TheKen FreeReads

the-ken.
com-5G to satellites All your spectrum are belong to us 12

the-ken.com-40 and outdated 14
the-ken.com-A digital cure for Indias mental health crisis 16
the-ken.com-A reality check for Indias smart mobility ambitions 18
the-ken.com-A Santacruz girl 20
the-ken.com-A spelling error you cant do much about Or can you 22
the-ken.com-Aadhaar and the gradual collapse of India Stack 29
the-ken.com-After an Annus Mirabilis what does 2020 hold for
Indian SaaS 31
the-ken.com-After global models national lockdowns India finally
has local Covid models 33
the-ken.com-After the Americans will half of Indian adults also fall
in high BP band 36
the-ken.com-Ajit Mohan to Sanjay Gupta Facebook Google hot
on Hotstars big stars 38
the-ken.com-Algorithm dynamics Asking Google Facebook and
others to be fair 40
the-ken.com-All licensed out but MVNOwhere to go 42
the-ken.com-All pain no gain Indias own opioid crisis 45
the-ken.com-Amid bogus imports the race to a make-in-India
oxygen concentrator 47
the-ken.com-An Illustrated Guide to Indian Food-Tech Part I 49
the-ken.com-Angel Tax and the harangued champions of change 69
the-ken.com-Antrix stuck with 1-billion payout but Indias busy
building a Newspace 71
the-ken.com-App store wars A new hope or phantom menace 73
the-ken.com-Ashok Varmathe life and death of a startup founder 75
the-ken.com-B2B The only change Indias dying wallets could use 77
the-ken.com-Bajaj Razorpay Zerodha carry the Indian fintech
torch 80
the-ken.com-Bayers IUD Mirena or the cheaper Emily Indian
women need options 83
the-ken.com-Behind the rush and hush of Indias National Digital
Health Mission 85
the-ken.com-Biomedical waste could be Indias ticking bombor a
thriving market 87
the-ken.com-Birth death and cows Indias oxytocin situation 90
the-ken.com-BSNLs asset monetisation plan faces stress test in
realty market 92
the-ken.com-BSNLs Rs 8000 crore tenderMake for India not
Make in India 95
the-ken.com-Can AAPs insurgent government deliver the
universal healthcare holy grail 97
the-ken.com-Can private healthcare prices be capped Should
they be 103
the-ken.com-Check-in check-out Indias fast-moving health burea-
ucracy 105
the-ken.com-Class of 2030 Indias on the cusp of an electric
future But whos going to build it 111
the-ken.com-Coming together Left and right of the healthcare
spectrum 113
the-ken.com-Covid homecare cant cover the home stretch in
India 115
the-ken.com-Covid Taskforce lets get real on vaccines Its time
for plan B 117
the-ken.com-Covid-19 going on 21 119
the-ken.com-Cracking the wheat code 121
the-ken.com-Cracks show after just a month of Ayushman Bharat 123
the-ken.com-Credit rating agencies must reform but it aint so
black or white 126
the-ken.com-Crunch time Aakashs 150-million plan to stay
relevant in a digital world 128
the-ken.com-Dance of the Unicorns 131
the-ken.com-Data breach No big deal Indian companies take it
easy 133
the-ken.com-Deaths door to doorstep delivery e-pharmacies are
here to stay 137
the-ken.com-Decrypting Hike Messenger 140
the-ken.com-Despite a lack of results India remains thirsty for
cloud seeding 148
the-ken.com-Diabetes and cancerthe second-order sufferers of
Covid in India 150
the-ken.com-Diagnostics lessons for India after 118 million Covid
tests 153
the-ken.com-Does TeamIndus still have a shot at its moonshot 156
the-ken.com-Doubts Doctrine Users flock but questions linger
over Doubtnut Brainly 158
the-ken.com-Down the rabbit hole of donation shaming 161
the-ken.com-Emergency Use Authorisation and the perils of fast-
tracking drugs 165
the-ken.com-Endgame Ola 167
the-ken.com-Error 404 BharatNets connectivity issues 174
the-ken.com-eSanjeevaniThe government-owned dark horse in
Indias telemedicine race 176
the-ken.com-EV batteries get their own identity EV makers face
an identity crisis 178
the-ken.com-Evaluation over valuation The public superstructure
exposing Indian edtechs vanity metrics 181
the-ken.com-Exit in sight Gates Foundation hopes India will foot
the vaccine bill 183
the-ken.com-Faasos 186
the-ken.com-Facebook has an anonymous astroturfing problem 190
the-ken.com-Facebook tests the waters for a walled payments
garden in India 192
the-ken.com-Facebooks Express WiFi aggregates hotspots Or is
it advertisers 195
the-ken.com-Fantasy sport real money Dream11 thrives on
betting minus regulation 198
the-ken.com-Favouritism and fake certifications mar Indias
ventilator procurement 200
the-ken.com-Fiinovation and the CSR funding pot at the end of
the rainbow 202
the-ken.com-Fishing with dynamite Indias contact tracing
overreach 205
the-ken.com-Flipkart Amazon Snapdeal 10 years 3 players 1 e-
commerce story 207
the-ken.com-From groceries to smartphones Flipkarts hyperlocal -
deliverance 209
the-ken.com-Future of meat The meat-ing point for non-veg
lovers and vegans 211
the-ken.com-Gatekept 215
the-ken.com-Glenmark Cipla or Zydus The winners and losers of
Covid stocks aside 222
the-ken.com-Google Indias 2017 Focus 226
the-ken.com-Google Indias experiment to reclaim local search 231
the-ken.com-Google Microsoft circle as India mulls extracting
value from health data of 13 billion citizens 238
the-ken.com-Google wants its share of SHAREits sideloading pie 240
the-ken.com-Govts honest mistaken belief 100 million rare
disease patients put on hold 242
the-ken.com-Gradeup Lido Enguru go from niche to norm 245
the-ken.com-Grocery and the illusion of an online-offline divide 247
the-ken.com-GSAT-11 delayed will Isro allow private satellite
broadband now 249
the-ken.com-Has Mumbai lost the startup fight to Bengaluru 252
the-ken.com-HCG is fighting the govt to keep cancer drugs costly 258
the-ken.com-Healthy Wellthy amp Cipla a digital therapy
reminder for Indian pharma 261
the-ken.com-Herbal drugs get a Covid push but at the cost of
your liver 263
the-ken.com-Higher quality lower costs Indias cancer grid
promise 266
the-ken.com-Home in time for Christmas 268
the-ken.com-Home is where the heart is 270
the-ken.com-Hot off the PressCoin Inside a changing Initial Coin
Offering 272
the-ken.com-Hot stuff or hot air Indias e-commerce market is
smaller than you think 274
the-ken.com-How an unlikely David felled a Goliath in the cloud
telephony wars 276
the-ken.com-How ANI quietly built a monopoly 284
the-ken.com-How charity is fuelling a superbug in India 286
the-ken.com-How e-pharmacies escaped death survived amp
turned the tables on their opponents 291
the-ken.com-How I was wrong about OYOs Ponzi scheme 298
the-ken.com-How India landed in the rabies vaccine doghouse 303
the-ken.com-How Indian B-schools could score an A 305
the-ken.com-How secure are Indias museums 307
the-ken.com-How to kill cash 309
the-ken.com-Humanising Algorithms 312
the-ken.com-If science is Covid-19s exit strategy could India
build its immunity shield on it 318
the-ken.com-IIT Kanpur others race Covid-19 clock to build ventil-
ators for India 322
the-ken.com-IITians have a weak heart for startups 324
the-ken.com-In a post-polio world India cannot sit still 333
the-ken.com-In India driverless cars need a driver 335
the-ken.com-In solar India is singing its best tuneless choir 338
the-ken.com-In Zerodhas shadow Upstox chases an elusive
Robinhood dream 340
the-ken.com-India makes its maiden entry into 5G standards
pisses off big telecoms 342
the-ken.com-India risks Covid-19 testing chaos as ICMR keeps
cards close to its chest 345
the-ken.com-India the middle kingdom for 5G is battleground
zero for Huawei and Samsung 347
the-ken.com-India up for a trade war over price control but theres
a Plan B 349
the-ken.com-Indian healthcare in 2020s rearview mirror 351
the-ken.com-Indian low-cost AQI startups AMBEE AirVedas certif-
ication up in the air 353
the-ken.com-Indian marketplace unicorns are the new
incumbents 357
the-ken.com-Indian Pharma gambles on a cure for Covid-19 361
the-ken.com-Indian Pharmas Perfect Storm Chinese APIs 363
the-ken.com-Indian regulators mantra to check the big tech boom 366
the-ken.com-Indias 49 million Covid tests hide more than they
reveal 368
the-ken.com-Indias bootless vaccine plans in the face of HLLs
divestment 371
the-ken.com-Indias crops are feeling the heat in a warming world 374
the-ken.com-Indias cybersecurity firms struggle for a seat at the
government tender table 377
the-ken.com-Indias digital bet paid off Charting the payments
story 380
the-ken.com-Indias digital payments Catch-22 in 2021 383
the-ken.com-Indias instant loan app crisis is made in China 385
the-ken.com-Indias misinformation crisis Fake or real 387
the-ken.com-Indias organ transplant paradox World no 2 but
most are living donors 394
the-ken.com-Indias Save The Internet breaks up 397
the-ken.com-Indias vaping fad could it go up in smoke 399
the-ken.com-Inshorts bumpy Public road to crowdsourced video
news greatness 402
the-ken.com-Inside Facebooks bid to become the Indian govern-
ments default town square 403
the-ken.com-Inside Indias big pharma-drug distributor team-up 405
the-ken.com-Inside the black box of Indias crashed drone
industry 407
the-ken.com-Inside the building and breaking of CoWIN 410
the-ken.com-Inside the final splutter of startup conferences 413
the-ken.com-Inside the generics price-fixing saga in the US 421
the-ken.com-Inside the implosion of AskMe 423
the-ken.com-Inspection out accreditation in for Indias technical
institutes 436
the-ken.com-Introducing Aishwarya 438
the-ken.com-Introducing Quikr week 440
the-ken.com-Investor-founder feud takes the wind out of TravelTr-
iangles sails 444
the-ken.com-IPRS copyrights and a 181-million music industry
out of tune 446
the-ken.com-IRCTC Payments companies and OTAs Five
takeaways 449
the-ken.com-Is the angel tax cure worse than the disease 452
the-ken.com-Isros heaviest rocket is ready but is it enough for the
load that lies ahead 454
the-ken.com-Its Operation Diplomacy for India as Covid vaccine -
preparedness hots up 457
the-ken.com-Journey to the centre of EaseMyTrip 459
the-ken.com-Juices for PMS patches for cramps Period care gets
padded up 463
the-ken.com-Karnatakas WhatsApp-first assembly elections 465
the-ken.com-Keep it simple silly 467
the-ken.com-Lessons for India from three women taking on
Google Facebook and Amazon 469
the-ken.com-Literacy through an app Pipe dream or secret sauce 471
the-ken.com-Local with solar As China goes cheap India loses
the beat 473
the-ken.com-Lockdown lessons Indias affordable private schools
face a reckoning 477
the-ken.com-Losing faith Indias anti-vaccine scourge 479
the-ken.com-Make in India vs having made it in India Skanrays
peculiar struggle 481
the-ken.com-Making sense of the Byjus hype machine 483
the-ken.com-Manipal to Medanta Will Ranjan Pai finally break the
no-deal jinx 492
the-ken.com-Matters of the heart Indias statin problem 494
the-ken.com-MedGenome has a silver bullet for TB diagnostics
but no gun 496
the-ken.com-Meet the man who took WhatsApp to the Supreme
Court 499
the-ken.com-Memes to an end The underbelly of Reddits IndianP-
eople Facebook 502
the-ken.com-Missed deadlines and half-measures Indias telecom
equipment has a security problem 504
the-ken.com-MobiKwik 507
the-ken.com-Moving the needle MIA for 20 years Parkinsons
drug Apomorphine still evades Indians 511
the-ken.com-Much ado about Indias health insurance 20
conditions apply 514
the-ken.com-My home is a demon-goddess 517
the-ken.com-Nazaras 22-year survival journey to 80 million
gaming IPO 519
the-ken.com-NCDC moves from frontline to sidelines in Indias
epidemic response 521
the-ken.com-News from the Editorial team 523
the-ken.com-No rapid results in Indias race for rapid testing kits 526
the-ken.com-No room to breathe Indias oxygen scarcity isnt just
about production 528
the-ken.com-Not all is gospel in Cybles bible 530
the-ken.com-Not alls lost some jobs could survive post-Covid
India 532
the-ken.com-NPCI The God of Many Things 534
the-ken.com-Of pride and prejudice Inside the human mind 536
the-ken.com-OLX India 538
the-ken.com-On the elevator pitches of Niti Aayogs Champions
of Change 541
the-ken.com-On the road to killing cash debit cards need a
rethink 543
the-ken.com-On the trail of Gileads 1000-pill 546
the-ken.com-One down nine to go TeamIndus baby step in the
giant moonwalk 548
the-ken.com-Open Data Choking Indias Innovation Pipe 551
the-ken.com-Otsuka Mylan amp Government A deal that will only
fuel the superbug 553
the-ken.com-OYOs Battle of the Bulge 556
the-ken.com-Patanjali and the Pirates of Perfidy 559
the-ken.com-Payments banks struggle to move beyond
payments 564
the-ken.com-PCOSDiabetes little sister is growing up fast 567
the-ken.com-PepperFry 570
the-ken.com-Pfizer snuggles up to Indias prized vaccination
programme 574
the-ken.com-Platform ambitions The story of how iSpirt lost its
true north 576
the-ken.com-Playlists vs borders Music streaming brings South
India closer 589
the-ken.com-Poker operators Bluffing or calling the bluff 591
the-ken.com-Polio vaccine breach India is perched atop the edge
of crisis 598
the-ken.com-Privacy terror to adtech SilverPushs rise from the
ashes 600
the-ken.com-Private sports broadcasters to pay for Doordarshan-
s free lunch 603
the-ken.com-Public vs Private India in a vaccine Catch-22 605
the-ken.com-Quo Vadis Snapdeal 608
the-ken.com-Qures AI bet goes from TB to Covid 613
the-ken.com-Rage against the machine behind Byjus swift
silencing of dissent 615
the-ken.com-Raising a stink Indias big-little STP problem 619
the-ken.com-Rajdeep Sardesai on tracking India in the Modi era 622
the-ken.com-RedDoorz The unlikely David to OYOs Goliath in
Southeast Asia 624
the-ken.com-Reliance Jio travels first-class on the tariff hike
gravy train 626
the-ken.com-Requiem for a dream 629
the-ken.com-Resisting upto 999 antibiotics Indias superbug war
begins 638
the-ken.com-RIP Tapzo Will the Ouroboros rest in pieces 640
the-ken.com-Ruhi Kandhari 642
the-ken.com-RuPays loss is UPIs gain 646
the-ken.com-Sahay Indias fintech disruption sequel 648
the-ken.com-Saving Indian vaccine makers from Covid pseudo n-
ationalism 650
the-ken.com-Say no to Indian censorship Netflix Hotstar and co
form a code of honour 652
the-ken.com-Selling to those who cant pay human cost of
modern banking 654
the-ken.com-Shopclues wants out 657
the-ken.com-ShopClues 659
the-ken.com-Snapdeal has some good news And bad 663
the-ken.com-Solar flair Indias quest to supersede China 670
the-ken.com-Spectrum satellites and new sheriffs in Indian
telecoms new season 672
the-ken.com-Stent price control was a short-sighted move right
Heres how 674
the-ken.com-Surprise market winners in Indian states diagnostics
race 677
the-ken.com-Swayams missed opportunity to be a Covid-19
remedy for higher education 679
the-ken.com-Swiggy 681
the-ken.com-TeamIndus and Isro call off their GLXP launch
contract 684
the-ken.com-Technology hurtles forward can we handle it 686
the-ken.com-Telecom networks teeter as Indias lockdown spikes
data traffic 688
the-ken.com-Telecom regulators 5-year legacy unforgettable and
unforgivable 690
the-ken.com-Tenancy troubles hang over Brookfields 35 billion
Jio tower bet 692
the-ken.com-That went by quickly 695
the-ken.com-The 32-year-old who wants to bring down the
edifice of Indias fintech revolution 697
the-ken.com-The 2021 toolbox for Indias clean energy targets 699
the-ken.com-The Aadhaar angle to National Health Authoritys
leadership shuffle 701
the-ken.com-The Advinus Decade Inside the Tata Groups
expensive drug discovery flameout 704
the-ken.com-The BJPs 5-year health policy check-up 706
the-ken.com-The bricks in Indias edtech wall 708
the-ken.com-The bubble that never was 710
the-ken.com-The charge of Indias unicorn brigade 714
the-ken.com-The Chinese eclipse over India Adanis solar manufa-
cturing dreams 717
the-ken.com-The collateral damage of regulatory roulette 719
the-ken.com-The everything year 721
the-ken.com-The Fast and the Furious world of Fintech 723
the-ken.com-The final stepand the first 725
the-ken.com-The funereal pace of Indias anti-TB drug acquisition
efforts 727
the-ken.com-The gap you cant ignore 729
the-ken.com-The growing digital economy of the Indian election
machine 734
the-ken.com-The hidden second epidemic of Long Covid 736
the-ken.com-The holes in Indias Covid immunisation arsenal 738
the-ken.com-The holes in Indias plan to become a drug
ingredient hotspot 741
the-ken.com-The IIM franchise is denting the IIM brand 743
the-ken.com-The Indian Nurse Demanding her due and finally
being heard 745
the-ken.com-The Indian spice in GitHubs recipe for enterprise
success 747
the-ken.com-The inside story of 500 Startups India adventure 750
the-ken.com-The Long Con 756
the-ken.com-The masala in MX Players OTT formula 768
the-ken.com-The miseducation of Pearson Byjus TutorVista acqu-
isition explained 770
the-ken.com-The MoneyOnMobile heist 772
the-ken.com-The NITI Aayogs midlife identity crisis 776
the-ken.com-The ping pong of 5G telecoms lobbying from
Geneva to Delhi and back 779
the-ken.com-The post-spectrum phase of Indian telecom 782
the-ken.com-The Refrigerator Construct of Life 785
the-ken.com-The rehabilitation of Nitin Mangal 787
the-ken.com-The reinvention of IIT-Madras 789
the-ken.com-The second coming RBIs move on crypto assets
dubbed demonetisation-2 805
the-ken.com-The ShareChat phenomenon 807
the-ken.com-The startup circus is in town 810
the-ken.com-The super secretive story of Indias Rs 4500 cr supe-
rcomputing mission 812
the-ken.com-The tricky business of making the perfect Covid
sanitiser 819
the-ken.com-The two Indian companies expanding the scope of
Covid-19 testing 821
the-ken.com-The unbelievable story of a Facebook impostor 823
the-ken.com-The unlearnt lessons from a year of Covid testing 853
the-ken.com-The untold complete story of GoJavas and Pigeon
Part I 855
the-ken.com-The year when big tech reflects 862
the-ken.com-Things dont add up at Vakrangee Share price biz
model and a Sebi probe 865
the-ken.com-Thirty minutes and a wrinkle in Indian Standard time 868
the-ken.com-Three things Indian medtech must get right and one
that is still open ended 870
the-ken.com-Through the Birac-ulors The odds for Indias only lab
-to-market engine 875
the-ken.com-To err is 878
the-ken.com-To Moon and Mars again 881
the-ken.com-Todays PSLV launch could create history And a
new market for Isro 887
the-ken.com-Toothless Tiger Between court cases Trai cant
regulate the industry 895
the-ken.com-Trapped in transition The rough road ahead of
Vodafone Idea 897
the-ken.com-Tsundoku The burden of the unread book 899
the-ken.com-Under the radar of regulation crypto conmen spin
brazen Ponzi schemes 901
the-ken.com-Unicommerces founding makes sense its acquisitio-
n by Snapdeal doesnt 904
the-ken.com-Unicorn blues The unbearable lightness of being
Hike 906
the-ken.com-Up all night Capitalising on Indias big sleep gap 908
the-ken.com-Vakrangee It is all relative 911
the-ken.com-Voting with their feet Indias young workers are
remapping the metros 914
the-ken.com-Watch this space New Bill could unleash facial reco-
gnition free-for-all 916
the-ken.com-What are Indians paying to get vaccinated 919
the-ken.com-What do startup boards look like We analysed the
leading 30 921
the-ken.com-What happens when regulators decide to play God 924
the-ken.com-What is hurting Indian pharma moremisinformation
or price control 926
the-ken.com-What it really takes to go green A story in numbers 931
the-ken.com-Whats bugging Truecaller 935
the-ken.com-Whats disrupting RBIs forex disruption 937
the-ken.com-Whats in store for the Gates Foundation in India 939
the-ken.com-Whats stalling Trais WiFi-for-everyone plan 941
the-ken.com-When chemistry meets life Searching for signals in
elephant dung 943
the-ken.com-When in a pandemic sell hygiene 946
the-ken.com-Where does the buck stop during a cybersecurity
breach in India 948
the-ken.com-Whose land is it anyway 950
the-ken.com-Whose troll is it anyway Indias internet laws need a
fix 952
the-ken.com-Why a lack of judicial reforms could kill Indias
startup story 954
the-ken.com-Why dont oral vaccines work well in India 956
the-ken.com-Why India should not buy Bitcoin 963
the-ken.com-Why Indias drug price regulators fate hangs in the
balance 965
the-ken.com-Why rural women in e-commerce are up against
Amazon Myntra 970
the-ken.com-Why the Human Eye is the Window to AI in
Healthcare 972
the-ken.com-Wide but not deep Ashokas 3-year liberal arts
course dilemma 985
the-ken.com-Will Google Facebook fuel Indias public WiFi under
PM-WANI 988
the-ken.com-Will India save its hospitals before they save India 991
the-ken.com-Will Indias focus on supply and not demand for
water spell its doom 994
the-ken.com-Yes Banks collapse exposes Indian fintechs shoddy
plumbing 997
the-ken.com-You can bring bullet trains from Japan but not
Artificial Intelligence 999
the-ken.com-You can demand mental health now its your right
But be ready for surprises 1001
the-ken.com-Yourstory 1003
the-ken.com-Youve Got Unwanted Mail 1007
the-ken.com-Zomato Swiggy and food delivery in the age of
plastics 1010
5G to satellites: All your spectrum are belong to us
the-ken.com/story/5g-to-satellites-all-your-spectrum-are-belong-to-us
July 25, 2018
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It’s the fifth-generation technology. It’s the Elon Muskian saviour of tech. It’s a buzzword.
Telecom’s 5G is a curious hybrid of all this, a force that could unlock many future
applications. Autonomous cars, internet of things (IoT), 3D videos, or even mission-
critical applications like e-health and public safety. Faster, efficient broadband—more bits
at lower cost—is the real promise if enough spectrum is available to go around the telcos.
Commercial rollouts of 5G are planned only by early 2020, but spectrum allocation,
auction, and now augmentation are on every country’s policy table.
On 12 July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) triggered a tsunami with

its unanimous decision to open up C-band, a frequency band hitherto used for satellite
communication, to mobile users, particularly future 5G cellular networks. The US
regulator believes this is the quickest way to get some spectrum in the hands of wireless
operators for the early 5G rollout in 2020.
C-band spectrum technically starts at 3.7 GHz and goes up to 8 GHz. Of this, the band
from 3.7 to 4.2 GHz is what the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has
harmonised for 5G use worldwide. However, mobile operators are even eyeing the lower
C-band, from 3.2 to 3.5 GHz. India’s regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
(Trai) has proposed reserving 3.3 to 4.2 GHz as the primary band for early 5G
introductions. A chunk of it, about 200 megahertz (3400-3600 MHz), is today being used
for fixed satellite service for broadcasters. These will now be moved to another band to
make way for 5G. In a meeting convened earlier this year by the Department of Telecom
(DoT), the chairman of the Wireless Planning Coordination (WPC) wing assured the
broadcasters and satellite operators that they wouldn’t be adversely affected.
Now with the FCC decision, which many see as a disruptive move in more ways than one,
a frequency block as big as 500 MHz is being offered for commercial 5G use in the US.
Finally, satellite operators and mobile operators will talk to each other even though
broadcasters have known for a while that newer services are coming for their spectrum
band. Not just the US, more than half dozen countries are seriously considering vacating
spectrum in C-band for 5G cellular uses.
The debate in the US will rage around what all mobile operators will pay for in the
transition and how satellite operators will share the booty. In India, the big question
arises if it’ll finally consider the Department of Space (DoS) easing its hold on satellite
spectrum and letting the Department of Telecom (DoT) allocate it. Will the silent turf war
the-ken.com-5G to satellites All your spectrum are belong to us 1/2 12

between the two departments come to an end? About time. Spectrum licensing in India is
crying out for reform. It’s too complex with onerous clauses, distorted (across bands), and
non-transparent when it comes to tracking spectrum usage in real time.
"More spectrum is certainly good for 5G but will cellular companies have the money to
buy?
Spectrum wars
Telcos will fight satellite companies. The Dept of Space will fight
the Dept of Telecom. There will be blood
Seema Singh, 25 Jul 2018
The United States has taken the lead but many other countries are farming out C-band
satellite spectrum for 5G use
India is just about finalising its 5G roadmap and 5G spectrum pricing guidelines
Since 5G needs more spectrum than all other Gs (2,3,4) combined, will India finally
rationalise spectrum allocation and pricing?
More importantly, will Dept of Space give way to Dept of Telecom in matters all
spectrum?
the-ken.com-5G to satellites All your spectrum are belong to us 2/2 13

40 and outdated
the-ken.com/story/40-and-outdated
May 16, 2018
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“So, how did it go?”
“It is hard to tell. You know how these things are,” said Sidharth. “But I’m an optimist,”
he quickly adds, pushing his floppy hair back.
An experienced software developer, Sidharth, who didn’t want his last name identified,
has gone nearly two years without a job. He didn’t want to talk before a crucial interview
with a cab-hailing company. “I don’t want any distractions,” he said. Understandable,
given he’s close to running his savings dry.
Now, Sidharth isn’t some job-hunting fresh graduate. As a self-taught developer, he has
worked on an array of technologies. PHP, Ruby, Java, Scala, Javascript, Python, Go.
Based on these programming languages he knows, like a form of carbon dating, you could
peg his age close to 40. Years of experience is traditionally worn as a badge, as if to show
‘I’ve been there, done that.’ But for him, these years are in the way.
For someone who has held four different jobs in his 14-year career as a developer, a job
interview should not be a big deal. But it is when you are close to 40 and looking to get
back after a break.
His first interview in two years didn’t end well. “They expected me to write code in half
hour, but I took longer. I could see from the interviewer’s face it was going badly. I came
back home, locked myself and just stayed in bed that day,” he said. Companies tend to
compare even those with experience to college freshers, who are, no doubt, faster. “My
speed is rusty, and I had to work to get it up to speed this time for this interview.” So he
prepared for this interview as if he had everything to lose. From taking numerous coding
challenges to answering problem-solving to even doing a role-play of the interview. “I
would pose as the interviewer asking questions and then answer.” The college kids have it
easier. “They have a nice support ecosystem built where they help each other out. Do you
know any bunch of 40-year-olds sitting together and preparing for interviews?”
For the 40-something tech professionals, this is an unexpected turn of events. This is
Generation X and they have seen multiple tech waves come and go. The first was in the
nineties when the rise of the internet saw them getting their engineering degrees in
droves. It was soon followed by the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a time in which many
were mostly in their first jobs. By the time the 2008 recession hit, they were seasoned
professionals in their thirties managing teams running into hundreds. It was the 20-year-
the-ken.com-40 and outdated 1/2 14

olds who faced the brunt of the recession. But now, the automation era is upon us. While
the Gen Xers manoeuvred through those first two waves, they’re bang in the middle of
this third one as companies peg their fortunes to AI, big data, and analytics.
40 is the new 60
For doctors or lawyers, years of experience is a badge. In tech, it

is a deadweight, and those in their forties suddenly find
themselves irrelevant. An outdated label on at least 10% of the 4
million IT professionals points to a problem
Arundhati Ramanathan, 16 May 2018
Tech professionals in their forties struggle to find and keep their jobs
Companies are pitting the Gen Xers squarely with millennials, who are well-versed with
new tech and come at a cheaper cost
In the US, companies like IBM have been accused of carrying out an age bias while
laying off employees
At this rate, the forties could turn out to be the new sixties, where people will have to
hang up their boots
the-ken.com-40 and outdated 2/2 15

A digital cure for India’s mental health crisis
the-ken.com/story/a-digital-cure-for-indias-mental-health-crisis
June 1, 2019
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Just two months into the existence of Juno Clinic, it was evident the company’s business
model wasn’t going to cut it. Founded in January 2016 by Davman Technology Services,
Juno was meant to meet a pressing and widespread health need—that of accessible,
affordable psychotherapy.
To do this, it aggregated independent mental health professionals—psychologists and

psychiatrists—on an online platform, making them accessible both offline and online.
With $2.4 million in funding from individual investors including Atul Nishar, the founder
of Hexaware Technologies & Aptech Computers, Juno was one of the first chains of its
kind in the country.
The opportunity couldn’t have been more apparent. Conservative government estimates
state that nearly 15% of India’s adults need active interventions for one or more mental
health issues. The World Health Organisation (WHO), meanwhile, states that one in four
people globally may be affected by mental disorders.
And while a huge market of potential patients awaits these mental health interventions,
the supply side of the equation is horribly skewed. In 2017, Anupriya Patel, minister of
state for health and family welfare, painted a grim picture of the mental health care
situation in the country. In response to a question asked by a minister in India’s lower
house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, Patel stated there were just 3,827 psychiatrists and
only around 898 clinical psychologists in the country. As against a requirement of 13,500
and 20,250, respectively.
According to the WHO, access to treatment is grim with a treatment gap of up to 95.7%
for depression in India
the-ken.com-A digital cure for Indias mental health crisis 1/2 16

Depression treatment gap
According to the WHO, access to treatment is grim with a treatment gap of up to 95.7%
for depression in India
Set against a backdrop so stark, Juno seemed destined to succeed. It saw itself as a
solution, not just to access, but to a critical factor preventing people from seeking mental
health care in India. The stigma around mental illness. By allowing people to seek help
remotely and discreetly, mental health issues could finally be addressed.
But Juno, and other startups such as HealthEminds and ePsyClinic which began with
similar marketplace-based models, have been forced to rethink their approach entirely,
scale down considerably, or become bootstrapped, respectively. They underestimated just
how ingrained the stigma dogging mental illness is. Indians are still reluctant to take the
plunge and get diagnosed, find a professional therapist, and open up to a stranger,
however qualified. At least not en masse. Not yet.
The struggles of these startups are indicative of the prevailing attitudes in the country
regarding mental health issues and the difficulties in controlling the quality of therapy in
a marketplace. But this isn’t to say there isn’t a market for mental health care in India at
present.
the-ken.com-A digital cure for Indias mental health crisis 2/2 17

A reality check for India’s smart mobility ambitions
the-ken.com/story/a-reality-check-for-indias-smart-mobility-ambitions
August 28, 2018
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Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), artificial intelligence, and hackathons. In its

attempts to push its Digital India initiative in the transport sector, the Indian
government is seemingly taking tech buzzwords and hurling them at India’s mobility
issues in the hopes that something will stick.
The need for this intervention is vital. As the roads of India’s urban centres grow
increasingly more congested, an intelligent overhaul of India’s public transport system is
required to keep the country moving. According to a report from the Boston Consulting
Group, the economic cost of congestion is as high as Rs 1,50,000 crore ($21.44 billion)
per year for four of India’s major cities—Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Mumbai.
At the forefront of these efforts is the Niti Aayog, the government’s policy think tank,
which is currently in the process of drafting a National Intelligent Transportation
Systems Policy. ITS, by definition, is simply the advanced use of technology to improve
transportation. Even technologies like those used by ride-sharing companies can be
classified as a form of it.
ITS is no new concept. It finds mention in past policy documents, stretching all the way
back to the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP), 2006. The erstwhile planning
commission, which Niti Aayog replaced, also took recommendations on how to invest in
ITS as part of the 12th five-year plan consultations in 2013. But in line with the
government’s Digital India pitch, NITI Aayog is striving to build on these past efforts.
the-ken.com-A reality check for Indias smart mobility ambitions 1/2 18

Having signed a Statement of Intent (SoI) to co-operate in the field of ITS with the
Geneva-based International Road Federation (IRF), Niti Aayog is making increasingly
louder noises about modernising India’s transport sector.
In fact, in the biggest show of this yet, it is organising a sprawling event—the Move
Summit—in early September. Dubbed India’s first global mobility summit, it aims to
bring together stakeholders, both local and international, to chart out a framework for “a
shared, connected, zero emission and inclusive mobility agenda”. A hackathon—Move
Hack—has also been launched, looking to crowdsource solutions for the future of Indian
mobility. The summit and the hackathon provide an interesting glimpse into the focus
areas for Niti Aayog when it comes to transport.
A look at Move Hack’s problem statement shows that Niti Aayog is looking beyond the
traditional ITS systems deployed in the country, such as Delhi auto rickshaws with panic
buttons and GPS-tracked Bengaluru buses. Instead, it is mooting the usage of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) along with cashless payments. Through these, the think tank is hoping
to build India’s transport capacity.
It is proposing to use ITS along with AI as a means to end our enforcement problems in
managing transportation infrastructure.
AUTHOR
Srinivas Kodali
Srinivas Kodali is an interdisciplinary researcher working on cities, data and internet. He

was previously a project associate at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory
at IIT Madras.
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-A reality check for Indias smart mobility ambitions 2/2 19

A Santacruz girl
the-ken.com/story/lathika-george-santacruz-girl
December 2, 2018
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I left my home in Santacruz West, a suburb of Bombay, in 1976. The anticipation of
moving to Kerala did not diminish the pangs of saying goodbye to the only home I had
known. For my mother, who had moved to Bombay with my father, this would be a
homecoming. For me, it would be a series of temporary spaces till I found a place to call
home again.
Three years later, I returned to study creative writing at Sophia’s College in South
Bombay. In the years I was away, I had carried a mental map of home and the immediate
neighbourhood with me: Main Avenue and its arterial side lanes; Khar, where my old
lending library stood; Bandra, with its shops and theatres; Juhu, where we spent
summers on the beach. Its scope did not extend beyond Santacruz and the immediate
localities: my world—except for the occasional foray into “town” with my parents—was in
the suburbs.
That first homecoming was not about nostalgia; I was there to reclaim the city as my own.
I was in Bombay for the first time alone, now an adult, rediscovering the city and
expanding the landmarks on my map.
Evening classes ended by 10 PM, and after wandering around Breach Candy with my new
friends, I would take the train or bus home by midnight. Travelling alone at that hour was
unimaginable in most cities then. But Bombay was alive and pulsing with life at night, and
I felt safe and anonymous in the crowds.
It was a carefree and exhilarating year. This was the first time I caught that distinctively
Bombay state of mind, a certain attitude that comes with the privilege of calling one of the
world’s most captivating cities home. You could plunge in and be a part of the city, or you
the-ken.com-A Santacruz girl 1/2 20

could be an outsider. I was in.
During the day, after pottery classes, I went to Leopold’s in Colaba Causeway and Cafe
Samovar at the Jehangir Art Gallery, where you never knew who you might see—M.F.
Hussain, Mario Miranda? There was jazz at Venice and Talk of the Town, places my
brothers frequented, and Bombelli’s, where I discovered cappuccinos.
I splurged on brunch at the Shamiana at the Taj, feeling chic and sophisticated, dining
alone with a confidence I hadn’t known I possessed. I shopped at Vamas and bought a
vintage clock from Chor Bazaar, feeling like a true Bombayite at last.
On weekends, I went with my schoolmates to faraway Madh Island, as the Juhu Beach of
my childhood, full of beach shacks and vendors, was now passé; so was Macronals, the
only restaurant in the suburbs that served anything close to international cuisine.
I also discovered a darker side of this era of freedoms when a childhood friend nosedived
out of a window in his apartment, too high (on cocaine, we heard) to realise he was on the
seventh floor.
the-ken.com-A Santacruz girl 2/2 21

A spelling error you can’t do much about. Or can you?
the-ken.com/story/spelling-error-cant-do-much
April 26, 2017
Most changes in our genomes do not really matter. They make us shorter or taller, fairer
or darker. But there are a few characters in the genome—a book of six billion letters that
make up one’s DNA—which are single handed in their agenda and overwhelming in their
impact. “If that character changes then there’s serious disorder,” says Ramesh Hariharan.
A computer scientist by training, Hariharan built bioinformatics tools and did analytics
on biological data for over a decade. But when his company, Strand Life Sciences, first
entered into clinical services three years ago, he was hit by the life-saving decisions his
tools had to make. “In the midst of all the computational work, there’s a decision on the
patient, staring in your face. We never had that connect before. It was fascinating,” says
he.
The book Genomic Quirks, which released in March, is a result of that patient connect. It
is about those ‘few’ characters that turn a person’s life topsy-turvy even as doctors
scramble to nail the root cause of a disease. And by a ‘few’, Hariharan actually means a
few hundred thousand letters, which is still a small fraction of the entire pool of six billion
letters.
About one in 100 people is affected by such characters. For some, the impact may be
slightly moderate; in others, it’s life changing. Take for instance the story of Mira and Sai,
a young couple who lost two sons, both under 18 months, to a mysterious disease the
physicians and geneticists couldn’t diagnose.
The boys, Som and Rom, had prominent eyes, small chins and full cheeks. Could there be
a clue in those features? Once the genomes of Som and the parents were sequenced, a list
of variant characters was ready for investigation. Whittling them down to the organs that
were affected—facial structures, lungs (respiratory problems) and so on, the investigators
ended up with a few hundred genes, which might hold the secret to the mystery.
Narrowing the gaze further, through some thought experiments that took them back 500
the-ken.com-A spelling error you cant do much about Or can you 1/7 22
million years, they arrived at an errant character. But it was uncharted territory—nowhere
in genomics literature had that genetic anomaly been reported. And while Hariharan’s
team pored over tonnes of data and scoured the worldwide web of scientific literature,
time was running out. The couple was expecting their third child and was desperate to
know if the baby would meet the same tragic fate as the two boys.
“In some cases, the defective characters are known to the doctors but in this case, it was
an unexpected gene. You had to convince the doctor who herself was not sure and was in a
dilemma if she should use our information to take a decision to terminate the pregnancy
or not,” says Hariharan, relieved that the doctor relied on their results. “When it comes to
patients, you can think of us as a glorified reporting service, which says—here are the
things, which indicate we have found the answer; here are the things, which indicate we
are in the realm of the unknown. And the doctor took a call at that point which was to do
nothing. And it turned out fine.”
One of the genome books. Each book is called a chromosome. There are 23 pairs of
chromosomes. The two chromosomes in each pair carry very similar (but not identical)
character sequences.
Moves and countermoves
Genomic Quirks: The Search for Spelling Errors is a collection of stories that shed light
on an entire variety of diseases whose underlying genetic causes are not easily
identifiable. Each story is a different medical phenomenon—eye, heart, blood and so on.
Each required a different algorithm after the team realised that something was wrong.
And each story has a different genomic phenomenon. If one is a cut and paste case, of a
few characters getting cut in one part of the genome and being pasted in another, another
is where a whole chunk of the DNA has been removed.
It’s also a story of a genomics war room: Amidst hundreds of cases coming in and all hell
breaking loose, how do you find the right answer? The preface captures it to an extent but
each story peels off the complexity a little more. The initial understanding is limited even
for the best technologists. But like a detective piecing together clues and evidence,
Hariharan’s team builds a plan to nail it. In every case.
“Our hunt for the culprit is now nearing its end. We look in our shortlist of rare missense
and nonsense variants for those, which appear in both versions of Dia’s genome. And how
many candidates do we find fitting this bill? Unfortunately, none!” writes Hariharan in
the second story. Clearly, he is inspired by Sherlock Holmes. The similes, the imagery and
the plot movement are all Holmesian. The maestro is quoted as well: “Once the
impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth.”
The context in the book for Holmes’ words is this: A genetic variant has been found but is
it really the culprit? “There’s a catch in Holmes’ claim. Unless we have considered every
possibility, we cannot eliminate all that is impossible. Have we really considered every
possibility?” writes Hariharan. Step by step, he takes the reader through the elimination
process. It’s logical and easy to understand even as the language is fraught with the
inescapable genetics jargon.
“No problem is too hard to go after, for Ramesh. He finds a systematic way of breaking
them down, be it in business or technology,” says Vijay Chandru, co-founder and
chairman of Strand. When a professor of computer science at the Indian Institute of
Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, Chandru had heard about Hariharan’s work at the Courant
Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York. It was the mid-1990s, and the connection
between algorithm and biology had already been established. The Human Genome
Project was in progress. “Ramesh had one of the best algorithms for matching strings of
[abstract] letters, which could be used in genetics [where the DNA is a string of letters A,
T, C and G],” says Chandru.
Soon after, he wooed Hariharan to the IISc as faculty, where he even blended with the
student community, thanks to his love for athletics and hockey. Hockey had made him
popular at IIT Delhi as well. When Chandru, Hariharan and two other academics left the
IISc to start Strand as a bioinformatics company in 2000, the subject itself was not more
than five years old. “But there were indications that it’d grow. And surely, more methods
to measure and more methods to analyse biology have come up in last 15 years. Back then,
there were few people and few problems to solve,” says Hariharan, now the chief executive
of Strand.
All the tools of bioinformatics that he, as CTO, and his team built, are now being used in
clinics. And as they entered the clinics, a whole new world of patients opened up for
Hariharan. For a runner and biker—he usually cycles to work wearing a mask—creativity
runs high in his DNA. He’d make interactive math puzzles for his children when they’d go
on vacation. All in the name of explaining math principles. So when patient data started
pouring in, Hariharan took up another challenge.
Ramesh Hariharan
Personal and yet abstract

Turning intriguing patient histories into riveting stories was an art that Oliver Sacks
perfected like no one else. The prolific neurologist who died in 2015 wrote numerous
short stories about the brain’s quirks. The stories of genomic quirks from Hariharan do
not have the same patient connect or the grand characterisation. And that, Hariharan
admits, is because he is not a practising medic that Sacks was. “I am two-three steps
removed from the [patients]. I don’t even remember their names,” he says. Speaking of
which, he has used names that are short, simple and easy to pronounce, keeping the
global readers in mind. Patients like Dia, Toto, Raj and Taj, and Rom and Som could be
from anywhere, even as their genetic defects are the first systematic public documentation
from India. The genomics literature, popular and scientific, so far is full of stories from
other parts of the world.
Still, Hariharan, 48, has brought a personalisation of its own kind. The book begins with
his own minor quirk of vision—partial colour blindness. “Serious illness is never a
pleasant topic to discuss, hence the decision to use this relatively minor condition to
provide a friendly introduction to the genome before we encounter graver conditions in
subsequent stories,” he writes in the preface.
Would he have disclosed his genomic quirk if he had not a ’minor’ but a ‘major’ defect,
one that could put his two children’s genetic inheritance for public scrutiny?
“On this, I have no reason to be insecure. I’d still disclose. Remember, I am also a
champion of science. The second story is from my wife’s family, her mother,” he says.
(This fact is not disclosed in the book.) And that story is about a devastating genetic
disorder in a family where several members face the loss of central vision in their 30s and
40s. A disorder where gradually the picture begins to get blurred. When reading, the
characters lose clarity. Or sometimes in conversation with someone, the person’s face
begins to appear unfocused. A definitive diagnosis by sequencing the genomes has
become possible only recently.
Brushing up on high school science—remember Gregor Mendel’s model of heredity with

pea plants?—each story ends with a snappy update on where modern science rests on that
subject. The first draft of the book went through a reading test when Hariharan called a
bunch of 11th graders for feedback. They found it a tad science-heavy, which sent the
author back to his writing desk. When I remark that there are still some blind alleys, as
the book gets into medical genomics, Hariharan is candid: “I could only simplify so
much.” You could attribute that to his training as a mathematician.
“Mathematicians are not trained to write romantically. The only romance you can show is
in the title, rest everything is about precision,” says Chandru.
Genetics is going to be a big part of our lives. No technology has had this exponential
growth in recent times. And with genetics becoming affordable, Genomic Quirks is an
important book for the future, to proactively prepare young practitioners and
academicians.
For the rest, the average reader, the Q&A below is a good starting point:
Genetic testing centres are growing rapidly. How can the centres and
patients be sure that what they report is 100% accurate? Is there any moral
dilemma here?
As a lab, we do a lot of different things to ensure that we are 100% accurate. A lot of
different things. Sometimes, we wonder if the Indian ecosystem is ready to pay for such
quality. For instance:
How often do you read? When you run the next-generation sequencing tests, you get
noisy readings but if you do many reads, then you reduce the chances of errors. We
read 180 times, sometimes even more than 200 times. Our best competitor does
about half of that. If you do that, the chances of missing the mutations are high. If
you read less, your costs are low but your chances of missing are high. That’s the
dilemma we face as a commercial entity. You have to tell the customer that. We are
so focused on quality that sometimes we lose out on the price.
Then you ask, how often is that you are getting everything right. For that, we run a
large study and compare our results with another method to get concordance and
ensure we get 100% concordance. Occasionally, we get some discordance. We know
why. And if during a test that reason arises in the sample, then we run the second
test for free.
Then there’s this notion of large variants; say, large deletions [where a sequence of
the DNA is lost]. No other lab calls that out today. Normally, even in the US doctors
don’t catch that. We have to run a lot of informatics to catch that.
After you put in all of this, you can still ask: How do I trust you? Twice in two years,
we have been proven 100% accurate in global blinded studies. We are the only next-
generation sequencing lab in the country accredited by the College of American
Pathologists. There are chances of weird things happening, especially the way one
handles samples. So, we have to track a large number of quality parameters. And
because of all this, we can ensure the results are 100% accurate. I can’t speak for
others in the industry.
You have the largest set of data on breast cancer cases in India. Are we on
the cusp of affordable testing or identifying India-specific mutations?
Roughly one in 300-500 women is born with hereditary mutations, which predisposes her
to ovarian and other cancers. While testing for these mutations, if one turns out to be
positive then there are standard guidelines on what to do. But whom do you screen? One
in 400? How do you screen 400 in India to save one person? Geneticist Mary-Claire King,
[the scientist who discovered the BRCA-1 gene mutation and its linkage to hereditary
breast and ovarian cancer] was in Bengaluru recently, and she said every woman above 30
should be screened. You cannot afford to pay for everyone in India. So, you evolve some
rules. The rule says—If you have a first, second or third-degree breast cancer relative, then
you should get tested. We’ve brought down the price to about Rs 15,000-Rs 18,000. More
R&D is underway to further bring the cost down.
On India-specific findings, we notice a few things: The median age of breast cancer
patients in the West is 61 years; in India, it’s 51 years. There could be referral bias and
probably young patients are being referred to us. It could also mean that Indian women
are being diagnosed at a younger age. We have not done a population study so we cannot
say conclusively.
Secondly, we see that 30% of the patients referred to us show hereditary cancer. It is 10%
in the West. Is there a possibility that Indian patients have a high incidence of hereditary
cancer or are only the likely ones being referred to us? We don’t know but it is leading us
to newer hypotheses, especially in the BRCA-1 gene, which seems to be higher in
frequency in India. In the West, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 are almost equal in incidence.
Thirdly, we are seeing founder mutations. That is, multiple members of a community
show the same mutation, and some are endemic to the Western region, like in the
Marwari community.
Consumer genetics has arrived. Labs are testing, digital health companies
are collecting clinical data, insurance companies are being partnered with.
But nobody knows where the data resides or how many hands it changes.
Are we ready for it as a country?
Even science is not ready for it. Nowhere in the world is consumer genetics happening
through the medical profession. If you go to them, they’ll advise you against it. Does it
help you personally change something in life? There it is a complex mix—lifestyle,
environment, and nature. It’s very hard to convincingly say this mutation increases [the
chances of a disease or an event] 5x or 10x. If it does that then fine, but if the increase is
1.2X, then it says nothing.
Affordability is also a function of insurance. But we don’t even go there. What if one
detects a BRCA mutation and the insurance chooses to not cover. We’d have opened a
Pandora’s box. The patient may not even know how to deal with it. We are worried that in
the absence of a law, pre-existing conditions may not be covered. In cancer and a few
other diseases, there is a definitive way of saying you are at risk.
The only practical way forward is for the government to enact a law that nobody can
discriminate against pre-existing conditions. Then it changes the game for test providers.
Today, genetic conditions are not covered at all. If you are born with some mutations,
insurers can deny coverage and they are well within their rights to do so.
Aadhaar and the gradual collapse of India Stack
the-ken.com/story/aadhaar-and-the-gradual-collapse-of-india-stack
October 3, 2018
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When stars die, they go out with a whimper, not a bang. The really large ones often end up
as black holes.
Such seems to be the fate that awaits the sun that had positioned itself right at the centre
of India’s digital ecosystem, India Stack. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere around five
years ago, India Stack quickly became the gravitational centre around which India’s
banking, telecom and fintech planets started revolving.
Such was the power of India Stack that multi-billion-dollar businesses could be created,
or destroyed, based on their knowledge and access to the APIs—‘application programming
interfaces’ are software functions that allow disparate applications to talk to each other
and exchange data—provided by India Stack.
Jio, India’s newest and most disruptive telecom player, owed its fast growth to its ability
to authenticate new customers via Aadhaar’s eKYC, an online authentication mechanism
linked to people’s unique Aadhaar IDs. PhonePe, the Flipkart-owned runaway success in
the digital payments space, owed its rapid rise to its early work and access to UPI, a real-
time money transfer protocol.
Both eKYC and UPI were powered by India Stack.
But on 26 September, India’s Supreme Court sucked away the fuel that was powering
India Stack – Aadhaar.
the-ken.com-Aadhaar and the gradual collapse of India Stack 1/2 29

A five-judge constitution bench that was hearing a slew of legal challenges to India’s
unique ID project for years, finally held that Aadhaar was legal and that the government
could continue to use it to identify citizens to deliver services.
But the same bench also struck down the entire section in the Aadhaar act that allowed
private companies or entities its use and declared it “unconstitutional” for good measure.
Barring a series of legal miracles from a government that’s in its final year, India Stack’s
fate seems sealed, albeit over a period of months, maybe even a few years. And with it,
dozens of startups that had based their entire business models around it.
“There are no two ways about it: India Stack and its whole Aadhaar authentication project
is dead in the water,” says a Delhi-based lawyer with a prominent think-tank, who did not
want to be quoted because of the sensitivity of the judgement.
"The reality is that you can be held criminally accountable if you’re in contravention of the
judgement"
Raman Chima, lawyer and policy director at Access Now
UnStacked
Aadhaar, India’s unique ID project, was the foundation for India Stack’s ambition in more
ways than one. First, by acting as a unique key that would identify all digital transactions
made by Indians. And second, by creating a critical mass of data on each user by virtue of
both the government and hundreds of private companies demanding it for pretty much
anything a user wanted to do.
the-ken.com-Aadhaar and the gradual collapse of India Stack 2/2 30

After an Annus Mirabilis, what does 2020 hold for
Indian SaaS?
the-ken.com/story/2020-indian-saas
January 2, 2020
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In 1954, Roger Bannister became the first human to run a mile in less than four minutes.
This was an epochal moment because, hitherto, the common belief was that it was an
impossible feat to achieve. In the immediate few months after, inspired by Bannister’s
feat, a number of other athletes emulated him. So much so what was until recently
considered impossible became not just possible but commonplace.
In SaaS (software as a service) terms, reaching the $100 million ARR (annual recurring
revenue) is the equivalent of running a four-minute mile. In mid 2018, Freshworks*
became the first VC-funded Indian SaaS company to breach this milestone. Druva
followed suit in 2019, and there are at least half a dozen Indian SaaS startups that are
lined up to emulate the two over the next year or so.
For Indian SaaS startups, 2019 was Annus Mirabilis–a “year of miracles”. A perfect storm
of ingredients along all dimensions—markets, capital, strategy, macro-trends—provided a
platform for Indian SaaS companies to thrive like never before.
A look back at 2019

While Freshworks represents the totemic lightning rod that inspires several other Indian
SaaS companies to follow its path, there were several other tailwinds that powered Indian
SaaS startups in 2019.
2019 saw a rising SaaS tide all over the globe. According to global research firm Gartner,
the global SaaS market is currently worth just under $215 billion and is poised to grow
exponentially over the next three years. By 2022, it’s expected to clock in north of $330
the-ken.com-After an Annus Mirabilis what does 2020 hold for Indian SaaS 1/2 31
billion. The Gartner study identifies strong tailwinds that could indeed propel the global
SaaS market to these new heights. More than a third of surveyed organisations see cloud
investment as a top-three investing priority, and that by the end of the year, over 30% of
technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.
Another Gartner survey estimated that spending on SaaS in customer relationship

management (CRM) alone would reach approximately $42 billion in 2019. This
represents 75% of the total software spend in the segment, continuing the rapid decline of
on-premises deployments.
If “software is eating the world”, it is clear that in 2019, “SaaS is eating software”.
Next, perhaps for the first time ever, 2019 saw an abundant supply of capital for SaaS
startups in India across the entire spectrum from seed funding to $100 million cheques.
The first generation of Indian SaaS successes—companies like FusionCharts, Kayako,
Zoho and Wingify—were all bootstrapped companies. The lack of a large funding treasure
chest to fall back on meant that these companies grew slowly, investing money towards
growth only from internal accruals, and more often than not, capped out at around the
$10 million ARR mark.
the-ken.com-After an Annus Mirabilis what does 2020 hold for Indian SaaS 2/2 32
After global models, national lockdowns, India finally
has local Covid models
the-ken.com/story/indias-next-top-covid-model
July 1, 2020
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On 4 June, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research (TIFR) released a paper detailing a mathematical model that suggested
strategies to ease lockdown restrictions in Mumbai.
Their suggestions, based on the model, were two-fold.
1. Mumbai could begin a phased reopening of workplaces, with 20-30% attendance,

without overwhelming the city’s medical capacity.
2. The city’s local trains—used by 7.5 million people every day pre-Covid—could
resume with 20% capacity, provided people maintained social distancing and wore
masks.
On 15 June, Mumbai resumed its train services after almost three months, limiting their
use to essential service workers.
Unlike earlier Covid-19 models, the IISc-TIFR version does not focus on predicting the
number of cases or fatalities. Instead, it compares various scenarios and suggests the best
option going forward.
Compare this to one of the earliest models, which came out on 24 March— the day India’s
first 21-day lockdown was announced. The model, by researchers from the Center for
Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP), Johns Hopkins University, and
Princeton University, forecast the spread of Covid-19 in India.
In the best case, it said, there would be more than 125 million infections by mid-May. In
the worst case, 250 million in April. Today, in July, India has 5,85,792 total recorded
cases. The huge difference, according to Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of
CDDEP, is due to India’s low testing rates coupled with the nationwide lockdown that was
imposed soon after the study was published. Moreover, according to Laxminarayan, the
actual number of infections till date, according to Indian Council for Medical Research’s
(ICMR) serological survey was between 5 and 10 million, based on their 0.73%
seropositivity rate. “We have 500,000 reported cases today and it is reasonable that we
have between 50 million and 100 million infections already,” Laxminarayan said in an
emailed response.*
The utility of models does not come from their numbers, said Gautam Menon, professor
of physics and biology at Ashoka University. Menon was part of a group called the Indian
Scientists’ Response to Covid-19 (ISRC), which developed its own model for the spread of
the-ken.com-After global models national lockdowns India finally has local Covid models 1/3 33
the disease in India. The group comprises more than 500 scientists, engineers, and
technologists.
“You need models at every stage. How many ICUs and ventilators do you need? Those
early models were important to give you a sense of the scale of what you needed to do. The
numbers are not to be taken seriously,” added Menon.
However, the numbers were taken seriously. India shut its economy and went into
lockdown sooner than
India's next top Covid model
Early mathematical models for Covid-19 came with an expiry

date. Now, post-lockdown preparation is best left to localised
models that account for cities’ unique characteristics
Shreedhar Manek, 1 Jul 2020
Mathematical models are useful. They help in planning for medical facilities and, in the
case of Covid-19, guidance for lockdown implementation
A number of early models predicted case numbers much worse than what we see today,
but they were useful predicting the disease wasn’t going away anytime soon
Now, the need is for localised models, which can give specific recommendations attuned
to specific cities
A number of models are in the works, but without access to data and an active
collaboration with government task forces, their utility is limited
After the Americans, will half of Indian adults also fall
in high BP band?
the-ken.com/story/indian-high-blood-pressure-band
November 21, 2017
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Rarely does tweaking a health guideline double the disease burden. It happened last week
when the United States decided to lower the threshold for reading high blood pressure. By
lowering it from 140/90 to 130/80, they put nearly half of American adults under the
hypertensive bracket. The guideline by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the
American College of Cardiology (ACC) is sweeping but has come into effect after a large
study showed pretty ‘convincing’ data that markedly lower blood pressure was both
beneficial and achievable.
If India, which informally follows the AHA guidelines, chooses to follow in their footsteps,
it’ll nearly double the number of people under high blood pressure, from ~24% to 40% of
the population. “Considering the new guideline, the same volume will be added as current
hypertensive population,” says Dr Sundeep Mishra, professor of cardiology at the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi and editor of the Indian Heart Journal. “An
estimated 50-60% of the adult population will come in this range (above 130/80) now. In
Delhi, as many as 70% of the adult population will be hypertensive.”
That’s a whopping number given that there are 700 million adults in India, according to
the 2011 census.
It’s been known for a while now that any increase in the mercury reading of blood
pressure after 115 leads to a progressive increase in risks for cardiovascular diseases. But
there was no study in the developed countries until the Sprint study to show it worked,
says Dr Rajeev Gupta, preventive cardiologist and epidemiologist in Jaipur. “Many years
ago, we showed [in a study] that Indians should have lower cut off levels. But it was more
the-ken.com-After the Americans will half of Indian adults also fall in high BP band 1/2 36
a statistical exercise than a clinical exercise,” says Dr Gupta. He runs the Jaipur Heart
Watch, a long-running and the only prospective hypertension (and other cardiovascular
risk-factor epidemiology) study in India with close to 10,000 people under its watch.
In India, there’s no data. And so, there are no specific guidelines.
“We only have consensus statements [from practitioners],” says Dr Gupta, who thinks the
new American guideline will trigger a big debate in the country. More importantly, he
fears there’ll be a push to prescribe more drugs. “There’s a temptation in India to
prescribe drugs at every opportunity. But unless the reading exceeds 140, medication
should be avoided,” he cautions.
That’s tough to pull off in clinics where doctors rarely have the time to seek multiple
readings in different settings, a prerequisite before labelling one as a hypertensive. In
addition, surveys suggest most Indians do not recognise they have hypertension, fewer get
treated, and fewer still, get adequately treated because high blood pressure does not
always cause symptoms. Now, with new guidelines—Europe, too, is revising its guideline
next year—millions can be described as hypertensive overnight, becoming a target
audience for one of the largest segments of pharmaceuticals.
the-ken.com-After the Americans will half of Indian adults also fall in high BP band 2/2 37
Ajit Mohan to Sanjay Gupta: Facebook, Google hot on
Hotstar’s big stars
the-ken.com/story/hotstar-sanjay-gupta-google
December 12, 2019
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As the world enters a new year, Hotstar—India’s most popular streaming platform—is hit
with a strong sense of deja vu. Sanjay Gupta, the current managing director of its parent
entertainment channel Disney India-Star, is leaving the company after a decade to take up
the role of head of search engine giant Google India in 2020.
Gupta’s exit—announced in November—mirrors the departure of Ajit Mohan, ex-Hotstar

CEO and a direct report to Gupta, who moved to social media leader Facebook to run its
India business in January 2019. Google reached out to Gupta after losing its long-time
India head Rajan Anandan to VC firm Sequoia in August—Anandan moved to manage
Sequoia’s early-stage startup program, Surge. (We’ve written about Surge before.)
But why would Google look to Hotstar for a replacement? It’s doing something right. At
least in terms of video consumption.
Hotstar’s quick rise to 300 million monthly viewers, since its launch over five years ago,
has made it a prime target for poaching by deep-pocketed global tech companies in search
of talent. Mohan, for one, is said to be earning around $2 million plus stock options at
Facebook, according to a report from The Times of India. That’s “significantly” more than
what he previously made, the report claims. It is not clear what Gupta’s salary at Google
will be.
Gupta’s impending move to Google also comes at a pivotal time for the US technology
giant in India. YouTube, Google’s video platform, is the company’s crowning jewel in the
country—its largest and fastest growing market with 275 million active users—but its run
as a more-or-less monopoly has been legitimately challenged. Not only by Hotstar, but
also the rapid rise of TikTok, the vertical, short-duration video app from China’s
ByteDance, the world’s most valuable startup with a reported label of $76 billion.
YouTube, to take a larger bite out of India’s growing internet market, needs a better local
focus in India. With an estimated 451 million active internet users—second in the world to
China—and 829 million more to come in the coming year, according to a report from
Cisco, India makes for an awful lot of eyeballs and advertising dollars up for grabs.
Enter Sanjay Gupta.
Gupta is credited with pivotal deals for Star, which include its sports programming and
the launch of Hotstar itself. Experience he could bring to YouTube. A former executive
with consumer goods retailer Hindustan Unilever and telco Bharti Airtel, Gupta is known
the-ken.com-Ajit Mohan to Sanjay Gupta Facebook Google hot on Hotstars big stars 1/2 38
for his sales prowess and strong relationships with content companies and telecoms
business.
But where YouTube gains Gupta, Hotstar is short of another leading executive. But that
may not be an impediment, according to a senior executive in the digital entertainment
industry.
Gold rush
Sanjay Gupta, the head of Hotstar parent Star and Disney, joins
Google India next year. But he’s not the first Hotstar executive to
jump to Big Tech in India—ex-CEO Ajit Mohan left to join
Facebook in Jan. A recurring theme for Hotstar, and barely a
coincidence
Gupta helped turn Hotstar into India’s top streaming destination with 300 million
viewers and an estimated $160 million in annual ad sales
Hotstar has snagged major programming including the India’s IPL cricket and Game Of
Thrones; Gupta’s experience with video in India could turn YouTube around
YouTube currently faces a strong challenge from Hotstar and TikTok, the viral video app
from China’s ByteDance—the world’s highest valued startup at $76 billion
But the buck doesn’t stop at video. Especially not for Google in India. Gupta will need to
navigate Indian internet at a deeper level
the-ken.com-Ajit Mohan to Sanjay Gupta Facebook Google hot on Hotstars big stars 2/2 39
Algorithm dynamics: Asking Google, Facebook and
others to be ‘fair’
the-ken.com/story/relook-google-facebook-algorithm
January 26, 2018
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Pervasive personalisation. Two words that describe how algorithms shape our views and
behaviour and determine what we see, buy, read online. There’s so much value in
personalisation that tech companies are giving away algorithmic tools for free; the actual
money lies in the application, in manipulating large population groups. And as this
happens, much of societal biases are reinforced online.
Elisa Celis and Nisheeth Vishnoi, professors at Ềcole Polytechnique Fẽdẽrale de Lausanne,
Switzerland, propose a framework to de-bias algorithms. They’ve built a prototype for
‘Balanced Search’, to demonstrate how it’s possible to mitigate extreme views and deliver
diverse content using novel algorithms. Businesses today use algorithms to select content
for each user in order to maximise the positive feedback (or revenue) received. The duo
argues that the current practice leads to extreme personalisation, which skews the content
consumed to a single type.
Google-owned YouTube investing $5 million to create programmes that “counter hate and
promote tolerance” is one thing and the search giant and other social platforms
introducing algorithmic features that reduce bias and inequality are another. Because
financial repercussions on the companies are enormous. In places like Germany, which
has gone through the holocaust, policymakers are cautious and worried about extreme
views, but the rest of the world is still figuring out the ever-changing dynamics of
algorithms.
the-ken.com-Algorithm dynamics Asking Google Facebook and others to be fair 1/2 40

As The Ken reported earlier, the community of computer scientists working on machine
learning—the core mathematical part that drives artificial intelligence, the applied part—
is very small in India. Say, 40 versus 400, at Google’s Deep Mind alone. In this context,
Vishnoi organised a workshop at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in
Bengaluru earlier this month. The objective was to get together and groom a ‘young’
community of computer scientists to nudge them to think about relevant problems, says
one of the speakers, Prateek Jain, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research India. We
caught up with Celis and Vishnoi over separate conversations to understand why they
want an algorithm literacy movement across the world. Edited excerpts, below:
Elisa Celis, EPFL, Lausanna
The Ken: What do you mean by ‘fair personalisation’? Personalisation is

everywhere, and, to an extent, aren’t people themselves driving it? Most of us
want to see content (or products when buying online) more directly related
to our interests.
Celis: We are all shown a personalised list. Content selection algorithms take data and
other information as inputs, including the user’s past behaviour, and produce such a list.
To cite a personal example, since I buy baby clothes online every time I log in, I get ads for
baby clothes even though I do many other things in life. How it’s not getting me right
bothers me at a personal level. At a broader level, more and more evidence is emerging
that algorithms have a bias, particularly against women and minority.
the-ken.com-Algorithm dynamics Asking Google Facebook and others to be fair 2/2 41

All licensed out but MVNOwhere to go
the-ken.com/story/mvno-india-trai
July 17, 2018
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In 2015, Sivakumar Kuppusamy had a plan. Zurich-based entrepreneur Kuppusamy and
his team would take on a crumbling telecom industry and become the first to sell to the
500 million Indians who were yet to come online. To do this, he set up India’s first ever
consumer-facing mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) called Aerovoyce.
The idea was simple—get Indian telecom regulator Trai’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority
of India) attention. To this end, Kuppusamy set up Adpay Mobile Payment India Pvt. Ltd
in Chennai, a mobile payments company and the parent company of Aerovoyce. He knew
that Trai was reconsidering MVNO licensing in India after its failed effort to push the
communications service in 2008. And as Kuppusamy had hoped, Trai’s renewed efforts in
2016 paid off, and India was open to consumer-facing MVNO businesses for the first time
ever.
When in Zurich
In Zurich, Kuppusamy also operates a mobile Internet company named Snovabits mobile
that offers a spectrum of products such as carrier billing, utility mobile apps, and mobile
advertising services
Aerovoyce, in April 2017, managed to launch its first fibre broadband service through a
tie-up with BSNL. It also launched voice and data services under its own brand name in
December 2017, with rates starting as low as Rs 79 ($1.1) per month for 1GB daily data,
coupled with unlimited calls.
Today, Aerovoyce is live in the Tamil Nadu circle. But things seem bleak. MVNO has no
takers. Consumers want none of it. Aerovoyce has just about managed to launch a
commercial business out of Chennai. Before they can pick up, though, MVNOs are facing
multiple crises. Their average revenue per user (ARPU) is falling. There’s no
comprehensive regulation. Taxes are skyrocketing. Established operators are giving it the
stink eye. And if all of these weren’t enough, there’s an acute shortage of high-quality
spectrum.
All in all, ouch.
If this weren’t enough, as of May 2017, 61 companies with a telecom background have
acquired MVNO licenses from the Department of Telecommunication (DoT). The licenses
were handed out almost a year after the DoT approved the entry of MVNOs in India. More
companies have applied for licenses but they’re yet to be approved.
the-ken.com-All licensed out but MVNOwhere to go 1/3 42

But wait. If MVNO has tanked, beyond Kuppusamy and his team, is anyone affected? And
if so, why is DoT still doling out licenses? Does India even need these right now?
Solid precedent
Kuppusamy, to his credit, was onto something. A graduate from Salem, Tamil Nadu, he
found his footing in Zurich, Switzerland, working with big telecom players such as NTT
Docomo, SWISSCOM, and others for 18 years. He wanted to, to use this football World
Cup’s favourite catchphrase, bring it home.
Trai’s trials
Just when MVNO licensing could’ve picked up, India seems to

have ditched it. Telecom operators are still giving MVNOs the cold
shoulder. In all this, consumers could be losing out on new
services
Salman SH, 17 Jul 2018
In 2008, Trai first consulted on allowing MVNOs in India, but the plans were stopped
right after the 2G scam unfolded
Operators such as Etisalat, AT&T, Sistem Shyam and others were caught in the middle of
the scam and their licenses were taken away
After Trai's renewed efforts in 2016 to re-introduce MVNOs, today, more than 61
companies have a license
Only one Chennai-based company named Aerovoyce currently operates a consumer-

facing MVNO, but things don't look good

All pain, no gain: India’s own opioid crisis
the-ken.com/story/all-pain-no-gain-indias-own-opioid-crisis
May 11, 2019
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When it comes to opium production, India is one of the largest producers and exporters of
opium. But while India supplies the world with opioids—the cheapest, most effective
painkillers out there—the story back home is very different. We are only equipped to
provide opioids for 40,000 patients—less than 1% of the national requirement. At the
moment, opioid painkillers are used mostly as anaesthesia for severe cases such as road
accidents or surgeries.
The needs of others who can also benefit from opioids, however, are not being met.
Millions of Indians currently battling incurable, debilitating conditions such as cancer,
lung or heart failure, HIV are left in the lurch. While these cases are often terminal, a lot
can be done to improve the quality of life even in their final days. This begins with
managing their pain and reducing their suffering.
Known as palliative care, this approach focuses on improving the quality-of-life for
patients and their families. Palliative care can be provided with or without the ongoing
curative treatment. It begins as soon as the patient’s survival chances become clear and
not necessarily just at the end of life. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared
opioid-based painkillers, especially morphine, as the “gold standard” for pain relief in
such cases.
So, why do Indians not have better access? A key reason is the stigma attached to these
substances. Take the opioid crisis currently unfolding in the US, for example. Between
1999-2017, overdose deaths due to prescription opioids in the US increased 5X. All told,
some 218,000 deaths related to prescription opioids occured in the same period.
the-ken.com-All pain no gain Indias own opioid crisis 1/2 45

Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, a brand of step II opioid oxycodone, has been held largely
responsible for the widespread addiction and deaths due to overdose. After realising that
the market for acute pain, pain after surgery or at end-of-life is small, Purdue changed its
positioning and went after the chronic pain market, such as arthritis and backache. The
company produced false evidence about OxyContin’s safety in daily use, influencing
doctors to prescribe and patients to demand.
But India’s problems with opioid access predate the US situation. They go all the way back
to 1985 when the government introduced the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances (NDPS) Act in response to the global war on drugs. It stipulated rigorous
punishment for medical professionals unable to produce proper documentation for
storing and prescribing opioid medications.
The fear of falling foul of the NDPS Act saw doctors avoid opioids altogether. Sales of the
cheapest strong opioid, morphine, dropped 97%, according to a 2002 study in the Journal
of Pain Symptom Management. And while the stringent regulations have since been
scaled back through a 2014 amendment, the problem of opioid access persists.
the-ken.com-All pain no gain Indias own opioid crisis 2/2 46

Amid bogus imports, the race to a “make-in-India”
oxygen concentrator
the-ken.com/story/concentrator-oxygen-supply-india
May 31, 2021
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On 13 May, Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, a professor at the Indian Institute of Kanpur (IIT-
K), joined a virtual conference on building indigenous oxygen concentrators. Along with
Bandyopadhyay—the head of IIT-K’s incubator, SIIC—there were 7-8 other companies on
the call. They were gathered as part of a collaborative effort to design and manufacture an
Indian oxygen concentrator.
Their deadline? A month.
On the call, one of the companies took apart a few concentrators imported from China
only to find that there is barely any quality control of the oxygen concentrators now
flooding the market. During the call, the company demonstrated how the machine’s
digital display was programmed to fluctuate in the range of 93 to 96% oxygen purity, but
the actual level was closer to 35%. “That could potentially be fatal,” says Bandyopadhyay.
During India’s second wave, oxygen concentrators have become a critical tool for the
oxygen management of Covid-19 patients both at home and in hospitals. For remote, rural
medical settings, concentrators can help plug the gap when fresh oxygen sources are in
short supply . The cruel shortfall of oxygen led to a deluge of avoidable deaths.
With ventilators and oxygen cylinders in short supply, concentrators became the default
alternative. The price of these devices jumped from Rs 50,000-60,000 ($691-828) to over
Rs 1.5-2 lakh ($2072-2762) in under a month. This, despite the Indian government
dropping all perceivable barriers for the imports of concentrators and other supporting
apparatus in April 2021. The GST rate on concentrators was even slashed from 28% to
12% in early May to increase the supply to end consumers through e-commerce portals or
international couriers. For individual use, the courts have decided to waive even the 12%
tax as “gift” exemption.
Since then, the flood of imports has been difficult to control, with India’s lack of quality
standards for oxygen concentrators only complicating things further. “Almost 90% of the
models flooding the market right now are “home-grade” concentrators, which don’t have
a powerful compressor inside,” says Siddharth Dhawan, a Mohali-based medical device
manufacturer. Medical-grade concentrators usually come with a stronger compressor
capable of generating more pressure and power for the concentrator. This is essential
when a patient is reliant on an external oxygen source.
The search for standards
the-ken.com-Amid bogus imports the race to a make-in-India oxygen concentrator 1/2 47

According to information sourced by The Ken, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is
now planning to adopt an ISO standard for concentrators
Dhawan’s company, Walnut Medical, is one of the several manufacturers attempting to

design and manufacture a make-in-India concentrator, of 5 and 10 litre/min capacity.
work in progress
Oxygen concentrators are a crucial bridge to India's oxygen self-

sufficiency. Local efforts to build a high-quality, low cost version
have been successful in designing "make-in-India" models. But
scaling against a flood of imports is the real challenge
Olina Banerji, 31 May 2021
Low-quality, rigged Chinese oxygen concentrators have flooded the country, and the
Indian consumer is none the wiser
A lack of standards for medical equipment and waived import duty have widened the
door for imports
Local designs for concentrators, from the likes of IIT-K and IISc, are tweaked for Indian
needs and aim to be cost competitive
But a crippling lack of zeolite, compressors, and a manufacturing ecosystem is a huge

stumbling block in India's path to oxygen self-sufficiency
the-ken.com-Amid bogus imports the race to a make-in-India oxygen concentrator 2/2 48

An Illustrated Guide to Indian Food-Tech – Part I
the-ken.com/story/illustrated-guide-indian-food-tech-part-1
November 28, 2016
Food-tech companies got a lot of attention from investors over the last couple of years. By
attention, we obviously mean money.
Source: Tracxn, Entrepreneur & Inc42
However, things don’t look too good now.
the-ken.com-An Illustrated Guide to Indian Food-Tech Part I 1/20 49

Before we begin, there are two very important lessons which we must dispense
immediately.
The second most important lesson is this means absolutely nothing. The people who
run these companies aren’t entirely at fault. Most of them are guys who are attempting to
make it big by giving a service that’s missing right now. Granted, this sometimes leads to a
depressing turn of events, but that’s no reason to not give it an honest shot.

While we are at it, the most important lesson is to stop assuming that all venture capital
companies are idiots. VCs are like Dharmendra. They throw their money at everything
they can. Some of those investments will pay-off in a big way…
…others need to be written off entirely…
…and some need to be pivoted to do other things.
If you sit back and think about it, there are perfectly
sound reasons why food-tech is a tempting place to
throw your money at. The market is largely
fragmented and unorganized (two words that perk-
up any VC’s ears). It’s a fairly high-margin business.
It’s a sector where the last technological
advancement in the field of food distribution was
the vending machine. As an added bonus, your
customers can’t download your product on
Piratebay.
Oh, and did I mention that your entire potential

customer base needs what you are selling three
times a day?
Not want. Need. Nothing attracts venture capital

more than telling VCs that your customers are
literally dying to have your product.
If you try to estimate the size of the food market

in India, it works out to around $50 Billion
dollars.

So, now we know that the size of the market isn’t the problem. Nor is the composition.
Above all, it’s trapped in the stone age. All this leads mostly sensible people to argue that a
half-decent technology company, following a dull but level-headed business model, could
meet with a fair amount of success.
That’s a good argument to make.

So it’s a little disconcerting when you find out that’s not exactly what’s actually
happening.
In order to understand what’s going on with food-tech in India, it’s important to unpack it
a bit. Food-tech is a notoriously complex business, with several players fighting each other
(and sometimes themselves) to make money off different areas. However, at the heart of
it, food-tech is divided into three parts:
*Roadrunnr merged with TinyOwl in 2016 to form Runnr
Out of these, food delivery is where several players are fighting for dominance. Even food
delivery has several models. And all these models basically depend on who takes the order
and who does the delivery.

Food-delivery companies are all essentially logistics companies. Most of them dress it up
in some way or the other, but that’s what companies like Opinio, Shadowfax and Grab do
– they move stuff from one place to another and try to make money off it.
So, let’s understand how that works.
Let’s assume, purely for illustrative purposes, that you decide to get into the lucrative
business of delivering whiteboard markers to startup founders in Bangalore.
The model is straightforward. The founder opens an app and asks for a whiteboard
marker, and you send a delivery boy to the closest stationary shop, who picks one up and
delivers it to him.
Now here’s the first problem. The startup founder is bootstrapped and isn’t going to pay
you much for this service.

But your delivery guy has slightly higher expectations from you.
It’s pretty easy to see where this is going. Much like Indian bowling in the nineties, with
every single delivery you make, you are actually losing.

After a while, you wonder – how does one fix this? So you call your good friend, who
thinks about it for a long time and says : ‘Dude, you need to get your guy to deliver more
orders’
This is actually easier said than done. Because if you look the pattern of orders in a day, it
looks like this
That’s how people place orders. It’s random. Sometimes demand spikes because a
Sequoia VC was spotted at Costa Coffee in Koramangala and sometimes all the startup
founders are arguing on twitter about Rahul Yadav and nobody needs whiteboard
markers that day.
However, if you could figure out a way to deliver all the orders that come in with one
delivery guy, you would be sorted. You could probably break even. But since you cannot
have your delivery guy in two places at once, you do the obvious thing: You tell your
customers that they can place all the orders they want, and you will deliver their markers
the next day, instead of doing it immediately.
At first, everybody is upset.

But it’s not the end of the world, so everybody moves on. So your delivery pattern
gradually moves to
The best part about this model is that the more orders you get, the better it is for you. You
are paying your delivery guy the same amount every day. And you are focused on getting
as many customers as possible in order to make money.
That’s why companies generally try to scale as fast as they can once they hit upon a model
that works. Also, there’s pretty strong evidence that the bigger you get, the more you can
drive down your costs.

There are more things you can do. If you had the scale, you could, for instance, buy all the
markers you needed and stock them in a warehouse, and send out people on routes to
deliver them the next day instead of hitting local stationery stores.

Logistics companies have perfected and tweaked this technique over decades. To date,
this is the only logistics model that has consistently and demonstrably made money.
Think about it : everybody from the postal service, courier companies like FedEx and your
doodhwala – all of them use this model.
With me so far? Good. Because things are about to get wild.
Now let’s say that for some reason, you are a young, up-and-coming startup with some
funding interested in changing all this. Competition is tight, and orders are scarce. So in a
bid to differentiate, you announce that all whiteboard markers will be delivered in a
couple of hours – guaranteed, instead of having to wait a day.
We even gave it a name. On-demand delivery. Have to admit – has a nice ring to it.
Normally, this might seem like a minor differentiation, but in the world of logistics, this is
an earthquake.

In logistics, time to deliver is a huge factor. It’s what makes the difference between profits
and losses. The more time a customer is willing to wait for a delivery, the more leeway the
company has to figure out what’s the least expensive way to do it. They can determine the
best route, group deliveries together and do a ton of things to keep costs low.
That’s the thing about logistics – preparedness is profit. The less time a logistics company
has to make a delivery, the lesser are the chances are they can group deliveries together.
This is why speedpost is more expensive than regular mail and why Amazon charges you
more for same-day deliveries.
Preparedness is profit.
But if your business model hinges on delivering everything on-demand, you are basically
throwing all of these lessons out of the window.
Now let’s get back to our startup.
So, what does this shiny startup do? Remember, this is what the order pattern looks like
in a day.

If you intend to deliver all these orders in under two hours, then there’s only one option.
You need to hire more delivery guys.

However, delivery guys cost money. So this means that you are losing money with every
order you deliver. This is a concern, and you want to control it, but your investors tell you
– don’t worry about it. Go after scale. Remember – scale always reduces costs.
No?
No.
Scale is like George RR Martin. It can help resurrect you if you have your basics sorted
out. But if it’s been four years and you still haven’t figured your stuff out, you are probably
going to suddenly find yourself at a wedding in the season finale.

Do you see what’s going on? Scale seemingly makes no difference, because in your model,
to see the benefits of scale, to do all those amazing things about grouping deliveries and
all that, you will need to get really, really big.
But there’s another problem.
Normally, scaling a business is one of the hardest things to do. There are tons of books
written about it. There are MBA courses on scaling strategies. It takes time. And large,
careful investments.
But not for you. Your business is built on an app, and you don’t have any large
investments. Plus, if you give away your stuff for free, it’s remarkably easy to scale.
This means that you get bigger faster than you anticipated you would, because hey, who
doesn’t love free deliveries? You projected you would have a hundred customers a day, but
instead you now have a thousand. All expecting instant on-demand, free service at the
touch of a button.
Do you see the problem? You are losing money with every order you make, and because
your growth is out of control, you are losing money faster.
But your investors are delighted.

Some people know better though.

Again, remember : This is happening because you shortened a one-day delivery to a two
hours. And this limits your ability to group deliveries – which is how everybody else is
making money. However, with some luck, you still manage to squeeze out and do some
group deliveries. But two hours is too short a window. It isn’t enough.
But it’s okay. You tell yourself to take deep breaths.
Done?
Good. Because it’s going to get worse.
If you are delivering food, you need to remember two key things:
First – you can’t afford to be late while delivering food. Much like the Aam Aadmi Party
leadership, food is a perishable product. Also, if you keep people hungry for too long, they
aren’t going to be happy about it.
So you no longer have two hours. Actually, it’s more like 30 minutes.
Secondly, this is what the distribution of orders look like for whiteboard markers, or
groceries or basically any product.

And this is what it looks like for food.

See the problem?
Oh, and don’t forget – you are paying your delivery guys by the hour. Regardless of
whether deliveries happen or not.
So in summary:
1. You have a lot of orders.

2. You are losing money for every order.
3. You are growing faster than you expect.
4. You have lesser time to deliver every order.
5. All these orders happen in a couple of bursts during the day.
6. Your co-founder thinks the whole thing is your fault.
This is why the food-delivery business is so hard.
—End of Part I—
The author is a Product Manager at a start-up in Bangalore. The views expressed here
are solely that of the author in his private capacity and do not represent the views of his
employer. Animations by Sakshi Singh and Gazal Roongta

Part II will be published on 29th November for The Ken’s subscribers only

Angel Tax and the harangued champions of change
the-ken.com/story/angel-tax-harangued-champions-change
February 1, 2018
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In a way, startups in India are paying for what parliamentarian YS Jagan Mohan Reddy
did in 2012. In Bengaluru alone, scores of startups have been slapped with notices from
the Income Tax department over the last year. Most of them are around a certain Section
56 (2) (viib) of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Startup folks know this section as “Angel Tax”
but the IT department officers have a more characteristic name for it.
They call it the Jagan Reddy Section.
The moniker is a hat-tip to the events that unfolded after pharma companies in
Hyderabad were given land at throwaway prices by the YS Rajashekar Reddy government
between 2006 and 2011. And to make sure the companies returned the favour, the chief
minister’s son, Jagan Reddy, created shell companies to receive kickbacks. The kickbacks
were shown as investments, and the companies showed that they were investing in
innovative new ideas.
India is one giant loophole. So it’s no surprise then that other Indian politicians and hoary
folks quickly adopted this. Why pay tax when it is easier to create shell companies and
bring in money as investments rather than revenue? While the beneficiaries are no longer
liable to pay income tax, it helps the “investors” too as these shell companies can be
shuttered in a couple of years and these investments can be written off as capital losses
that can be set off against capital gains accruing from other sources. A double bluff if there
ever was one.
To make sure that practices like this are nipped in the bud, the Income Tax department
mounted an aggressive attack on companies that they believed were attempting this type
of financial charade.
The problem, of course, is that there is no easy way to tell which company is legitimate
and which is a shell. A simple rule of thumb that the tax authorities adopted, more as an
exigency rather than as a thoughtful rubric, was that any private company that raised
money from individual investors, rather than institutional investors, was subject to
scrutiny.
Needless to say, this meant that several startups, especially those that received money
from angel investors, were slapped with notices from the tax authorities. Under this
section, it said companies should treat the difference in the funds raised at the actual
value and the “fair market value” as “income from other sources”. And companies will
have to pay a 30% tax on that income. Because startups receive funds from individual
angels, this was dubbed as “angel tax” within the startup community.
the-ken.com-Angel Tax and the harangued champions of change 1/2 69

And now, startups, even those that have shut down, have become unintended collateral
damage. “We were slapped a penalty order of Rs 57.20 lakh by the IT department that
said a major part of our angel fund was income,” said Rahul Vats, the co-founder of
NexGear, which eventually shut down in 2017.
Pound of flesh
Glitzy government events and grandiose program

announcements encouraging startups are one thing. But as they
get flooded by “Angel Tax” notices from the IT department, now
is when startups really need the government to intervene. The IT
department says it is merely following orders
Arundhati Ramanathan, 1 Feb 2018
Startups faced with the angel tax issue are totally at the mercy of the income tax
assessment officer's judgement of the company's valuation
Besides angel tax notices, startups are facing questions on various other accounting
issues as well
For angel investors, this move is a big investment deterrent
IT Department officials says only the government can find a solution to this issue
the-ken.com-Angel Tax and the harangued champions of change 2/2 70

Antrix stuck with $1-billion payout, but India’s busy
building a Newspace
the-ken.com/story/antrix-stuck-with-1-billion-payout-but-indias-busy-building-a-newspace
April 9, 2019
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Elections rouse emotions. Especially one where 900 million people will vote to elect their
leaders this month. That, to an extent, explains the timing and the ensuing chest-
thumping after India demonstrated its ability to destroy targets in space by shooting
down one of its own satellites late last month. It, however, doesn’t explain this under-the-
radar activity: creating a new public sector company under the Department of Space
(DOS), which already owns another public sector company, Antrix Corporation Ltd.
Created 26 years ago, Antrix has since been the commercial arm of ISRO, selling its
technologies and services.
On 19 February, a 9:30PM Press Information Bureau release said that the Union Cabinet
chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had approved setting up of a new company, “to
commercially exploit the research and development work carried out by Indian Space
Research Organization (ISRO) Centers and constituent units of DOS.”
Conspicuously, the news went unreported.
On 6 March, Newspace India Ltd was incorporated with D Radhakrishnan and Suma
Devaki Ram as its two directors, according to the documents filed with the Ministry of
Corporate Affairs. The two ISRO directors, of launch services and operations respectively,
also serve on the management team of Antrix. On the face of it, Newspace looks no
different from Antrix. Like Antrix, Newspace is attached at the hip to ISRO. This
relationship has been awkward, thorny even, for industry partners and customers because
it comes in Antrix’s way of independent and fair commercial operations. Nonetheless, it’s
the-ken.com-Antrix stuck with 1-billion payout but Indias busy building a Newspace 1/2 71
the timing of the new company rather than its ownership structure that is important. Is it
a safety net for ISRO when Antrix stares at a liability payout of at least Rs 7,000 crore ($1
billion) in just one of the three arbitration cases that it has lost?
In 2011, the ISRO leadership unilaterally broke a commercial agreement between Antrix
and Devas Multimedia Pvt Ltd, a newly set up communications services company. It was a
decision that would go down in the history of ISRO as mysterious and irresponsible. One
that would make India’s space establishment pay through its nose: all put together, close
to $1.5 billion in penalties paid out of the Consolidated Fund of India.
Devas had signed an agreement with Antrix in 2005 to lease transponders on two of
ISRO’s yet-to-launch communications satellites, GSATs, to launch hybrid satellite-
terrestrial broadband services. It would use spectrum in the 2.5 GHz or S-band, then an
unutilised resource. It was a unique business deal—ISRO would build customised
satellites for a private company. Everyone was getting along with their business until
India’s purported satellite, GSAT-4, failed in 2010 due to a rocket failure. Soon after,
India’s 2G spectrum scam would consume everything telecom and communications,
dragging the S-band project into controversy. A leaked CAG report hinted at
irregularities, mostly procedural lapses, in the Antrix-Devas contract.
the-ken.com-Antrix stuck with 1-billion payout but Indias busy building a Newspace 2/2 72
App store wars: A new hope or phantom menace?
the-ken.com/story/app-store-wars-a-new-hope-or-phantom-menace
October 13, 2020
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To a casual observer, the developers’ conference held on 8 October could pass for a
reenactment of India’s freedom struggle. “It’s another fight for the freedom of India,” said
one attendee, another lamented about “the whole East India Company structure which is
trying to oppress us”.
Organised by India’s most valuable startup, Paytm*, the conference was attended by a
diverse group of companies. Startups such as healthcare platform GOQii and foodtech
company Innerchef, venture capital firm India Quotient, and even matrimony website
Bharat Matrimony.
What they all had in common was animosity towards tech giant Google and its move to
enforce its new Play Store billing policy. The Play Store is Google’s app marketplace on its
mobile operating system, Android. Google charges developers a 30% fee for transactions
done through apps listed on the Play Store, but this rule wasn’t always enforced strictly.
“What Paytm has started is a freedom movement. The internet in our country is
controlled by Google and we all are at its mercy. It is time that India comes together and
frees the internet from the clutches of Google,” said Murugavel Janakiraman, founder and
CEO of Bharat Matrimony, at the conference.
He wasn’t just referring to the conference.
In response to Google’s move, Paytm launched a ‘Mini App Store’ on 5 October. It asked
startups to list their apps—or mobile websites—on the store, promising them the attention
of its 150 million monthly active users (MAU). Google quickly backtracked on its decision
to charge a 30% commission, of course, pushing the implementation of the policy in India
until April 2022.
But the damage was already done, spawning a coalition of nearly 150 startups , a faction
of which made a beeline for the Competition Commission of India
What's in an App?
A coalition of 150 Indian startups is taking on Google’s Play

Store. Their biggest power is their collective bargaining power
but no one knows what, exactly, they want
the-ken.com-App store wars A new hope or phantom menace 1/2 73

Google’s announcement that it would enforce its rule of 30% commission fees set off
fireworks in the Indian startup community
Paytm, which was once kicked out of Play Store, is leading the charge against Google
with its ‘Mini App Store’
A part of the coalition has already approached both the government and the Competition
Commission of India
They want better alternatives to Google, but forcing the tech giant to back off may end
up being their best option
the-ken.com-App store wars A new hope or phantom menace 2/2 74

Ashok Varma—the life and death of a startup founder
the-ken.com/story/ashok-varma-the-life-and-death-of-a-startup-founder
November 23, 2020
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The annals of startup media are largely devoted to covering glorious success stories—
sagas of intrepid men and women who braved the odds and won amazing victories to take
their companies to unicorn heights. Occasionally, there are stories about mega-failures—
riches to rags narratives that are polar opposites of the success stories.
But while such stories dominate the media, in the real world, they are but outliers. The
vast majority of startup stories are those of journeyman voyagers—average Joes and Janes
plying their trade to earn a livelihood.
Like Ashok Varma.
Varma founded a startup called Report Garden. It’s a name that most people wouldn’t be
familiar with, but by all other measures it was a successful software-as-a-service (SaaS)
startup. It had multiple millions of ARR , thousands of customers all over the world, and
nearly a hundred employees. All this without a cent of venture capital. It was also a rare
instance of an Indian startup being acquired by a US corporation.
Unfortunately, none of these victories prevented a tragedy.
Because Ashok Varma is no more. He died on 24 September 2020. Death by suicide.
He was 32.
This is his story.
Prologue
the-ken.com-Ashok Varmathe life and death of a startup founder 1/2 75

What is the heaviest burden that a human being can carry?
A parent carrying a child who has left this world.
The image is from a Zoom conference last month that a few of Varma’s friends organised
to commemorate his life and share memories. Varma’s parents, wife, and brother are on
one screen. The image is fuzzy, but the pain is palpable.
As Varma’s friends share their stories, his father, a mild-looking, bespectacled man with
thinning, silver hair, can barely sit on his chair. He breaks down periodically with
spasmodic tears. Varma’s mother seems more stoic, but her courage gives way when she
speaks of her son’s childhood. “He was a very bright child. I was teaching in the school in
which he studied. Ashok used to come to my office occasionally and would take great
pride in seeing me run the school from my vice-principal’s chair. Perhaps this is what
inspired him to dream about creating his own company…”
The early days
Varma was born in 1988 in a middle-class family—his father was a government servant
and his mother was a teacher. The family was not financially well off, but was content and
led happy, idyllic lives in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. “Through our childhood,
Ashok and I slept together in our single bedroom house, either on the floor or on a small
bed,” says Varma’s elder brother Sudheer. “We dreamt in instalments—would we be able
to afford a bike someday?
Ashok Varma
Report Garden
Saas
SaaS startups
Startups
the-ken.com-Ashok Varmathe life and death of a startup founder 2/2 76

B2B: The only change India’s dying wallets could use
the-ken.com/story/india-dying-wallets-b2b
May 16, 2019
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Digital wallets are teetering on the brink of obsolescence.
I returned to India shortly before the advent of demonetisation in October 2016. Digital
payments were all the rage, but nothing prepared me for the frenetic excitement that
followed the government’s decision to wipe out 86% of cash in circulation the following
month. Digital wallet startups hailed the prime minister’s move as the event of the
century.
Overnight, newspaper advertisements, display ads, and retail signage mushroomed

everywhere, shrilly announcing that operators like Paytm*, MobiKwik and FreeCharge
were open for business. Everyone from grocery stores to paan shops loudly proclaimed
they now accepted one or other digital wallet.
These startups—which mostly began their lives as mobile-phone recharge and bill-pay
facilitators—were the first wave of the digital payments revolution that has rocked India
over the past five years or so. They quickly won over consumers frustrated with the
shoddy transaction processing infrastructure for payments offered by banks. As
demonetisation spurred them to greater heights—and as they burned ever more money on
cashbacks and discounts for consumers—the number of users and transactions soared.
But with the government building the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, which once
again revolutionised mobile payments with the ability to pay directly from a bank account,
wallets have stagnated. (Punitive regulation hasn’t helped either.)
In the lead
UPI payments—across apps—totalled Rs 1,33,460 crore in March, against Rs 15,990 crore
for all wallet transactions.
Today, wallets face an existential crisis—they spend hundreds of millions of dollars worth
of venture capital on acquiring customers and earn next to nothing. Wallet transactions
have been largely flat over the past six months, while UPI payments have shot up to more
than eight times that of wallets, by value.
Basic payment economics are harsh—especially for person-to-person (P2P) and

consumer-to-business (C2B) payments. You have a small window of time in which to
convert the initial interest of the consumer into an ongoing, need-based utility that
outlasts the value of a single transaction.
the-ken.com-B2B The only change Indias dying wallets could use 1/3 77
To the point that One 97 Communications Ltd, which runs Paytm, reported a net loss of
nearly Rs 1,500 crore for the year ended 31 March 2018, on revenues of over Rs 3,200
crore. Wallet rival MobiKwik reported a net loss of Rs 203 crore on revenue of Rs 69 crore
in the same period.
Regulations for their part, have played a big role in crippling this payment option. In
October 2017 RBI thought wallets’ rapid rise was because it prioritised convenience over
security so it mandated two-factor authentication—to finish a transaction much like debit
cards. And worse, it said a physical verification of the customer should be done to comply
with know-your-customer or KYC norms, just as with bank accounts.
New purpose
Digital wallets heralded a revolution in electronic payments in

India, but the past couple of years haven’t been kind, with UPI
taking the lion’s share of P2P payments. For the likes of Paytm
and MobiKwik, though, salvation may lie in the untapped B2B
segment
Ateesh Tankha, 16 May 2019
Regulatory burdens and a changing payments landscape have left digital wallets to
stagnate as UPI payments race ahead
While the likes of Paytm and MobiKwik are also adopting UPI, the path to differentiation
and profit may lie in B2B payments
Unlike P2P or merchant payments, the business-to-business space presents an

opportunity for reliable, recurring revenue
It's far from an easy task, but wallets need to stake out a new space for themselves or
risk oblivion
Bajaj, Razorpay, Zerodha carry the Indian fintech torch
the-ken.com/story/bajaj-razorpay-zerodha-carry-fintech-torch
January 3, 2020
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There’s always a sector that’s the apple of the investor’s eye. In the first half of the last
decade, that position was held by e-commerce in India. In the second half, fintechs
became all the rage, attracting millions of dollars. Among the top 100 global companies by
market capitalisation, financial services are worth $3.7 trillion in market capitalisation.
That makes for 17.6% of the $21 trillion that the top 100 companies are valued at, says a
report by consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
With that kind of billing, venture capitalists believe fintech challengers like lending
startup Capital Float, payments firm PhonePe, and mutual fund distributor Paytm Money
can face off with traditional firms—banks like HDFC, or payments companies like Visa.
Nearly $10 billion has been invested in fintech in the last decade. That’s nearly as much
funding as has gone into food tech, hyperlocal delivery companies, and ride-hailing put
together in the same duration, according to venture capital data tracker Tracxn.
But very few viable business models have come out of this fintech hype machine.
“The hype sets in when investment dollars take over reality, and that leads to business
running ahead of fundamentals,” says Kunal Walia, partner at Khetal advisors, a boutique
investment bank. Over the last 15 months, the real picture behind fintechs’ hyped growth
has been emerging.
the-ken.com-Bajaj Razorpay Zerodha carry the Indian fintech torch 1/3 80

Fintech apps—like payments apps, wealth tech apps—spend Rs 150-300 ($2-$4) to get
one app install in India, but 59% of those apps are uninstalled in a day, says AppsFlyer, an
app analytics firm. Fintechs aren’t any closer to cracking their core businesses. For
example, payments companies like Paytm*, PhonePe, Google Pay, BharatPe bank on the
richness of transaction data to then monetise that data through ads or credit. But
ironically, fintechs solely focused on credit—like Capital Float—are struggling.
Still, hype has its uses. “It is only when there is enough hype in a sector does it get a lot of
dollars and only then those dollars reach those few worthy companies that otherwise may
not have got the money,” says Walia.
Besides, it also brings the focus on who’s bringing value to users. And who isn’t.
Performance first
The sector has become mature and there is now better data to understand performance.
Fintechs are now being measured on performance than just potential, and quality of the
companies are more transparent, says Vinod Murali, managing partner of Alteria Capital
Should, say, a Paytm, which grew to 140 million users by offering cashbacks to get people
to choose its app, really be more valuable than traditional credit card payments company
SBI Cards?
Hyped up

Last year, an escalating bad loan and liquidity crisis stripped the
hype from fintechs and revealed which companies were truly
gaining ground in digital finance. And they lay the foundation for
the new decade
Arundhati Ramanathan, 3 Jan 2020
In lending, Bajaj Fintech emerges as the real fintech for the way it uses technology
while maintaining a stranglehold over bad loans
Tech helped Zerodha rise over other broking behemoths in 2019, a feat Razorpay too
hopes to achieve
All fintech attention is focused on payments and wealth tech companies, but the real
fintechs there are NPCI and BSE STaR
As the hype lifts from fintechs, in 2020, Indian fintech will be measured on real
performance rather than just potential

Bayer’s IUD Mirena or the cheaper Emily? Indian
women need options
the-ken.com/story/iud-hysterectomy-india
January 13, 2019
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Sathyabhama Ganesan, 50, has had trouble with her period since giving birth to her
daughter two decades ago. But matters worsened in 2010. She would bleed heavily, and
her stomach would clench so tightly that medicines couldn’t really ease her pain. When
her period would arrive, 15 days or 25 days or 35 days after her previous cycle, she would
lie crumpled on her bed for days at home in Trichy, Tamil Nadu.
“For two days every month, I couldn’t do anything,” she recalled in Tamil. “I would have
to lie down. When my daughter was younger, I’d grit my teeth and try to care for her.”
Two doctors advised Ganeshan to remove her uterus in a procedure called a

hysterectomy. But a friend suggested she talk to T Ramanidevi, a gynaecologist who has a
reputation for avoiding surgery. After a consultation, the doctor implanted Mirena, a
hormone-releasing intrauterine device (IUD) made by pharma company Bayer, into
Ganesan’s uterus. Within three months, her period disappeared. She became pain-free.
Ganesan is one in a fraction of Indian women who’ve avoided a risky surgery for
gynaecological issues. In Dec 2017, the government published the first data on the
prevalence of hysterectomies after news reports revealed unscrupulous doctors were
pushing the surgery on women. The procedure can cost upwards of Rs 40,000 ($568).
Some 700,000 women reported having a hysterectomy and more than half of them were
younger than 40. Two-thirds of the procedures happened in private clinics. Extrapolating
from other surveys, it is likely that 30% of them had issues related to abnormal bleeding,
which may have been treatable using a hormonal IUD.
the-ken.com-Bayers IUD Mirena or the cheaper Emily Indian women need options 1/2 83
But though these devices have been available for about 18 years in India, they remain
unavailable to poor, uneducated and rural women who undergo the vast majority of
hysterectomies, The Ken has found. That’s despite the fact that these devices are on
India’s National List of Essential Medicines, which contains 376 medicines that the
government mandates must be accessible and affordable. Hormonal IUDs are also on the
World Health Organization’s essential medicines list.
"All that is available currently in the public sector is hysterectomy"
Subha Sri Balakrishnan, doctor
A controversial history of family planning, high prices and a government focus on fertility
rather than women’s reproductive health has meant the devices are not widely available,
said Subha Sri Balakrishnan, a doctor at the Rural Women’s Social Education Centre
(RWSEC) in Tamil Nadu.
“All that is available currently in the public sector is hysterectomy,” she said. “A hormone-
releasing IUD would be something that could be very useful, if it came into the public
sector, for women having menstrual issues.”
In 2013, HLL Lifecare, a government enterprise in the manufacture of healthcare

products, developed a low-cost, home-grown alternative to Bayer’s Mirena, called Emily.
the-ken.com-Bayers IUD Mirena or the cheaper Emily Indian women need options 2/2 84
Behind the rush and hush of India’s National Digital
Health Mission
the-ken.com/story/behind-the-rush-and-hush-of-indias-digital-health-mission
September 22, 2020
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To announce a national mission to digitise health records in the middle of a pandemic—
when healthcare infrastructure, financial and human resources are all stretched thin—is
either visionary or gimmicky. The line between the two begins to blur when one factors in
the lack of an actual financial commitment.
The blueprint for digitising India’s patient landscape has been in the works since at least
2018. It was lightyears ahead of earlier efforts to standardise health records, which didn’t
go very far. On 15 August, India’s 74th independence day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
launched the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM). Every individual will get a “health
ID”, a health account that contains all medical reports—everything from prescriptions to
diagnostics.
Overnight, via a 41-page document , the NDHM subsumed the government’s 2018 scheme
to provide insurance to 500 million Indians, popularly known as Ayushman Bharat. At
least on paper, it became a unified health system for every citizen and the central verifier
of all truths in healthcare.
The bureaucracy swung into action. It launched pilots in six Union Territories (UT).
By the end of August, 55,700 individuals were made to register for a health ID. That
number has since crossed 100,000. On 26 August, the National Health Authority (NHA),
which runs Ayushman Bharat—and will implement NDHM—put out a Draft Health Data
Management Policy for public consultation. Despite the importance of this policy —it will
determine NDHM governance—it was open to public feedback for only a week. After a
public outcry, the deadline for feedback was extended to 21 September.
But forget the policy for a moment, and focus on its vision and execution.
Based on the tech stack of Aadhaar, India’s unique ID programme, a health stack has been
created for NDHM by software think tank iSpirt. Its building blocks include a unique
health identifier, DigiDoctor, registry of healthcare facilities, consent manager, electronic
and personal health record standards (which allow portability of data), and so on.
In theory, a patient who has a health ID could seamlessly move from one healthcare
provider to another. She could fetch her desired health records on a phone or any other
device, show it to the doctor, even have it deleted at the doctor’s end within a stipulated
period of time. She could also choose to have all her longitudinal health records stored in
the Digi-Locker, or a health locker provided by a private company.
the-ken.com-Behind the rush and hush of Indias National Digital Health Mission 1/2 85
In the shadows
Over 100,000 people have signed up for a health ID under the

Indian government's National Digital Health Mission. An iSpirt-
created health stack, a unique health identifier, a registry of
healthcare facilities... there's a lot the Mission promises. With
hospitals and citizens left clueless, though, what is NHA hiding?
Soon after it was announced on 15 August by the Indian PM, bureaucrats jumped into
action to get India's National Digital Health Mission started
To date, over 100,000 Indians have already been registered with health IDs. While
authorities say this is optional, many claim they were pressured into signing up
There are concerns over the programme, which seeks to digitise health records,
especially in the absence of a personal data protection law
There are also allegations that those rolling out the programme are not doing so in a
free and fair manner, giving a select few startups an unfair advantage
the-ken.com-Behind the rush and hush of Indias National Digital Health Mission 2/2 86
Biomedical waste could be India’s ticking bomb—or a
thriving market
the-ken.com/story/biomedical-waste-india-ticking-bomb-thriving-market
June 19, 2019
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Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, hasn’t had the best
track record in terms of medical facilities. Most infamously, 30 children died in the main
government hospital in the district of Gorakhpur in 2017 due to a lack of oxygen cylinders.
In January, the same hospital, Baba Raghav Das Medical College, was fined Rs 5 crore
($720,000) by the National Green Tribunal for improper disposal and burning of
biomedical waste this January.
The problem of biomedical waste disposal isn’t new to Gorakhpur, nor limited to it. In
2016, Gaurav Srivastava filed a Right to Information, or RTI, request to find out how
many biomedical waste treatment facilities existed in Gorakhpur and three nearby
districts. 34-year-old Srivastava, who formerly worked on climate change issues and as an
environmental auditor in the state, received a damning response—zero.
Little has changed since. Uttar Pradesh, as on 25 July 2018, had 525 violations of the
Biomedical Waste Management Rules by healthcare facilities and treatment facilities. And
while it may be one of the worst offenders, biomedical waste disposal is a nationwide
issue.
India has a problem—it generates more biomedical waste than it can process. According
to 2017 data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), India generates 559
tonnes of biomedical waste a day. The CPCB says that 92.84% of this waste is processed
properly, either incinerated or sterilised and buried by independent treatment facilities or
by hospitals.
The remaining 7% or so, however, goes untreated—that’s 41 tonnes of waste a day, or

nearly 15,000 tonnes a year. Without proper treatment, and with reports aplenty of
biomedical waste being mixed in with municipal garbage, India is staring at a potential
biohazard crisis.
Among the types of infections caused by biomedical waste are gastrointestinal

transmitted by faeces or vomit, respiratory infections caused by saliva and mucous, and
eye infections caused by infected eye secretions. Inadequate waste management, apart
from causing environmental pollution may lead to transmission of diseases like typhoid,
cholera, hepatitis and AIDS through needles contaminated with infected blood.
Poor management of medical waste risks polluting water, air and soil.
the-ken.com-Biomedical waste could be Indias ticking bombor a thriving market 1/3 87

The environment ministry in February this year updated the 2016 biomedical waste
regulations. The idea was to improve compliance and strengthen implementation as
healthcare facilities are not segregating medical waste diligently and handing it over to
facilities.

But there are no punishments, not even heavy fines, under the current regulations. Only a
show-cause notice or suspension of licence by the district magistrate. The lack of stringent
punishments is one of the reasons why these rules have been criticised as ineffective.
Potential Biohazard
Almost 15,000 tonnes of medical waste go untreated every year in

India—a potential biohazard crisis in the making. But with the
right regulatory push, it could be serious business
Suraksha P, 19 Jun 2019
India has a medical waste problem: hospitals, clinics and labs put out ever more each
year, but treatment capacity is sluggish
On the one hand, there are enthusiastic startups that are struggling for government
assistance to set up new treatment facilities
On the other hand there are large corporate players that are knocking door to door for
household medical waste
With the number of treatment facilities remaining stagnant over the years how will we
deal with burgeoning medical waste?

Birth, death, and cows: India’s oxytocin situation
the-ken.com/story/birth-death-cows-india-oxytocin
March 26, 2019
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Today, the Supreme Court of India will decide on a matter that has a bearing on all
current and future labouring mothers in India, a country that sees 26 million births each
year. It will decide whether one southern Indian company should be given sole
responsibility for manufacturing and supplying oxytocin for all of India’s women and
animals.
Oxytocin is a critical part of the birthing process and is recommended as a first line drug
to prevent and treat excess bleeding immediately after childbirth. With stakes this high,
it’s little surprise that the oxytocin injection figures in the World Health Organisation’s
Model List of Essential Medicines as well as India’s National List of Essential Medicines.
But despite this, both manufacture and distribution of the drug have been severely
restricted since July 2018, when the Indian government banned private companies from
manufacturing oxytocin. Instead, the health ministry decreed that a public sector unit
(PSU)—Karnataka Antibiotics & Pharmaceuticals Limited (KAPL)—located in Bengaluru
would now single-handedly shoulder the burden of fulfilling India’s oxytocin needs.
Here’s the kicker though, KAPL’s expertise in oxytocin is limited. It only began producing
oxytocin in 2018, when it was finally licensed to manufacture it. But now, its factory in
Peenya, an industrial area on the outskirts of Bengaluru, is expected to produce at least
160,000 ampoules per day for 71,232 births (two ampoules per woman)—the national
daily requirement of oxytocin, according to the country’s birth rate. An ampoule is a small
single dosage vial with a sealed neck.
The government’s logic for this was that private players were illegally diverting the drug
for other uses, such as injecting cows with it to increase milk production. However, in the
the-ken.com-Birth death and cows Indias oxytocin situation 1/2 90

months following the government’s directive, one patient activist group and three
pharmaceutical companies challenged the ban in the Delhi High Court. In December
2018, they won. The court overruled the government order as it wasn’t supported by
sufficient data to prove the assertion that there was “rampant abuse” of the drug. The
court also saw the dangers of concentrating production for the entire country in one place.
Missing in action
The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation started seizing oxytocin only after the
government banned the private production of oxytocin. According to its submission in the
Delhi HC, it seized 1.12 million oxytocin ampoules meant for veterinary use in four
months, from April to August 2018, but no manufacturer’s licence was cancelled in this
period
So, the government took its fight to the Supreme Court.
There are questions aplenty about KAPL’s capability to manage this incredibly important
duty. Doubts about its distribution channel, which, public health activists and
gynaecologists allege, is insufficient.
the-ken.com-Birth death and cows Indias oxytocin situation 2/2 91

BSNL’s asset monetisation plan faces stress test in
realty market
the-ken.com/story/bsnls-asset-monetisation-plan-faces-stress-test-in-realty-market
January 28, 2020
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It’s impossible to miss the vast tracts of land owned by telecom operator Bharat Sanchar
Nigam Ltd (BSNL) in Mumbai’s western suburb of Borivali. In a city infamous for its
congestion and general lack of space, state-owned BSNL’s wealth of property is the rarest
of exceptions. Now, with the beleaguered telco fighting for its future, it is considering
selling some of its landholdings. These include the barren 42.43-acre plot in Borivali, a
45-acre housing colony in Deonar, and a 3.5-acre plot in Juhu that boasts a guesthouse
and a 12-storey residential building.
These three land parcels in Mumbai—arguably the most promising ones in BSNL’s
portfolio—are among the 14 assets BSNL wants to monetise to raise Rs 20,000 crore
(~$2.7 billion) in four years. This is a key element of the Rs 69,000-crore (~9.6 billion)
plan the Union government approved last month for the revival of BSNL and its fellow
public telco Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL).
The revival is an about-turn for the government, which considered shutting down the
loss-making public sector enterprises as recently as 2019. According to sources, the Prime
Minister’s Office shot off a letter to Telecom Secretary Anshu Prakash, asking about the
possibility of shutting down the two companies and selling their assets.
That plan, however, changed as the government realised that India was hurtling towards a
duopoly of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, the only two telcos whose futures are
guaranteed at the moment. Vodafone-Idea, the other major player, faces an uncertain
future. Its mountain of debt—around Rs 1 lakh crore ($14 billion)—coupled with a recent
Supreme Court directive to pay Rs 53,400 crore (7.4 billion) in licence-related dues have
left it on life-support.
Vodafone-Idea’s potential demise, though, could make BSNL invaluable. Doubts linger
over the ability of Airtel and Jio to service the 336 million-odd Vodafone-Idea customers
left in the lurch. Already, consumers have complained about network congestion in
India’s metros. While both companies could upgrade their networks to handle the deluge
of new customers, BSNL could help ease the burden.
BSNL’s own closure would also create a massive void. It has 117 million mobile
subscribers, 9.8 million fixed-line customers, and 8.51 million broadband users. In many
remote and militancy-prone areas, it is either the only player or one of two players
servicing customers.
the-ken.com-BSNLs asset monetisation plan faces stress test in realty market 1/3 92
In addition, many of its mobile subscribers are at the bottom of the socio-economic
pyramid and are crucial to the government’s aims to further digital payments and
financial inclusion. Access to these subscribers will also be crucial to the various startups
looking to scale by going beyond tier-1 and tier-2 cities, targeting first-generation
smartphone users.
The government seemingly understands these imperatives and is hoping to turn BSNL
around. Its plan involves the merging of BSNL and MTNL, monetising their assets,
restructuring debt by raising sovereign guarantee bonds, and rolling out a voluntary
retirement scheme (VRS) to its bloated workforce of over 170,000 people.
Encashing Fixed Deposits
Loss-making telco BSNL has the largest land bank of any public
sector company in the country. Parlaying this into the funds it
needs, though, will be an uphill task in a cash-starved real estate
market
Pratap Vikram Singh, 28 Jan 2020
As the possibility of a duopoly looms in India's telecom sector, the government has
approved a Rs 69,000 crore package to revive BSNL
As part of this, the ailing BSNL must raise Rs 20,000 crore from monetising assets,
primarily its land and buildings
While the telco has prime property in some of India's largest cities, a real estate slump
means it is unlikely to realise the true value of its land
Apart from land, BSNL may also seek to monetise its telecom assets such as towers and
fibre
BSNL’s Rs 8,000 crore tender—Make for India, not
Make in India
the-ken.com/story/bsnls-rs-8000-crore-tender-make-for-india-not-make-in-india
April 27, 2020
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If the highly eventful Indian telecoms space were a montage, Bharat Sanchar Nigam
Limited’s (BSNL) latest shot would stand out for pulling a trick that is both staid and
stupid. The state-backed telecom operator has invited bids for its Rs 8,000 crore (~$1
billion) 4G network build-out and expansion. The budget comes out of the Rs 69,000
crore (~$9 billion) revival plan the Indian government cobbled together last year after
deciding to keep the telco alive for reasons of national security and self-reliance.
Many clauses in BSNL’s tender, however, reflect the opposite. Demands such as prior
experience of millions of telecommunications lines installed, or having millions of
subscribers in at least two countries, are restrictive enough to exclude virtually every
Indian telecom equipment manufacturer. As it is, the industry is dominated by large
multinationals: the ratio of imports to exports is 10:1 in the country. What takes the cake,
though, is BSNL’s requirement of turnover:
“The bidder shall be a company having a minimum turnover of Rs 8,000 crore each in the
last two years.”
It appears BSNL, on a lark, decided to say, ‘I am rolling out a Rs 8,000 crore network, so I
want Rs 8,000 crore turnover’.
“Not just the turnover, the technical specs are such that no Indian or new company can
ever fulfil it,” says the chief executive of a telecom tech manufacturer in Bengaluru. He
declined to be named as he doesn’t want to publicly criticise BSNL. “It’s like saying, ‘I
want a search engine built, but I want all the tech specs of Google and I want it to work
better.’”
Directionally, too, BSNL seems to be looking at the past, not future. Why else would it
insist on the new 4G network to have backward integration with 3G and 2G rather than
forward-integration with 5G?
“That’s because the tender has been cooked up by the incumbents—ZTE and Nokia—
which have been suppliers to BSNL,” says the CEO quoted above. “The tech specs are [so
legacy-based] that even Samsung (the anchor supplier to Reliance Jio’s 4G network) is
not eligible.”
On Friday, the news broke that the commerce ministry had warned the Department of
Telecommunications (DoT) of disciplinary action if the BSNL tender violated the public
procurement conditions laid out under the Preference to Make in India guidelines.
the-ken.com-BSNLs Rs 8000 crore tenderMake for India not Make in India 1/2 95
Self Reliance
New Delhi machinery is in motion to amend the state-owned

telco’s 4G tender, which is myopic at best, skewed at worst.
Whatever action the Dept of Telecom takes, it will impact billions
of dollars of public procurement in the near future
BSNL just got rapped on the knuckles for a Rs 8,000 crore tender to build out its 4G
network
The tender’s stipulations—like scale across multiple countries and minimum turnover—
effectively exclude Indian bidders
All told , industry insiders expect the government telecoms project to cost Rs 50,000
crore over the coming years
If played right, this could be an opportunity to build a local telecoms ecosystem and end
India’s dependence on foreign telecoms giants
the-ken.com-BSNLs Rs 8000 crore tenderMake for India not Make in India 2/2 96
Can AAP’s insurgent government deliver the universal
healthcare holy grail?
the-ken.com/story/aap-universal-healthcare
April 10, 2017
The pizza boxes are strewn around the table in a backroom of the health department of
Delhi government. The chatter, attitude and energy of the men sitting around on plush
couches make the place look like a well-funded startup. Also, the reason why certain
quarters of the government have been raising eyebrows.
The mood in the room is bittersweet. Two years ago, the state government inherited 260
primary healthcare units and made a grand promise of establishing 1000 more mohalla
clinics—one doctor-primary healthcare units—across the city. On 15 March, the state
inaugurated 49 mohalla clinics reaching a total of 150. The achievement, which may
appear meagre against the promise, is unprecedented for any state government and thus,
the pizza lunch for celebration.
Robert Yates is impressed. A globally acclaimed expert on Universal Health Coverage

(UHC) and project director of the UHC Policy Forum at the London-based Centre on
Global Health Security, Yates is visiting Delhi to understand the state’s strategy. He
cannot think of any example in the world, where new facilities have been introduced in
such a short time in one city.
He is not the only one. Reputed medical journal, The Lancet, and former Secretary-
General of United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan have lauded this free clinics model of
healthcare delivery. Other state governments are trying to emulate it. Treating high-
incidence low-cost illnesses like cold, cough and viral fever for free at the doorstep of
Delhiites makes financial sense too.
That’s also the first ladder of universal healthcare, seen as a holy grail because it’s a tricky
game of execution and political will. Letting people buy healthcare through myriad
insurance schemes is less head-scratching than providing care at doorsteps, sort of, to
the-ken.com-Can AAPs insurgent government deliver the universal healthcare holy grail 1/6 97
check costs. And disease escalation. Nearly 30 emerging economies are moving towards
it. In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government began this experiment in July 2015.
There’s no qualitative data to show how it’s working, but there are initial signs that people
and care providers like it even though the opposition doesn’t.
Money is not a problem
The cost of primary healthcare

Director of the state health mission, Dr Tarun Seem, explains that primary healthcare is
very cheap. So cheap that it could be done under a tree. It is not about reinventing the
wheel but sticking to a simple and minimalistic design with some innovation.
Delhi’s annual health budget is Rs 5736 crore. It could, like India as a whole, do with more
but for now, this money is good. Director of the state health mission, Dr Tarun Seem,
explains that primary healthcare is very cheap. So cheap that it could be done under a
tree. It is not about reinventing the wheel but sticking to a simple and minimalistic design
with some innovation. And innovate it did. The state has nipped redundancies like
employing full-time staff, buying equipment and acquiring space by hiring temporary
General Physicians (GPs) and other staff, who are paid for each consultation. It has also
outsourced the diagnostics. For the 29 lakh outpatient consultations provided via mohalla
clinics, the state pays Rs 30 to the doctor and Rs 70 is spent on support staff, basic drugs,
diagnostics and maintenance.
For patients who need specialised care, the state has decided to outsource that task to
private diagnostic labs and hospitals at heavily discounted rates. A sum of Rs 500 crore
assigned for mohalla clinics is more than sufficient to achieve the state’s target of 30
million OPD consultations. The rest is for expanding secondary and tertiary care services.
This partnership between the public and private sector in Delhi is a cliched win-win for
everyone. The private hospitals, which profit from in-patient services like surgeries, say
they are happy to be rid of the cough-and-cold crowds. The doctors employed by the
government on contracts are content with per patient incentives as the patients they
consult are large in numbers. They can establish or continue with their private practice in
the evenings.
The state seems to have found a way to offer universal healthcare. Why, then, is the mood
bitter at this celebratory lunch? Health minister Satyendra Jain, in a Kafkaesque manner,
with his hand on his forehead, responds in a helpless tone, “Once you tell a bureaucrat to
get something new done in a new way, for months you will hear the rules and regulations
that prohibit it from happening.”
Keeping it simple
The central and state governments together spent 1.3% of the country’s GDP on public
health in FY2016, against a world average of 6%. The new National Health Policy
promises to increase the public spending to 2.5%. Taking it a step ahead, Delhi’s health
department has not only increased the expenditure on health but also focused on making
it count by improving the efficiency of the health systems. No point in pumping money
down the same inefficient systems, they say.
Dr Seem—an Indian Revenue Services officer, who has worked with the Delhi-based
Public Health Foundation of India and helped frame the National Rural Health Mission
with the union ministry of health—has found that primary healthcare is inexpensive. He
points towards an audit report of a state government-run maternity home. Over 1 lakh
rupees were being spent on each delivery. This report is one of the many audits that the
AAP government conducted in the initial stages of planning UHC. However, he
understands that public systems cannot always care about efficiency. A train has to run
even with one passenger, he says. However, the costs can be optimised.
Pooja Mehta
I did not want to spend Rs 2,000 on consultation, diagnosis and drugs for a sore throat,
that is why I dropped in at the mohalla clinic on my way to work
“Once you cut hospitality and manpower from healthcare, the basic costs are next to
nothing. By paying per unit to the staff and building a portacabin, we are considerably
bringing down the costs of primary healthcare, sparing enough for drugs and diagnostics,”
he says, with the conviction of a tough tax officer in a Bollywood movie.
His design for disruption is not only aimed at lowering costs but also upgrading quality.
Dr Seem’s plan to challenge the private sector with efficient public systems by getting the
middle-class populace into the fold is working. The queues in front of the mohalla clinics
are getting longer. This writer visited three clinics in North Delhi. Most patients had
walked to the clinics but a few two-wheeler and car owners were in the queue too. “I did
not want to spend Rs 2,000 on consultation, diagnosis and drugs for a sore throat, that is
why I dropped in at the mohalla clinic on my way to work,” said 37-year-old Pooja Mehta.
Mehta was surprised that the government had employed a doctor, who was polite.
Most of those waiting were women, elderly and children, first-timers in the government
healthcare system. The pulls for them—proximity to home and inexpensive treatment. But
what about quality?
Graphic: Nikita Takkar
Quality & public health rarely go hand-in-hand

Dr Shuchin Bajaj, director of the NCR-based Cygnus Hospital, who is advising the state
government, says that there are two ways to ensure quality in a public health system. First
is paying the doctor per patient, where the doctor has a reason to be nice to the patients,
and the second is targeting the rich. “The rich users of the system paired with a strong
regulatory environment can keep the quality of the public system alive,” he added.
How good is good enough when it comes to the quality of primary healthcare?
It depends on how many people it treats out of those that show up. Nachiket Mor, country
director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, believes that the full potential of a
primary healthcare unit is realised if it can treat 98% of the health conditions. Passing
only 2% to secondary or tertiary care. It is too early to assess the qualitative success of the
mohalla clinics. However, based on the data from the first 100 clinics, government
officials loosely claim that over 90% of the cases are being treated. And the rest are
referred to specialists. The AAP government is hesitant to put a number until more clinics
are established and more data is collected.
According to Mor, 98% can be achieved by providing extra training to the GP and the
nurse. “We must enhance our focus and investments on the training of a general
physician. The training of the GP and the nurse has to be very strong to pull people from
the communities and offer them the services they need,” he said.
The state has no plans for such training. For now, it is preparing to float a tender to
establish the remaining 850 clinics.
Requesting help
Satyendra Jain, Delhi health minister
We had promised the private sector three things—volumes, payments on time and that we
would not take cuts
If we cannot provide it just yet, we will pay for it. This is the strategy for high-cost low-
incidence situations like surgeries for appendicitis, removal of cancerous lumps and heart
bypass. To make it happen, in the first week of March, Jain announced a tie-up with 41
private National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers (NABH)-
accredited hospitals to facilitate 30 such surgeries. In one stroke, the Delhi government
directed patients, who had been waiting for over six months, to private hospitals. This
served a dual purpose—cleared the backlog and gave the government more time to
increase bed capacity. The same week, Jain also announced a tie-up with 21 private
laboratories to provide radiology tests including MRI, PET and CT scan when prescribed
by a Delhi government hospital.
The bills are going to soon start pouring in but Jain is not perturbed. The state has
negotiated discounted rates, which are lower than market rates.
“We had promised the private sector three things—volumes, payments on time and that
we would not take cuts. The government is changing its strategy from procuring to
outsourcing, it is cheaper. It is a saving, and we are benefitting from this partnership,”
Jain explained.
In return, the private hospitals have offered available beds—estimated at 20-30% at

mutually-agreed rates that the government can afford, and private hospitals can secure
lower margins, said a Delhi Medical Association representative.
Promises to keep or to be broken?
The AAP’s promise of UHC was sold with the adjective ‘rapid’. A promise it is struggling to
keep. It had planned to set up 1000 mohalla clinics in 2016. With only 150 clinics
currently functioning, the deadline has been moved to the end of the year.
Seem concedes that it is a lot simpler for a government to build a large super-speciality
hospital than several mohalla clinics, which are a nightmare as far as the rules are
concerned. Logistics aside, the reasons for the delay are several demolition notices issued
by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), which is ruled by the AAP’s political
opponent BJP, a vigilance probe and an enquiry by CBI. The AAP’s unique means do not
justify the end, argue these authorities.
“If you go strictly by the financial rules, this pizza will have to be tendered, a bidding
document would have to be framed, tenders invited and depending on the requirement,
the pizza brand that we should order pizza from, will have to be picked,” an official at the
lunch, who did not want to be identified for the fear of getting into trouble, stated. “Of
course, the lunch-time would be long gone by that time,” he added.
The official is hinting at the process of establishing mohalla clinics, which were set up
through public notices seeking interested parties. The AAP’s opponent, the Congress
party, has written a complaint to the vigilance commissioner stating that the former
flouted tender rules. The MCD, vigilance commissioner and CBI are yet to arrive at a
conclusion.
Meanwhile, the AAP is preparing for the MCD elections scheduled for this month. If on
the back of mohalla clinics, the AAP wins, it would have slain its most ardent enemy in
making UHC possible in Delhi. If not, it will have an uphill climb to keep its promise of
1000 mohalla clinics.
Whatever the election outcome, Delhi’s commitment to UHC has proved infectious. Most
notably, in October 2016, Karnataka health minister KR Ramesh Kumar announced his
decision to start extended health centres for doorstep care—on the lines of the mohalla
clinics.
Kumar told The Ken that the state health department will begin the process of tendering
for about 100 extension hospitals in April. He had been waiting to secure a budget for
primary healthcare. In March, his wish was granted: Rs 5,118 crore covering Karnataka’s
population of 61 million. However, the Delhi government has allocated Rs 5,736 crore for
a population of 11 million—approximately a sixth of Karnataka’s population.
States will improvise but it is an improvisation that’s needed.
As far as the proof-of-concept goes, the Delhi government has proved that UHC is
possible. If in the remaining three years of its rule, the AAP government can get the
majority in Delhi hooked to a functioning public-funded healthcare system, it’d have set
up an institution that’d outlive its political life.
Can private healthcare prices be capped? Should they
be?
the-ken.com/story/private-healthcare-prices-capped
June 28, 2017
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On 13 June, the Karnataka legislative assembly discussed a law to enforce standardised

charges for medical treatments. The following days saw closed hospitals, doctors on the
streets protesting against the bill and heated debates among the state’s political leaders. A
week later, the government decided to reconsider the bill.
The risk is mitigated but certainly not averted for private healthcare providers.
Karnataka is not the first state to express an intention to fix prices for them, and it
certainly won’t be the last. In the last few months, the medical fraternity has learnt that
the narrative of a hospital that exploits patients is strong, and price control is not an
empty threat. The state’s intention to regulate hospital treatment prices is real. Like a
chameleon, it is manifesting in unique regional and political environments.
Health is the domain of the state, not the centre, and the tool that state governments
currently use is the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010. Can
the legislation regulate prices? No. Does it favour the standardisation of charges by state
governments? Yes. A crown jewel of the Indian public health movement, the Act’s
intention was to usher transparency, better quality care and monitoring of private
hospitals, under one law for the first time in the country.
The law is one thing and politics, another. Although notified in 11 states, it’s not
completely functional in any state—it has not ensured regulation of every clinical entity,
even in states where the law does exist. This is recognised by both stakeholders—doctors
the-ken.com-Can private healthcare prices be capped Should they be 1/2 103

and policymakers. Why? Because of the resistance by the state chapters of medical
associations, points out Sunil Nandraj, who was one of the drafters of the legislation.
The journey of the Clinical Establishment Act

The law is one thing and politics, another. Although notified in 11 states, it’s not
completely functional in any state—it has not ensured the regulation of every clinical
establishment even in states, where the law does exist. This is recognised by both
stakeholders—doctors and policymakers
The doctors won the first round. But did the state governments accept defeat? Clearly not.
Nandraj did develop a template that the states could follow to determine the rates for
hospital procedures, but he says that the politicians wanted more out of the bill. They
wanted to cap prices.
The politicians’ intention has taken a tangible form. On 17 March, West Bengal enacted
the law. On 1 June, the state government proposed the rates, fixed under the state health
insurance scheme Swasthya Sathi, announced in February 2016, for all treatment and
diagnostic packages across hospitals.
the-ken.com-Can private healthcare prices be capped Should they be 2/2 104

Check-in, check-out: India’s fast-moving health
bureaucracy
the-ken.com/story/india-health-bureaucracy
March 30, 2017
Earlier this month, a very forgotten-type of policy was announced. After 15 years, India
got a new National Health Policy 2017. Since in a democracy the government often
delivers what the people demand, such a lapsed policy revision, after 2002, could be
blamed on the people. On what they demand from their elected representatives. But
there’s another plausible explanation for this apathy. It’s the mirror opposite. Like Alice
peeping Through the Looking Glass in Lewis Carroll’s sequel. The policy did not move at
all in 15 years, but the topmost bureaucrat in this ministry moved the fastest. The ministry
of health bade farewell to 12 secretaries.
Until February 2014, when Keshav Desiraju was suddenly transferred to the consumer
affairs ministry, nearly all secretaries in the preceding 20 years had vacated their posts on
retirement. But an unhealthy turn of events—can’t be called a trend yet—began after
Desiraju. Two other secretaries to touch and go between 2014 and 2016 did not
superannuate.
But what’s in a tenure? A civil servant from the Indian Administrative Service is trained
for ‘quick learning’ on the job, is a cogent argument.
Not in the social sector, and not in India, which has abysmal social indicators. It slipped
down one rank to 131 in the new Human Development Index of 188 nations released on
22 March.
For bringing about any change and taking the agenda forward, you need a cycle of three
years, even if you have worked in the sector or the ministry before, says K Sujatha Rao,
who retired as health secretary after a 14-month-stint in 2010. “The first year goes in
the-ken.com-Check-in check-out Indias fast-moving health bureaucracy 1/6 105

understanding the issues, the second in bringing the changes and facing the resistance
and it is in the third that the graph begins to go upward, and results fall in. Because of the
short tenures, India’s health policy never went beyond the first year,” says Rao.
What's optimal?
“The first year goes in understanding the issues, the second in bringing the changes and
facing the resistance and it is in the third that the graph begins to go upward, and results
fall in. Because of the short tenures, India’s health policy never went beyond the first
year,” says K Sujatha Rao
Self-inflicting shuffle
When Desiraju was shunted out in February 2014, in the full glare of public curiosity
and outrage, speculations hung heavy that it was the tobacco lobby and a multinational
stent manufacturer, which wanted him out of the ministry. Desiraju wouldn’t comment on
his sudden exit from the health department except confirm having taken a stent-related
decision, on the recommendation of an additional secretary in the finance ministry. The
decision ensured that the Central Government Health Scheme would only reimburse
government employees’ stent expenses if the stents were manufactured in India, passing
up imported expensive stents.
Look at what that transfer wreaked. The Ken’s sources say that Desiraju had been
assiduously working on the draft mental health legislation. It had passed through the
cabinet and went to the parliamentary standing committee and came back. Desiraju’s
team was preparing to take the updated draft back to the committee and moving it further
when he was transferred. His successors sat on that file for two years and four months.
“I am sorry that I was unable to complete a task I had set myself, which was to get the
Mental Health Care Bill, 2013 enacted by Parliament,” says Desiraju. The bill was
introduced in the Lok Sabha last week and passed on 27 March. “It is a very progressive
draft, which gives primacy to the health and welfare of persons with mental illness. I am
glad that the bill has finally been enacted as the Mental Health Care Act, 2017 and hope
that government will find a way towards finding the resources that will be needed if the
provisions of the act are effectively implemented.”
But it’s not just political interference, which derails bureaucracy. Many times, the officers
have no particular interest in health. When BP Sharma came as the health secretary in
February 2015, he was, officials in the ministry say, very clear that he wanted to go back to
the department of personnel and training where he came from. And he did, after 11
months.
In these years, another important bill, on medical education, which was the purview of the
health ministry and its secretary, got shoved around and finally landed up at NITI Aayog,
a government think-tank. It has prepared a new National Medical Commission Bill, 2016
but officials say the ministry of health has had little contribution in it. “This draft bill
places too much reliance on private sector interventions. Also, it has built a large network

of institutions of nominated, and not elected, members. We have a very bad history of
elected members, but the government is also very bad at nominating people. Just look at
the current national board of examination. Ideally, the bill should provide for an
independent body making all the nominations,” says a former health secretary who
doesn’t want to be named.
The Ministry of Health in 15 years
The outsiderdom effect

It appears there’s a basic misunderstanding of how health interacts with our economy.
Or else what would explain the short-termism that every government has shown in
grooming health leaders. Going back further than 2002, say to 1992, the check-in-check-
out culture prevailed—seven secretaries in that decade.
The government has to take a long-term view of grooming leaders, says Rao. This is done
partially in the finance sector, which has also seen many reforms. In the last 70 years,
says Rao, the financial sector brought in several institutional innovations in addition to
the ministry of finance and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that the British left us with.
“In health, even creating a department dedicated to public health has been evading us for
over two decades,” she says. Rao has recounted the failure of the Indian health system in
her new book Do We Care?
Many past secretaries agree that the overall policy paralysis in the ministry of health—
timely procurement, the implementation of disease control programmes and the non-
implementation of several sanctioned projects, like the 2010-approved plans to build
capacity for noncommunicable diseases—can be attributed to short tenures. Talking of
procurement alone, tales of dispiritedness are legion. Which also explains why a vigorous
health technology industry has not taken root in India. To cite an example, two startups
from Bengaluru have been developing high-end diagnostics for tuberculosis (TB) for
over a decade. But they haven’t been able to enter the public health pipeline despite
closely working with the government agencies during their product development. (The
startups don’t want to be identified because they are still hopeful and don’t want to
antagonise the ministry.)
One story is particularly notable. Back in 2004, one of the two startups mentioned above
proposed to develop a test that would tell multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB directly from
sputum. While one review committee said, “There’s not much MDR-TB in India”, (which
was not correct); the then Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP) director
remarked: “he needed to ask the WHO if this kind of test will work or not”. The
entrepreneur developed the test on his own. And in the meantime, MDR-TB continued
to grow and is at an all-time rise in India. (We wrote about it earlier.) The public
procurement of that diagnostics never happened. The second startup has been

developing point-of-care diagnostics for TB (and other diseases) for many years now but
isn’t sure if its product will enter the national programme as an imported—reportedly
similar—diagnostics has already found a place in the national programme.
To avoid a similar fate, some startups have found a longer, complex route. Anand
Sivaraman, founder and chief executive of Remidio, which makes smartphone-based
eye-care diagnostics, first demonstrated its products’ cost-benefit impact at a pilot at
Aravind Eye Hospital in Tamil Nadu. Remidio has several installations in the country
but is now allowing itself “to be handheld” by a set of nonprofits that have prior
experience of working with the government in India, to be able to eventually deploy in
the public health system through them.
“Is it the most ideal way? Maybe not, but as a startup, we have to make it happen,” says
Sivaraman.
Risk free
“In the uneasy mix of technologies in procurement, officers take easy decisions, which
may be expensive in the short term. But money is not an issue with the government,”
says an entrepreneur who once lost out despite being the lowest bidder with a
progressive product
Even today, the ministry requires agencies from outside India to baptise certain local
technologies. “In the uneasy mix of technologies in procurement, officers take easy
decisions, which may be expensive in the short term. But money is not an issue with the
government,” says an entrepreneur who once lost out despite being the lowest bidder
with a progressive product. In this context, consider the fact that a secretary—a
bureaucrat who leads the health ministry—by the security of her tenure is under no
(psychological) pressure to take ‘risk-free’ decisions.
Tenure doesn’t matter, continuity does. Really?

As long as the government posts someone from the same ministry as secretary, tenure
doesn’t matter, says K Chandramouli, who retired as secretary in 2011 with nine months
in that post. Prior to that, he had spent over two decades in the ministry.
Implementation is where India falls short and that lies in the states. “Whatever the
short-term system in Delhi, there is a cushion in the state administration,” he says.
If that were so, says Rao, then why have the ministry of health and a secretary if she has
no work? After all, bureaucrats cost a lot of the taxpayers’ money. “The VII Schedule of
the Constitution lays down the distribution of responsibilities between the Centre and
State. Medical education, infectious disease, food safety, drug control regulation, etc. fall
in the concurrent list, which means the central government is responsible for the
implementation of these policies. Are these areas problem-free?” Rao asks. A passionate
health bureaucrat, her colleagues, say she “believed in health systems and brought a
refreshing style of work in the ministry”.

Those like Chandramouli believe that under the prevailing system, it is the joint
secretary who is the bulwark of the ministry. “They have a mercifully good tenure of five
years. They are the custodians,” he says, adding that when such people get promoted as
secretaries, a short tenure doesn’t make a difference.
Rao, who served both in the Centre and the states, strongly disagrees. Have some more
joint secretaries, why have a secretary, she counters. ‘This tenure of five years is notional.
If you study the ministry of health, the tenure of most JSs is barely a year or two at a
desk. This is one reason affecting domain knowledge,” she says.
There’s enough evidence to show that longer tenures of secretaries by and large work
well in setting the direction. In the departments of biotechnology and science and
technology, secretaries have had fixed tenures, going up to eight years with extensions.
Of course, these are more technical and less political departments, but they provide
proofs of bold decisions. “I don’t think the health secretaries’ tenure affects technology
absorption as there is a board for that. However, for any leader, it takes time to develop a
strategy and implement a few important schemes,” says Maharaj K Bhan, former
secretary of biotechnology who served for eight years.
A signature issue, more than ever

The above arguments notwithstanding, there’s yet another reason why the government
ought to pay serious attention to the tenure of secretaries. The current crop of senior
bureaucrats entered the civil service when they were 23-24 years of age. By the time they
became eligible for the top post, most were 56-57 years of age and had about three years
of secretaryship. But in over the last two decades, people have been entering the service
at ages 27-28, and it’s anybody’s guess how long their tenures at the top post will be.
“That’s true. And it is a serious issue. The government will have to think. Maybe they will
raise the retirement age. When I joined, the retirement age was 55; when I retired, it was
60,” says Chandramouli, a little gleefully.
Reportedly, the present health secretary, CK Mishra who took charge in August 2016,
has a little over three years to his retirement. Given how bureaucrats with more than
two-three years in secretaryship often like to shop around, it’d be worth watching his
tenure.
“He is a very bright man. He has another three plus years but he is almost certainly not
going to retire as secretary, health. He is going to hang around for some time and then
he’d go somewhere. Who knows, the PM wants him to move,” says a former health
secretary who doesn’t want to be named. Mishra declined to be interviewed for this
article.
There’s never been a chipper narrative around healthcare in India. Unless of course, one
rejoices in the fact that at the time of Independence we were like Afghanistan in, say,
infant mortality. If we want such a narrative, then more than mere policy is needed.

Along with aptitude and good intent, tenure is particularly important in the social sector,
says Desiraju. “What would be good for the government to do is to send a strong message
that they want people as a health secretary who’d want to stay and not lobby for postings
outside,” he says. That all the government wants is a good person and that it would
support her, even with increased budgetary allocations so that she is allowed to do what
needs to be done.
“That message has not come out of any government in the last 10 years,” says Desiraju.

Class of 2030: India’s on the cusp of an electric future.
But who’s going to build it?
the-ken.com/story/electric-vehicles-talent-gap-future
March 7, 2019
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UPDATE: On 7 March, the government officially announced a 15% import subsidy on
lithium. The Ken had earlier reported a 5% subsidy rate, as told to us by a senior official in
the know of FAME-II policy discussions.
2019 will be the year of the perfect electric storm.
This is the year that India might finally get the chance, in earnest, to ride on the path to
electric mobility. After almost a year of policy negotiations between the Prime Minister’s
Office and the Department of Heavy Industry (DHI), the Faster Adoption
and Manufacturing of (Hybrid &) Electric Vehicles scheme, or FAME-II, was passed last
week. We are at the cusp of a great revolution in electric mobility, claim industry leaders.
Prominent car manufacturers, including Hyundai, Mahindra, Tata, Audi and Nissan have
advertised their intentions to launch electric vehicles in 2019. Original Equipment
Manufacturers (OEMs) like Tata and Mahindra, who already sell a moderate number of
units in the market, hope that favourable import policies and the increased focus on local
research and development will boost manufacturing and lower costs.
Auto-adjacent industries in the supply chain, like battery and powertrain—how an EV

connects the batteries, motor and transmission system—makers and companies building
EV-charging infrastructure, also hope to see a boost in production and sales volumes. The
infusion of funds, up to Rs 10,000 crore ($1.4 billion) from Rs 5,500 crore ($780 million)
under FAME-I (passed in 2015), is significant.
the-ken.com-Class of 2030 Indias on the cusp of an electric future But whos going to build it 1/2 111
But this storm could also leave a disaster in its wake. India’s capacity to engineer and
produce electric vehicles at the promised scale, is as middling as it is scarce. To develop
quality talent for the EV sector, at scale, is no trifling matter because the learning curve
for Indian manufacturers, at this point, is perpendicular. “The technology within electric
vehicles changes every six months. Auto manufacturers are used to doing 1-2%
improvement on internal combustion [IC-engine] units year-on-year. But EV tech has to
be understood and built from scratch. It’s very challenging for a workforce that hasn’t
been exposed to this tech before because 60% of the electric powertrain is different from
an IC-engine,” says Chetan Maini, co-founder and vice-chairman of SUN Mobility, and
creator of the first Indian electric car, REVA, which he sold to Mahindra in 1999.
According to a 2018 report by the temp staffing company Teamlease, the EV industry is
staring in the face of a huge talent drought. Engineers who can work and, more
importantly, innovate on EVs are thin on the ground. Currently, around 1,000 engineers
are employed in the EV divisions of various automakers. By 2021, the projected
requirement of such engineers in India will be 15,000.
By 2040, 55% of all new car sales will be electric; and China is projected to lead these
global sales.
the-ken.com-Class of 2030 Indias on the cusp of an electric future But whos going to build it 2/2 112
Coming together: Left and right of the healthcare
spectrum
the-ken.com/story/left-right-healthcare-spectrum
December 26, 2017
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Coffee and conversation is always a good idea. Well. Almost always.
The warmth of a steaming cup has served exactly three goals since the Indian health
ministry installed a coffee machine in a dusty, pan-stained corner last winter. It provides
for the after-lunch caffeine hit, keeps hands warm, and most importantly, entertains new
guests in the ministry. Those who have a lot to offer to the government.
One such offer is that of unused hospital beds in private hospitals that are otherwise
inaccessible to most because the ones who really need them cannot afford them. These
beds make about 80% of all the beds in all the hospitals in the country, against the meagre
20% in overcrowded government-funded hospitals. Everyone can see that they are two
pieces of a health jigsaw puzzle waiting to be put together, but few did so this year.
In 2017, the Aam Aadmi Party took long strides towards making free and universal
healthcare an achievable goal. It also proved that one service that the state government
can offer to gain popularity is healthcare. How? By partnering with privately-funded
profit-motivated hospitals. Meanwhile, states like West Bengal went on a witch hunt
against private hospitals’ revenue by capping prices of medical procedures.
The negotiations between private companies and state governments will continue in 2018
as the former has losses to cover, and the latter is responsible for three quarters of the
Indian population that is still not covered by any health scheme or insurance.
the-ken.com-Coming together Left and right of the healthcare spectrum 1/2 113
Both in talks behind closed doors and public forum, one question became the bone of
contention this year—who will pay the actual cost of healthcare? The central government
insisted that large corporates should bear the cross. Be it in the form of drug donations or
controlled prices of medical devices or higher taxes on unhealthy packaged food. The
policy intention was right, the results were not. While donated drugs for drug resistant
tuberculosis and capped prices of cardiac stents deprived patients from accessing
affordable healthcare, the sin tax on sugar laden aerated drinks pushed stubborn large
companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to shift to selling healthy treats this year.
They were not the only ones who pushed the boundaries to new frontiers, pharma
companies tried and succeeded in the fields of biopharma and specialty drugs. Large
Indian drug manufacturer Sun Pharma partnered with a Korean contact manufacturer to
develop a novel biologic, and Biocon succeeded by getting a seal of quality on its
biosimilar. Along with the decade-old Eris Lifesciences that went public in 2017.
A new drug policy, biopharma mission, health policy: all inked this year, are an indication
that the state is trying to get on the same page as healthcare providers and drug
manufacturers. As the negotiations between them get long and hard, 2018 will show who
benefits from the association.
Some stories that readers loved in 2017:
Aam Aadmi Party’s first of its kind experiment in healthcare. Read it here
Only two drugs can treat the tubercular superbug. Both of them are not
available in the Indian market. Here is why
The story of price control of stents—right intention but wrong results
Majors like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are inspired by healthy beverage startups
like Paperboat and Raw Pressery to diversify
Can Indian drug manufacturers emulate the success they saw in generics in
biologics? It looks tough at this point. Why? Read it here
The story of Eris Lifesciences: how a pharmaceutical company became a

legitimate unicorn in 10 years
the-ken.com-Coming together Left and right of the healthcare spectrum 2/2 114
Covid homecare can’t cover the home stretch in India
the-ken.com/story/covid-home-care-cant-cover-the-home-stretch-in-india
November 25, 2020
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When a 53-year-old Gurugram resident tested positive for Covid-19 in early November,
her foremost concern was the availability of a hospital bed in case her symptoms
worsened. The Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) has been facing a shortage of
hospital beds for a while now. And with the Indian capital seeing a sharp spike in Covid-
19 cases recently, the shortage has gotten all the more acute .
She explored her options; if she couldn’t be assured of a bed in a hospital, the next best
thing was a homecare package. After some to and fro, she settled for one offered by Delhi-
based private hospital chain Medanta. At Rs 4,900 ($70), it was the least expensive
package available. The most expensive one was for Rs 21,900 ($300).
By the end of her 14-day quarantine period, her condition improved, but it came at a cost.
She had ended up spending nearly 10X the amount she had paid upfront.
Her bills, which The Ken studied, revealed that she had spent close to Rs 20,000 ($300)
on a string of lab tests. A D-dimer test, used to study blood clotting, set her back by Rs
1,900 ($25); kidney and liver function tests cost Rs 1,200 ($16) and Rs 1,350 ($18); and a
Ferritin test was for Rs 1,250 ($17). All of these tests were priced at least 50% higher than
market rates. She spent another Rs 8,000 ($108) on several drugs, including a week-long
course of Favipiravir, an antiviral drug. CT-scans cost her Rs 7,000 ($100).
Halfway through the quarantine, when the doctor ordered another round of tests, she
decided to compare prices with other pathology labs. “I realised that these were
overpriced at Medanta. I could get them at a fraction of that cost from [lab chain] Dr Lal
Pathlabs,” the patient told The Ken. “The government regulates prices of RT-PCR , but
what about blood tests like IL-6 and D-dimer? Why is it letting some hospitals get away
by charging such high prices?” Medanta did not respond to The Ken’s questions about
their pricing decisions.
Bitter Pill
India’s $5.4 billion homecare industry has everything you’ll need

for home isolation, but everything also comes with a price.
Sometimes hidden
Maitri Porecha, 25 Nov 2020
With upto 9,000 patients testing Covid-positive every day in Delhi, hospital beds are
scarce. Many emergency cases slip through the cracks
the-ken.com-Covid homecare cant cover the home stretch in India 1/2 115
Patients opting for private hospital homecare packages sometimes end up spending 10X
in drugs and lab tests
State governments have partnered with established homecare companies to carry out
home monitoring, but pricing isn’t transparent
The answer doesn’t lie in telemedicine and its regulation; without sound health
infrastructure, the doctor-patient-hospital loop can’t be closed
the-ken.com-Covid homecare cant cover the home stretch in India 2/2 116
Covid Taskforce, let’s get real on vaccines. It’s time for
plan B
the-ken.com/story/covid-taskforce-lets-get-real-on-vaccines-its-time-for-plan-b
May 27, 2021
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As the virus continues to play a game of whack-a-mole with the healthcare system
worldwide, the vaccine supply crunch is universal and yet infinitely particular to India.
From 3-9 April, a total of 24.7 million doses of vaccine were administered, the highest
ever, but the numbers dropped drastically due to vaccines being in short supply. Between
15-21 May, only 9.2 million doses were given.
Indian policy makers, the Covid Taskforce, specifically, have been playing their own game
of whack-a-mole with vaccine registration, procurement, pricing, and now total
availability by the end of the year. It appears the Taskforce put numbers in a spreadsheet
—which seem to have multiplied faster than the virus—and shared it with the media on 13
May. With Niti Aayog’s member (health) Vinod Paul announcing that 2.1 billion doses
would be procured, the Taskforce assumed their job during the pandemic peak was done.
Then, as if as a bonus or even a safety net, the government asked three public sector units
(PSUs)—Haffkine Biopharma in Mumbai, Indian Immunologicals Ltd in Hyderabad, and
BIBCOL in Bulandshahar, to step up and produce Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin.
This spreadsheet math doesn’t add up, neither for immediate needs, nor for future-
proofing.
The company at the top of this list, Serum Institute of India, hasn’t commented on these
numbers. However, The Ken has reliably learnt that producing 150 million doses per
month between August and December—as mentioned in the above chart—is simply not
possible. Serum hasn’t scaled manufacturing to that level yet even though it has diverted
other production lines for Covid vaccines.
Purported to produce 550 million doses over the next five months, Bharat Biotech has
committed only 80 million doses till date. The company has further commissioned its
animal vaccine facilities in Malur in Karnataka and Ankleshwar in Gujarat to produce its
inactivated vaccine, Covaxin. The Hyderabad-based company now says it can
manufacture 1 billion doses by December. But can it, really?
Even if Malur and Ankleshwar plants are GMP compliant, industry experts say, the
qualification process itself can take up to six months. The latter plant uses the same
platform—vero cell. At Malur, The Ken has learnt, the company uses a different platform
—submerged cell culture—for producing a foot and mouth disease vaccine. Repurposing it
for Covaxin will take more time than the company has indicated.
the-ken.com-Covid Taskforce lets get real on vaccines Its time for plan B 1/2 117
“The regulatory processes require carrying out limited comparability studies with the
vaccine produced in Hyderabad. Then, if the regulators are satisfied with the results of
three consistency batches instead of human studies of safety and immunogenicity, it can
get expedited approval in about a month’s time thereafter,” says a vaccine manufacturing
expert in Hyderabad.
Reality Check
India’s spreadsheet math shows it’d get 2.1B doses by December,

but it will be lucky to get even a third of that. Even getting PSUs
to focus on just Covaxin isn’t a sound strategy. India needs to
spread its bets
None of the private suppliers meant to ship 2.1B doses by December are ready with
their scale-ups. Bharat Biotech’s additional plants will need at least 6 months before
they start shipping doses
Haffkine has secured Rs 154 cr in grants; the company’s former CEO believes its land
parcel could fetch thousands of crores, but can money buy expertise or speed up
production?
Unlike the US or UK, India & ICMR have excluded academics from vaccine studies and
drawing up a vaccine roadmap
The fault lines are now glaring. It’s time also to bet on startups that bring fresh
approach and new tech
the-ken.com-Covid Taskforce lets get real on vaccines Its time for plan B 2/2 118
Covid-19 going on ‘21
the-ken.com/story/covid-19-going-on-21
December 28, 2020
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Covid and 2020 may as well be synonyms.
When it came to dealing with the virus, it seemed like the more things changed, the more
they remained the same.
In India, over 10 million have already been infected, and over 1% of them have died.
Globally, over 1.5 million people have succumbed to the virus. As you read this, many
more would have been irreversibly hit by the pandemic.
As a doctor in the ICU of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) put it: We need
to brace ourselves for the long haul. SARS-CoV2 is not going away anywhere, at least not
for another year. We have to adapt and learn how to live with the virus.
A few weeks ago, though, the Union Health Secretary, Rajesh Bhushan reassured a bunch
of reporters backstage after a press briefing. He said hospital staff are learning to respond
quicker, especially with emergency cases. “Earlier, patients used to wait for close to five
hours before being triaged . Now that time has reduced to 30-40 minutes. The more we
are learning about the manifestation of the virus in patients, the response systems are
getting better,” he said.
And while it is heartening that patients are being attended to quicker than before, there’s
a lot more work left. A whole gamut of interventions from vaccines to drugs and
diagnostic tests will be scrutinised as the new year approaches. Some approaches may
work, others won’t, some interventions will become cheaper, others won’t. But will 2021
be any easier than the year that’s ending?
the-ken.com-Covid-19 going on 21 1/2 119

Needle in a haystack
The word ‘vaccine,’ has never before evoked so much hope. So many are eager to take a
jab, imagining a life beyond that resembles their existence before 2020.
The UK has been the first country to roll out a mass vaccination programme for its
citizens, after Pfizer received an emergency nod for it’s vaccine. Pfizer, through its Indian
arm, has knocked on the Indian regulator’s door too. But the vaccine needs to be stored at
ultra-cold temperatures of -70 degree celsius. India is infrastructurally not prepared.
We’ve written about the holes in India’s Covid immunisation arsenal.
the-ken.com-Covid-19 going on 21 2/2 120

Cracking the wheat code
the-ken.com/story/cracking-the-wheat-code-india
September 2, 2018
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17 August 2018. The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC)
publishes the conclusion of its bread wheat genome-sequencing project in Science,
sending scientific and media circles into a tizzy.
Why the hype?
With 107,891 genes (five times that of humans) and a genome 40 times more complex
than rice, bread wheat befuddled scientists for decades. Sequencing involves, in simple
terms, breaking down a genome into a dizzying number of pieces, identifying each
segment and then putting it back together. With wheat, that’s a gargantuan task, in large
part because 85% of its genome is replicated—nearly everything looks identical or has
identical characteristics.
What's cooking?
Knowing how the world’s most complicated plant genome works is key to planning for a
better future of food
Beyond the difficulty of the task, the fact is wheat—whether you call it bread wheat,
Chinese spring or common wheat—is the world’s most widespread food crop, accounting
for nearly 20% of global calorie intake.
A 2013 study in PLOS One estimated that current agricultural output would be
insufficient for humans by 2050. Crop yields would need to increase by 1.6% annually to
meet demand. All this, in the face of depleting land and water resources and vagaries of
climate change.
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By cracking the wheat genome, scientists have birthed the potential to isolate wheat’s
most resilient traits. The potential for higher yield. The potential for fortified food. The
potential for climate and pest resistance. Knowing how the world’s most complicated
plant genome works is key to planning for a better future of food.
It has taken 13 years and 200 researchers from 20 countries to blueprint wheat. India is
one of those countries. And this is the story of how it got there.
A missed opportunity
14 April 2003. The Human Genome Project (HGP) formally came to an end. And with
that, Indian scientists lamented missing out on the world’s most significant biological
project. Depending on who you ask, our quicksand was lack of funds, sycophancy, a
cantankerous political cabal or red tape. But for the country’s most hallowed molecular
scientist, it was all of the above.
Pushpa Mittra Bhargava (1928-2017), India’s father of biotechnology, was as sharp-

tongued as he was far-sighted. His book, The Saga of Indian Science Since Independence:
In a Nutshell (co-authored with Chandana Chakrabarti), unfolds like a Shakespearean
drama. It’s a must-read irrespective of whether science is up your alley or not.
The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is the villain in the narrative of India’s HGP
gaffe.
the-ken.com-Cracking the wheat code 2/2 122

Cracks show after just a month of Ayushman Bharat
the-ken.com/story/cracks-show-month-ayushman-bharat
October 30, 2018
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Touted as the world’s largest health insurance scheme, the Indian government’s
Ayushman Bharat programme was never going to be easy to implement. The team tasked
with its roll out knew this when it was first announced in February 2018. How would the
Centre convince states, especially those which already had similar schemes in place, to
come on board? After all, why should a state that is already successfully running a health
insurance scheme adopt the Centre’s more elaborate version?
The Centre’s answer to this was simple. Flexibility. It gave states the option of deciding
how to execute the programme. Rajasthan, for instance, had a very similar scheme—
Bhamashah Yojana. In effect since 2014, it offered a coverage of Rs 3.3 lakh ($4,514)
across over 1400 medical procedures. The scheme already covers most of the state’s poor.
Understandably, Rajasthan was reluctant to sign on for the Centre’s scheme. And while
Ayushman Bharat is yet to be launched in the state, Rajasthan finally signed the
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the scheme thanks to the favourable terms on
the table.
“The MoU gives complete freedom to the state to decide execution and merging the
schemes. It just mentions that 5.97 million beneficiaries must be covered. We already
have 9.2 million people covered. There would obviously be overlap in beneficiaries of the
two schemes,” said Ashish Modi, Joint CEO, Rajasthan State Health Assurance Agency.
Most other states have also agreed to either launch Ayushman Bharat as a fresh scheme or
make it work with their existing schemes the way Rajasthan intends to. Since the scheme
was launched, Tamil Nadu has announced that it would merge the existing Chief
Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme (CMCHIS), which covers 13.4
million families for Rs 1 lakh ($1,368) annually, with Ayushman Bharat. Similarly, West
Bengal negotiated a merger on the condition that the merged scheme continues to be
called Swasthya Sathi. This, despite the number of beneficiaries under the scheme
increasing twelve-fold. From 4.7 million to 60 million.
As of now, only two states have rejected the scheme outright—Odisha and Delhi.
Telangana, meanwhile, has chosen to abstain for the time being. Despite these holdouts
though, the effect of Ayushman Bharat could still be massive. 500 million vulnerable
people will stand to benefit from it, according to a press statement issued by the Ministry
of Health and Family Welfare. Once it is implemented, says a consultant with the
Ayushman Bharat scheme, about 40% of these 500 million will get health insurance for
the very first time. For the remaining 60%, the scheme will push their coverage from as
the-ken.com-Cracks show after just a month of Ayushman Bharat 1/3 123

little as Rs 20,000 ($273) to Rs 5 lakh ($6,840), while also covering more medical
treatments.
Ayushman Bharat
Bajaj Allianz
Cygnus Medicare
Health Insurance
Max Healthcare
National Health Protection Scheme
price fixing
Religare Health
TPA
the more things change, the more they stay the same
The Centre has most states on its side. Hospitals and insurers
though, remain reluctant. But even if they all came onboard, the
world's largest health insurance scheme may still struggle
Ruhi Kandhari, 30 Oct 2018
The Centre has convinced all states barring three to implement its ambitious Ayushman
Bharat scheme
However, vital stakeholders such as hospitals and insurers feel shortchanged
While states have found ways around the need for insurers, only 14,000 hospitals have
empanelled thus far
But even if all hospitals sign on, is India’s healthcare infrastructure enough to meet the
demand created by the scheme?

Credit rating agencies must reform, but it ain’t so black
or white
the-ken.com/story/credit-rating-agencies-must-reform
November 6, 2018
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It’s hard to identify a system-wide implosion, much less be able to call one. But India
may currently be having its own “Lehman Brothers Moment.”
India’s Lehman Brothers is Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), a

massive “shadow lender” to infrastructure projects across the country. Almost exactly a
decade after the global financial crisis that Lehman’s crash triggered.
Why Lehman? Well, there are three stark similarities that also mirror as fundamental
differences.
Debt, ratings and credit rating agencies.
Let’s start with debt. The defining term of the 2008-era subprime bubble was
collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) – complex debt instruments packaged with
individual fixed income assets. CDOs were sliced and diced ad infinitum till nobody
knew what they contained or what they were worth. These CDOs, which were then sold
across the world to banks, mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance companies,
turned out to be junk. Which then set off a chain reaction pushing the entire global
economy into recession.
In IL&FS’ case, debt is still the reason. The labyrinthine group with 347 different
subsidiaries had total consolidated borrowings of Rs 91,000 crore (~$12.5 billion) as of
March this year. Out of this Rs 24,297 crore (~$3.3 billion) (26.35%) was raised through
the-ken.com-Credit rating agencies must reform but it aint so black or white 1/2 126
debentures and around Rs 5,752 crore (~$785 million) (6.3%) through commercial
paper (CP), as per a report by brokerage firm Nomura. Needless to say, many banking
and financial institutions in India have lent to IL&FS.
In debt
As of 31 March 2018, the outstanding debentures and CPs of IL&FS accounted for 1%
and 2%, respectively, of India's domestic corporate debt market, as per a report by
Moody’s.
Number two is ratings.
CDOs enjoyed super safe AAA ratings until companies started to file for bankruptcy,
after which they went toxic and were conveniently reduced to default grade.
IL&FS enjoyed a AAA credit rating as late as August 2018. But after the crisis started to
get talked about, the ratings started to fall. Ratings firm ICRA Ltd first decided to drop
its rating by a level to AA+. Then, in September, ICRA and others like Fitch Ratings and
CARE Ratings downgraded it to default after the parent and a host of subsidiaries
defaulted.
Which brings us to the third similarity – credit rating agencies, or CRAs – essential
gatekeepers of the financial ecosystem, who were caught napping.
The string of defaults by IL&FS and the sudden downgrade by rating agencies have
created a panic in the Indian capital market and cast doubt on the credibility of rating
agencies’ work. “Beginning from the failures from the 2008-09 crisis and the current
scenario of IL&FS and two years back with office equipment company Ricoh India, all
these are living examples of the message that rating agencies are not serving the purpose
for which they were created,” says JN Gupta, former Executive Director of Securities and
Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and MD of proxy advisory firm Stakeholder
Empowerment Services.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
In his earlier stint at Moneycontrol, the website owned by the Network18 group, Sid
wrote on cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity, business, and finance. Born in Raipur,
Chhattisgarh, Sid has spent most of his life in Jalandhar, Punjab. He has a BSc in
Mathematics from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Sid is a comic book nerd and a big fan of
Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Brian Azzarello. He can be reached at sidhartha at the rate
the-ken.com
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the-ken.com-Credit rating agencies must reform but it aint so black or white 2/2 127
Crunch time: Aakash’s $150-million plan to stay
relevant in a digital world
the-ken.com/story/aakashs-big-digital-bet
September 25, 2019
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Aakash Chaudhry is in a dilemma. His 30-year-old coaching institute needs a revamp. But
there’s no roadmap for what he needs to do.
We’re sitting across a giant U-shaped table from Chaudhry, at the headquarters of Aakash
Education Services Limited (AESL) in Delhi. As Chaudhry, the company’s chief executive
officer, walks us through a presentation on the company’s growth plans, his stoic
expression cracks as he says, “It’s such a complex time. I’m taking new decisions everyday
without really knowing how they’ll pan out.”
It’s an odd predicament for AESL—one of India’s leading exam coaching chains. But as a
digital wave sweeps through the coaching space, many legacy players have been caught
unawares. Where decades-old chains like FIITJEE, Allen, and Aakash once stood topmost
in the minds of the India’s students, younger, online-only players like Vedantu and
Unacademy are now the talk of the town.
Unsurprisingly, one decision features prominently in Chaudhry’s presentation—the

intention to take the brick-and-mortar business digital. It’s a bold move, especially when
rival coaching firms—Allen, Resonance Eduventures and FIITJEE—are yet to establish a
significant digital footprint, despite running “digital learning programmes” for the last
few years.
Clearly, Aakash—the man and the institute—are in uncharted waters.
AESL’s shift to digital isn’t just an inevitability. In the larger context of the offline test-
prep market, it’s a calculated survival strategy: stay relevant.
And it’s aware that a storm is brewing. Traditional coaching businesses are staring
directly in the face of a slowdown. Owners of coaching businesses that The Ken spoke with
confirm that enrollments for engineering prep courses are dipping year-on-year, with
growth in metros slowing. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education, the
number of students enrolled in undergraduate engineering courses has declined by 11%
since 2014-15, while those pursuing Master’s have more than halved. The online test prep
market, meanwhile, is expected to reach $515 million by 2021, growing at a CAGR of 64%,
according to a KPMG and Google report.
With this sort of imperative weighing heavy, Chaudhry is setting lofty goals. “We want
digital to be 25% of our total revenue in the next four years,” he says, a marked increase
from the 3% it currently stands at. AESL’s revenues for the financial year ending 31st
the-ken.com-Crunch time Aakashs 150-million plan to stay relevant in a digital world 1/3 128
March 2018 stood at Rs 980 crore ($138 million), with a profit of Rs 162 crore ($22
million).Its revenues went up by 34% from a year before, while its profit shot up sharply
by 165%.
TV face time
According to industry sources, AESL's USP is its marketing. 'Others focus on training and
hiring. AESL blows big bucks on TV ads. In fact, in 2017, AESL was 'knowledge partner'
for the uber popular game show Kaun Banega Crorepati.
From ed to tech
Aakash, the brick-and-mortar coaching behemoth that controls

5% of the $6.6 billion offline coaching market, wants almost 25%
of its business to be digital by 2023. How it deals with building
this new tech empire—through talent, tech and content—will
determine its legacy
Olina Banerji, Vandana, 25 Sep 2019
Aakash Education is the offline test prep leader in India; it now wants to replicate this
success online
A saturation in branch expansion and declining enrolments, especially for JEE, make it
imperative for Aakash to do so
But it will have to fight the likes of Unacademy, Vedantu and Toppr on one hand and its
own offline image on the other.
At stake is its 5% share of the $6.6 billion offline coaching market and its future in a
rapidly growing online one
Dance of the Unicorns
the-ken.com/story/dance-of-the-unicorns
August 11, 2017
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Binny Bansal’s email to Flipkart’s employees is perhaps a good place to start this story. On
Thursday, SoftBank announced that it has invested close to $2.5 billion in the company.
This investment is an extension of Flipkart’s funding round in April this year, when
Tencent, ebay and Microsoft invested in the company. Needless to say, Bansal was
enthused. To quote from his email:
“This is truly a watershed moment for the Flipkart Group and India. This is the largest
ever private investment round in an Indian technology company. And coming from a
visionary investor renowned for backing innovative, winning companies, it is a big vote of
confidence in Flipkart. At the same time, it augurs well for India because we are among
the few economies globally that is able to attract such massive interest from top-tier
investors.
As I’ve said earlier, the ball is in our court now. With razor-sharp execution, we must
continue to transform commerce in India through technology and India-specific
innovations. As the leader of Indian e-commerce, the onus is on us to make its benefits
reach the farthest corners of India.”
We are still wrapping our head around what this means for Flipkart. The simplest
explanation is, more money. Where Flipkart had $2 billion in cash, it now has $4 billion.
What Flipkart does with this money is a good question to ask and we will get to that
shortly. More importantly, it is the SoftBank angle you must consider. Perhaps you
already know that Softbank has poured in $900 million in Snapdeal. As things stand
today, that money hasn’t amounted to anything. Now SoftBank might be a behemoth but
the-ken.com-Dance of the Unicorns 1/2 131

even for a firm of this size, $900 million is a lot of money, especially so when this money
has come out of its own corpus and not from the $93 billion Vision Fund that SoftBank is
now shepherding.
While it might seem that by making a bet on Flipkart, SoftBank is essentially writing off
its investment in Snapdeal, the imperatives of the Vision Fund (from which the Flipkart
investment has been made) are at an altogether different level.
The world has never seen a fund of this size dedicated to making investments primarily in
unproven technology startups.
A big bet
Billion-dollar unicorn exits won’t even begin to nudge the needle for SoftBank—they need
Decacorn exits of $10 billion plus to reach their target returns
But the magnitude of the fund is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, SoftBank can
enter pretty much any deal it chooses to but on the other, it can’t afford to miss having a
stake in any of the hot sectors/startups that could emerge as the totemic companies of
tomorrow, essentially ending up with an index fund of the most important startups in the
world.
the-ken.com-Dance of the Unicorns 2/2 132

Data breach? No big deal: Indian companies take it
easy
the-ken.com/story/data-breach-indian-companies
March 8, 2018
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What happens when a friendly-neighbourhood ethical hacker warns companies of their
vulnerabilities in India?
A) The companies don’t care because they’re answerable to no one
B) The companies ask them to mind their own business and quietly patch their own
servers
C) The companies consider getting the ethical hacker prosecuted (instead of rewarding
them)
D) All of the above
The correct answer is D), best illustrated over the course of this story.
On 4 March, a French hacker who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter wrote a
thread on how he gained access to BSNL’s intranet and got hold of details of over 47,000
employees.
On 27 February, Reddit user always_say_this showed the vulnerability of servers

belonging to Truecaller Pay and Tata Sky.
Always_say_this stumbled upon 6,000 such potentially vulnerable servers from around
the world. The servers he discovered did not have any authentication security layer—not
even a simple username or password was required to access them.
the-ken.com-Data breach No big deal Indian companies take it easy 1/4 133
Searchlight
Using Google Dorking to run a python script, and a few filters after that, was all it took to
locate these vulnerable servers. Google Dorking is a way of advanced search which
hackers use to discover confidential corporate and private information that is not readily
available through a normal web search.
Data visible on the servers of Tata Sky and Truecaller Pay. It took both the companies
almost a day to patch the server.
In 2017, 978 million people in 20 countries fell victim to cybercrime. They lost $172
billion in such attacks. The second most number of victims—186 million—were from
India, who lost $18.5 billion, as per a Norton cybersecurity report. If company servers
are completely open, customers’ personal data is free for the taking. And that could
attract buyers who are constantly looking for readily available sensitive personal data.
Also, with this data, it is easy for hackers or scammers to conduct extremely precise and
fraudulent phishing attacks.
But unguarded servers are a threat to both users and the company. The kind of data
visible on the company server—in this case, Truecaller’s and Tata Sky’s—could be sold to
competition. This data, which contains contact details, can then be used to run
marketing campaigns.
Before taking to Twitter and Reddit about these lapses, always_say_this first reached out
to the companies and was met with indifference. “I received very few replies to the
emails sent directly to companies, which is why I started pinging out CEOs of each
company,” the hacker says. He’d hoped to get a reward or even a job. Instead, most
companies politely acknowledged his work; some even asked him to mind his own
business. Of the 30-odd CEOs he wrote to, he got 10 replies, but he noticed those who
didn’t reply simply patched their servers.
BSNL
bug bounty
Capitaworld
CERT
cybercrime
cybersecurity
Data breach
hacker
ICICI Bank
Shree Krishna committee
Tata Sky
Thomson Reuters
Truecaller Pay
Zomato
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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AUTHOR
Shashidhar KJ
Shashidhar has been a journalist for over six years and has worked with The Times of
India, The Financial Express and MediaNama, his last assignment. He is a fine bloke, and
by that, I mean unusually quiet. Over the years, Shashidhar has written on several
subjects. Banking, startups and technology, media, and also financial technology. He
started his career on the desk at the old lady of Boribunder. At The Ken, Shashidhar works
out of Mumbai and writes on telecom and financial technology. What he really wants to
talk about though is his vinyl collection.
View Full Profile
AUTHOR
Arundhati Ramanathan
Arundhati is Bengaluru-based. She is interested in how people use money in the digital
age and how new economies will take shape based on that interaction. She has spent
over 10 years reporting and writing on various subjects. Previous stints were at Mint,
Outlook Business and Reuters.
View Full Profile
Death’s door to doorstep delivery, e-pharmacies are
here to stay
the-ken.com/story/deaths-door-to-doorstep-delivery-e-pharmacies-are-here-to-stay
May 28, 2018
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In 2012, Prashant Tandon set up his e-pharmacy 1mg in Gurugram. It was a maverick
move at a time when most valuable new companies in India were being set up in the
startup hub of Bangalore. Fast forward just over half a decade and Tandon stands
vindicated. Now, one of India’s largest e-pharmacies, 1mg had over 2.4 million active
users last month, four times the number of users its closest competitor Practo had,
according to App Annie. It has built this popularity on the back of its digital content—
creating a database of which brands sell which drugs and at what price. However, none of
this would have been possible were it not for 1mg’s unconventional choice of location.
the-ken.com-Deaths door to doorstep delivery e-pharmacies are here to stay 1/3 137
While 1mg was growing unhindered in Gurugram, its competitors in other states were
backed into a corner by state regulators and offline pharmacies.
In Jaipur, for instance, statues were burnt and rallies were held by incensed traditional
pharmacists to intimidate e-pharmacies in 2016. Death threats were also sent. They were
even banned in Jaipur until Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje stepped in,
recounts Deepesh Rajpal, co-founder of e-pharmacy LifCare. While LifCare survived this
onslaught, Zigy, a similar venture founded by former Infosys director Phaneesh Murthy,
closed down in 2016 after an advertising ban and multiple court cases filed by traditional
pharmacists proved fatal.
It was not because we were doing anything illegal, but because the law was ambiguous,
Rajpal says. The law in question, the archaic Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945, allowed
regulators to crack down on e-pharmacies since they could not monitor whether e-
pharmacies were compliant with certain aspects of the law. For instance, it required
stamping prescriptions to avoid someone using the same prescription to buy drugs from
multiple pharmacies. Similarly, it wasn’t possible to ensure that drugs were handed over
to an adult. The risks with e-pharmacies were too many, and regulators in most states
decided to crack the whip.
Regulators in Haryana, meanwhile, were considerably more relaxed, giving 1mg a

relatively hassle-free existence. This advantage, though, may soon be a relic of the past.
The Indian government is set to level the e-pharmacy playing field, with the health
ministry suggesting new regulations that effectively legitimise e-pharmacies. The
proposed new regulations will amend the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945, and recognise
e-pharmacies as legal entities. These were circulated among state drug regulators last
month. Traditional pharmacists, who were up in arms last year after the government
suggested they digitise their supply chain in a public notice on online and offline sale of
drugs, stand pacified as well. The proposed regulations no longer make a mention of the
controversial suggestion.
Long time coming

In March 2017, the health ministry uploaded a ‘public notice’ acknowledging e-
pharmacies.
Decrypting Hike Messenger
the-ken.com/story/hike-messenger
May 2, 2017
Hike is India’s most recent unicorn, reaching the $1 billion valuation mark faster than any
of its predecessors.
Yet it is a startup that has hitherto never been covered by the media in any meaningful
manner beyond the funding announcements and the hype surrounding the traction it
claims to have achieved. The biggest of its claim centres around its user base—around
nine months ago, at the time of its last funding round, Hike announced that it had crossed
100 million users.
Today’s story goes one level deeper into Hike’s claims and attempts to understand the
actual traction that the company has achieved.
First, a few pointers on the company. It is important that we start at the very beginning.
Not only to understand Hike better but also Bharti Softbank Holdings and its play in
India. After all, that’s how Hike was born.
October 2011: Bharti Enterprises and Softbank Corporation came together in a 50:50
joint venture. The company, Bharti Softbank Holdings Pte Ltd (BSB) was formed with the
idea of participating in the growing mobile internet ecosystem in India; in three key areas
—social media, gaming and e-commerce. Kavin Bharti Mittal joined BSB as the company’s
head of strategy and new product development. He is the son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, the
founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises. Bharti Airtel is India’s largest mobile
services provider in terms of number of subscribers.
May 2012: BSB put out its first play. By picking up a 49.74% stake in a startup called
Hoppr. For about Rs 22-odd crore. At the time, Hoppr claimed to be a location-based
check-in service. It was started in the year 2010 by Md. Imthiaz, a former VAS (value-
added services) head of Bharti Airtel.
the-ken.com-Decrypting Hike Messenger 1/8 140

December 2012: BSB put out its second play in India. An application called Hike
Messenger. As the name suggests, Hike is a chat application. The app was first released
globally on 12 December 2012.
April 2013: In a statement, BSB claimed that Hike Messenger crossed five million users.
“‘hike’ is a free mobile messaging app that crossed the 5 million users in just four months
after its launch on 12/12/12. This makes ‘hike’ one of the fastest growing free mobile apps
globally.”
In the same month, BSB invested $7 million in Hike.
May 2013: Hike entered into an agreement with Nokia. As part of the deal, Nokia
bundled the Hike application in its phone Lumia 510, Lumia 720 and the range of Nokia
Asha full-touch phones to be sold in India. When an app player signs a pre-bundled deal
with a mobile phone manufacturer, the strategy is to acquire users with minimum
friction.
July 2013: Hike entered into an agreement with Micromax. As part of the deal, the Hike
app was preloaded on the Micromax Canvas 4 phone.
August 2013: BSB launched its third business in India called Tiny Mogul Games. This
app had games like SongQuest and Shiva: The Time Bender.
February 2014: In a news report, Hike said that it had crossed 15 million users in India.
It added an additional 10 million users in flat nine months. Mittal claimed that 80% of
Hike’s users were under 25 years of age.
April 2014: BSB invested another $14 million in Hike.
June 2014: Hike crossed 20 million users. Post a large, multimedia advertising
campaign. In a news report, Mittal said that post the television campaign Hike was
“adding users at the rate of 150,000-200,000 a day.”
August 2014: In a statement, Hike said the company has crossed the 35 million user
mark. Not just that, Hike claimed that it added 15 million users in just two months, with
over 50% users active every month.
Tiger Global Management and BSB together invested $65 million in Hike.
January 2015: Hike acquired Zip Phone, a US-based free voice calling app.
August 2015: Both of BSB’s businesses, Hoppr and Tiny Mogul Games were merged
with Hike.
October 2015: In a news report, Mittal claimed that Hike Messenger has touched 70
million users. To quote from the piece, “Mittal said on an average, a user on Hike spends
over 140 minutes per week and 20 billion messages are being exchanged per month by the
consumers.”

January 2016: In a statement, the company said it had crossed the 100 million user
mark in India. In just three months, Hike’s users jumped by 30 million. A jump of almost
40%. In just three months. To quote from it, “Hike is now logging a monthly messaging
volume of 40 billion messages, having doubled on messaging in a span of 5 months (from
20 billion messages per month logged in August 2015). Users are spending over 120
minutes per week on Hike.”
August 2016: Tencent, Foxconn Electronics and Tiger Global Management invested
$175 million in Hike. With this round, it became a unicorn. A unicorn is a company valued
at $1 billion or more. Hike raised this round at a valuation of $1.4 billion. To put this in
context, in just three and a half years, Hike became a unicorn. That’s the fastest unicorn in
India. Till date.
April 2017: In a news report, Hike said that it would launch payments on the app, linked
to the government-backed UPI. Over 90% of Hike’s users are in India. The payments play
would make Hike the largest UPI-based payment platform in India.
This is the end of our timeline. Now, if you’ve read till here, it will be fair to say that Hike
seems like a really popular app in India. Over 100 million users. Ninety per cent of them
below the age of 25. What’s not to like?
So, we checked. Independently. Using data from App Annie, a business intelligence
company, which tracks apps and provides data and intelligence reports. Data from App
Annie, collected and collated from all major app stores plus independent download sites,
is the go-to-source for due diligence and research.
Hike refused to comment on the data we presented. “You know that we do not yet
comment on our active user base,” wrote a company spokesperson in an email.
Nonetheless, we looked at the top apps across both iOS and Google Play in India. For the
period April 2016-March 2017. Across both free and paid downloads.

Do you see Hike Messenger?
Nope. Nada. Nothing. It will be fair to say that all the other popular chat apps are right
there. WhatsApp tops the list. Then Facebook Messenger. And the real surprise in the
pack, Jio Chat. That’s from the house of Reliance Jio. Curious, isn’t it?
Now, let’s look at Monthly Active Users (MAU) data for Hike. In simple terms, MAU
measures how many users log into an online service or mobile app at least once a month
to use it. MAU does a good job of capturing even occasional users, as opposed to more
frequent measures like WAUs (Weekly Active Users) and DAUs (Daily Active Users).
Hike Messenger Usage Intelligence
This graph clearly shows that starting December 2015, things haven’t really been great for
Hike. The messenger app’s MAU hit a peak of 45 million users in December 2015. And
after that, there’s been a steep fall. A drop of 15 million users. In March 2017, Hike had an
MAU of 30 million users. Mind you, in isolation, by itself this is not a bad number. Any
application, which has 30 million users shows that there is a genuine use case.
Here, a question must be asked. Who are these 30 million users of Hike?
There is one explanation. Students and young people in general.
Those who want to chat, away from the prying eyes of their parents. Remember that in
India, WhatsApp is the messenger of the masses where everyone from your father to your
grandmother is present. So in that sense, Hike is the alternative messenger where a
teenager can stay in touch with her friends without needing to broadcast her status to her
mother. Hike also has an interesting feature where a user can set different status
messages for different groups of people—again very handy if you don’t want your parents
to know that you are, say, online at any point of time.

“No messaging app has better privacy than Hike. You can choose who sees your last seen
and also hide conversations through Hidden Mode in the app,” said the Hike
spokesperson. “Today, Hike has transformed from a simple messaging app to a platform
where people can post stories, consume news and so much more.”
Beyond students, Hike could appeal to folks who are interested in availing offers around
free SMS and talktime on Airtel. Admittedly, given the falling prices and ARPUs
witnessed by telcos in general in India, this is a shrinking demographic.
The third set of people who might prefer Hike to the ubiquitous WhatsApp are those who
want to participate in large groups beyond the 256-member limit that WhatsApp imposes
(earlier this used to be just 100 members). Hike doesn’t have such restrictions.
But all said and done, for a messenger app, which claims to have 100 million users, the
numbers of these groups don’t add up. Let’s take a quick detour and took a look at
WhatsApp’s numbers as a reference.
WhatsApp Usage Intelligence
There’s only one way to say this. WhatsApp. Is. Killing. It. In. India. Between March 2015
and February 2017, WhatsApp MAU’s have grown from 150 million to just under 200
million. Notice the steady, healthy growth in users.
Now, let’s get to other insights from the data. You can clearly see that Hike’s best user
growth happened post-June 2014. It coincides with our timeline when Hike launched a
massive multimedia campaign, across outdoor, radio and television. Hike indeed gained
20 million users between June and July 2014. There was another spurt between August
and December 2015, the company added 20 million users. But ever since, it has been
downhill. And on the subject of downhill, curiously enough, Hike doesn’t seem to have got
a boost post the launch of Reliance Jio in September last year. Which isn’t a good sign. If

Jio brought in 50 million users, it is strange that none of them want to chat on Hike
Messenger. Though when asked if Jio made its downloads jump, the spokesperson said,
“Naturally. The usage/downloads post-Reliance Jio have seen an increase.”
According to App Annie, Hike’s current MAU is 25.6 million (according to subscribers,
there’s usually a variation in App Annie’s data over the immediately preceding couple of
months, as it keeps sourcing more data and recompiling it). That’s a real far cry from its
January 2016 claim of 100 million users. What about user engagement? Hike: 3 hours
and 4 minutes average time spent per month. WhatsApp: 15 hours and 12 minutes.
Right, let’s move on from MAU and now take a look at the DAU. For the period 1 January
2016 to 8 April 2017.
Hike's DAU: 1 January 2016 to 8 April 2017
Hike’s current DAU is about 22.4 million albeit with a decent average user engagement
per day of 16* minutes.
Also note, that DAUs for Hike are on a steep decline, just like the MAUs. And its
estimated DAU for April was around 18.5 million. That’s not a great number for a
messenger app.
How can we say that? Another comparison with WhatsApp.

WhatsApp’s DAU: April 2016-April 2017
WhatsApp’s DAU in the period April 2016-April 2017 is growing steadily. The average
DAU is 184 million.
But Hike claims its active users spend “24 minutes per day”. “This is public information. A
new stat is that our heaviest users spend ~48 minutes per day on the app,” said the
company spokesperson.
To understand the stickiness of an app, it is important to look at the DAU/MAU ratio.

This metric is used to measure the depth of engagement of a company’s users. Example:
While the monthly user count was enormous, the DAU over MAU revealed that most of
those users only log in sporadically. WhatsApp ratio (for Feb 2017): ~180 million/182.8
million is 0.98. The maximum an app or service can aim for is 1 (Why? Because an app or
service cannot possibly have more daily active users than monthly ones).
Hike pales in comparison. For March 2017, 18.5 million/30 million is about .61.
Let this remain with you. Hike is a messenger app unicorn with a DAU of 18.5 million
users. For three and a half years, the company has been on a massive public relations
drive on how it is the fastest app in India to reach 100 million users.
The reality though, of its avowed traction, seems very different.
Update:
*The story was updated on 3 May to reflect Hike’s average user engagement per day of
16 minutes, instead of 1 minute. The error is regretted.

Despite a lack of results, India remains thirsty for cloud
seeding
the-ken.com/story/does-cloud-seeding-work
December 18, 2018
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Here’s how things would unfold if Sachchida Nand Tripathi has his way.
During winter, an ISRO aircraft flying three kilometres above ground uses its flare
launchers to shoot hygroscopic (water-inducing) salts at target clouds over Delhi-NCR.
Updraughts—which can reach speeds of 50 metres a second in storm conditions, but
average 5-8 m/s in summer months—may be absent this time of year. But here’s hoping
they’re present, because these upward air currents will help disperse the salts. The salts
serve as additional nuclei for precipitation to occur.
The outcome, hopes Tripathi, is that raindrops will form as a result, showering down on
the national capital and bringing temporary respite from Delhi’s air pollution woes.
…if Sachchida Nand Tripathi has his way.
The atmospheric science specialist, who heads the department of civil engineering at IIT-
Kanpur, is collaborating with the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the India
Meteorological Department (IMD), and ISRO to use cloud seeding for artificial rain and
air pollution abatement in the capital. But induced rain has a chequered history. More so
in India, where the science of weather modification is a knee-jerk reaction to natural
calamities. Advocate cloud seeding trials for the man-made disaster of air pollution, and
you’re bound to get kaleidoscopic responses from Tripathi’s fellow experts:
“Preposterous.” — BN Goswami, former director, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology

(IITM)
the-ken.com-Despite a lack of results India remains thirsty for cloud seeding 1/2 148
“Needs further investigation to say anything.” —Thara Prabhakaran, project director of
IITM’s Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment (CAIPEEX)
“Hygroscopic seeding requires warm, tropical cumulus clouds, which don’t form in winter
in the northwestern states. How will this be possible?” — RR Kelkar, former director
general, IMD
“I’m not saying don’t try. But cloud seeding itself needs further substantiation.” —Saurabh
Bhardwaj, earth science and climate change division, TERI (The Energy and Resources
Institute)
Air pollution
CAIPEEX
Cloud seeding
CPCB
Delhi
Drought
IIT Kanpur
Indian Metereological Department
Isro
Karnataka
Maharashtra
Solapur
Tamil Nadu
Weather modification
the-ken.com-Despite a lack of results India remains thirsty for cloud seeding 2/2 149
Diabetes and cancer—the second-order sufferers of
Covid in India
the-ken.com/story/diabetes-cancer-second-order-covid-india
April 9, 2021
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With generic terms like ‘testing’ and ‘vaccination’ being exclusively used to talk about
Covid, non-Covid diagnostic tests have acquired an intuitive new name—‘Novid’. Novid
refers to all other diseases including chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and
cancer.
Coined by Mumbai-based Thyrocare Technologies—the largest diagnostic chain in terms

of patients visited and sample collection centres across India—Novid tests seem to have
an inversely proportional relationship with Covid tests. As Covid spikes, especially now
with the second wave, Novid takes a backseat.
Thyrocare—which has 44,645 touchpoints , with 4,410 partners across 796 cities—noted a
90% drop in Novid tests in April last year as compared to April 2019. While this improved
to 50% in August and to pre-pandemic levels in September, Arokiaswamy Velumani, the
Managing Director of Thyrocare, says these were merely people who couldn’t come earlier
due to the all-India lockdown.
The lack of Novid diagnosis is an unforeseen Covid casualty. Without timely diagnosis,
chronic conditions develop into acute diseases.
No one loves going to a doctor, Velumani accepts, but the reluctance was at its highest last
year when a majority of Novid patients with minor symptoms chose to not see a doc.
“Why would someone with little discomfort go to a doctor’s clinic and risk contracting
Covid?” he asks.
In fact, fewer new patients were taking drugs for early-stage chronic conditions that can
be controlled with medication, potentially due to late testing. According to market
research firm AIOCD-AWACS, the growth in volume of sales of cardiology and diabetes
drugs dropped to one-fifth of last year.
the-ken.com-Diabetes and cancerthe second-order sufferers of Covid in India 1/3 150

Besides, the problem doesn’t stop at late diagnosis.
The treatment of these chronic diseases also took a hit as all medical resources were
diverted to controlling and treating Covid-19 last year. In fact, Indian hospitals are still
not seeing as many new patients with early chronic conditions as they used to pre-
pandemic.
In February 2020, about 700 kidney transplants—for patients with kidney failure, which
is often a result of diabetes and hypertension—were carried out across India, says
Vivekananda Jha, the president of International Society of Nephrology. This as opposed
to February 2021, when only 300-400 transplants took place. Jha also consults as a
doctor at the Fortis chain of hospitals in Delhi.
At Nephroplus, the largest dialysis chain with 245 centres in India, the number of deaths
increased from about 15% patients every year to about a third of all patients in its network
between April-December 2020.

a stitch in time
A quarter of all Indians suffer from chronic lifestyle diseases like

hypertension and diabetes. What was preventable last year is
now an acute problem, and the second wave of Covid is filling up
hospitals again
Ruhi Kandhari, 9 Apr 2021
234 million have hypertension, 72.96 million have diabetes, and over 1 million new
cases of cancer are diagnosed every year—as opposed to the 12.5 million Covid cases in
India
Patients suffering from chronic conditions were unable to access screenings, diagnostics,
medicines and hospitals, making their condition worse last year
While access to all healthcare services has improved since, some are investing in
insurance, but others can barely afford it
The government, too, has decided to focus only on preventing, diagnosing and treating
Covid-19 instead of chronic conditions this year

Diagnostics lessons for India after 118 million Covid
tests
the-ken.com/story/diagnostics-lessons-for-india-after-118-million-covid-tests
November 10, 2020
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As incomplete as our understanding of the SARS-Cov2 virus behaviour is, one tool has
remained a constant through all these months. Testing was vital in February; it is vital in
November. But while India was woefully short of diagnostic kits then, there’s an
oversupply today.
As of 29 October, more than 300 different kits for RT-PCR , rapid antibody, and rapid
antigen tests have been approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the
apex and lone agency granting permissions to kit manufacturers and distributors.
As the number and variety of kits exploded, their prices crashed. From Rs 4,500 ($61) for
an RT-PCR test in a private diagnostic lab in April-May, state governments are now
capping prices at Rs 800-900 ($11-12.5). Reagents that cost $3-4 per kit then, are being
sold for less than a dollar. The crucial PCR machines that cost upwards of Rs 20 lakh
($27,000) early this year, have seen their maximum retail prices (MRP) slashed by 50-
60%.
Sometime this week, Agappe Diagnostics will launch a new Covid-19 test in the Indian
market using RT-LAMP technology, a new assay to test the genetic material of the virus.
The 25-year-old Kochi company, in association with Japan’s Eiken Chemical, has also
built accompanying equipment for these tests. More suitable for rural areas or tier 2-3
towns, Agappe’s tests and equipment don’t require the extreme low temperatures that
PCR tests can’t do without.
More tests are under development and will hit the market in due course. However, it’s
time to pause in this phase of the pandemic, and evaluate the quality of kits floating
around, something which was impossible to contemplate even two months ago.
“All district collectors had to do then was to show they were doing a good job. Everything
was very transactional, nobody looked at any kind of data or had any long-term view,”
says a senior executive of a diagnostics chain in western India. He is referring to the July-
August period, when the Centre passed the baton to states. “I know of instances where
tens of thousands of samples were collected but not tested… It was a mad rush to do more
and more tests, and get more budget.”
The Covid-19 situation on the ground is not dire today. Or at least it doesn’t seem so based
on conversations with at least 17 path labs, kit makers, and Covid researchers across five
states.
the-ken.com-Diagnostics lessons for India after 118 million Covid tests 1/3 153
"Every country faced issues. The US is still a mess; China managed in an ideal way. India
somehow managed... it’s God’s own country only. We can’t be dependent on imports.
We’ve gone and become self-sufficient in cars but not in diagnostics,"
—GSK Velu, Chairman and MD, Trivitron
Understandably, ICMR has slowed its approval process and become a little more
stringent.
Lab lessons
With India’s daily case count slowing, the country must now
assess not just the quality of the testing kits that have flooded
the market, but also its approach to diagnostics as a whole. Of
the 330+ kits in the market, some need an upgrade, some outright
rejection
Seema Singh, 10 Nov 2020
Covid-19 test prices have crashed. Small, one-time sellers are happy with razor-thin
margins
The onus rests on established/serious players and Indian regulators to ensure quality is
high and consistent, batch to batch
It’s also time to devise a long-term strategy for better assays because they’d be needed
when vaccines hit the market
Like mature countries, India should withdraw emergency use authorisations, demand
second-generation tests, and ensure standardisation
Does TeamIndus still have a shot at its moonshot?
the-ken.com/story/team-indus-moonshot
July 26, 2017
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July evokes moon memories like no other time of the year. Forty-eight Julys ago, man
landed on the moon, setting off a long race to decipher our planetary neighbour. And
earlier this month, Moon Express, the private American company that is competing for
the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP), unveiled its lander and additional
missions to the moon.
July is big for us too. Because away from the bright arclights of PR, this is a good time to
ask how is India’s TeamIndus, a proud winner of the $1 million GLXP milestone prize,
doing? The rocket lift-off date, 28 December 2017 is far, and yet so near. Particularly
because it involves many firsts in a deep space voyage, not just for the Indian Space
Research Organisation (Isro), which has given a chartered rocket flight to TeamIndus, but
for the latter, which is perhaps redefining what is possible in a private endeavour.
In keeping with the zeitgeist, the countdown, say, T-6 (months), should have begun in
July. A step-by-step guide to the launch from Sriharikota was in order given that it has
been branded as Har Indian Ka Moonshot (Every Indian’s Moonshot), accompanied with
a new plan to raise $10 million from direct public contribution.
Therefore, the question arises, how ready is TeamIndus to participate in the XPRIZE
competition? What are the tech milestones that the company should have achieved by
now? If it has, then why isn’t it talking about it? And if it hasn’t, then is it also the reason
why some breakaway groups from TeamIndus, which admit the ‘significant’ delay, are
starting their own space ventures?
the-ken.com-Does TeamIndus still have a shot at its moonshot 1/2 156

First things first. While the company signed a launch contract with Antrix Corporation
(Isro’s commercial arm) late last year, some of the necessary approvals to launch its
spacecraft on the moon have not yet concluded. The Indian Express first reported it,
quoting the Antrix chairman and managing director Rakesh Sasibhushan. Under the
Outer Space Treaty, to which India is a signatory, every government is responsible for
space activities undertaken by private parties under its geographical territory. While this
may require some paperwork and cutting the bureaucratic slack, it is not a challenge that
should give sleepless nights to anyone. Little surprise then that TeamIndus co-founder
Rahul Narayan told the newspaper: “We have not heard of any questions being raised by
the government. We have a launch contract that was signed last year.”
Sources in Isro say the approval per se wouldn’t be an issue because they don’t want “to
discriminate against Indian companies launching satellites”. Should that happen, it could
lead to a bad precedent where Indian companies would set up subsidiaries in
neighbouring countries and approach Antrix as a foreign entity.
the-ken.com-Does TeamIndus still have a shot at its moonshot 2/2 157

Doubts Doctrine: Users flock but questions linger over
Doubtnut, Brainly
the-ken.com/story/doubts-doctrine-doubtnut-brainly
August 22, 2019
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“If you have a math question, I’m 99% sure it exists in our database,” says Tanushree
Nagori. We’re inside a giant boardroom, with off-white walls and rows of tables, which
double up as writing surfaces. Nagori draws on the table between us, explaining where her
fledgling online venture—Doubtnut—lies within India’s edtech landscape, which is
projected to be worth $1.96 billion by 2021.
“I guess you’d put us in this quadrant,” she says, pointing to a white space between “local
language” and “concepts + doubts”.
the-ken.com-Doubts Doctrine Users flock but questions linger over Doubtnut Brainly 1/3 158
Nagori's visual explanation of India's edtech landscape (Picture credit: Olina Banerji/The
Ken)
Nagori founded Doubtnut with husband Aditya Shankar in late 2016. Offered as an app, a
website and even a WhatsApp helpline as of 2019, Doubtnut is an online platform which
primarily offers students 24×7 help with math doubts. It caters to students all the way
from class 6 to aspiring engineers sitting for public exams, allowing them to upload
pictures of questions from books and receive a video solution within minutes. Like a
Google for math queries.
“No one was paying attention to the urgency of doubts. We wanted to resolve doubts in a
way that would break the Byju’s price point,” says Nagori. Byju’s—which offers online
videos and course material on tablets—charges upto Rs 2.5 lakh ($3500) a year, which
makes it financially unviable for a large section of the Indian population. Doubtnut, while
yet to arrive at an exact price point, is experimenting with granular pricing for modular
products. Say, Rs 399 ($5.6)to unlock a month’s worth of doubt-solving videos.
Of all the use cases to build edtech products, doubts are perhaps the stickiest and most
compelling. If not tackled on the spot, they fester into what Nagori labels ‘learning gaps’.
While Byju’s prides itself on creating a multi-step, learning journey, Doubtnut’s approach
is to provide the necessary pit-stops. But has spinning an engagement model of just
solving doubts really taken off?
Like a rocketship, Nagori claims.
Doubtnut says it receives 200,000 mathematics doubts every day. It has 7 million
monthly active users, with over a quarter of these using the platform daily. Till date,
Doubtnut has raised around $3.3 million from marquee investors such as WaterBridge,
Sequoia and Omidyar Network*.
But Doubtnut isn’t alone. Its main competitor in India—Brainly—fields questions from
over 15 million users every month. Unlike Doubtnut, which is programmed to send pre-
recorded explainer videos to students, Brainly is an international peer-to-peer question-
answer platform, a la Quora.
“We realised that students turn to their community of friends, parents and teachers if
they’re stuck on a question,” says Michal Borkowski, Brainly’s Poland-born co-founder.
This is the experience, he adds, that Brainly’s trying to replicate online.
Market Potential
One in every four Indian students are enrolled in private, after-school tuitions.
Down the rabbit hole of donation shaming
the-ken.com/story/donation-shaming-kerala-floods
September 9, 2018
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If social media is an experiment, we are all Pavlov’s dogs. Twitter, a laboratory in this
spectacle of operant conditioning, has 335 million subjects. We start by craving
instantaneous information and exchange. Time, however, conditions us to salivate at
stimuli that either reward or punish us.
If you’re one of the millions of Indians on the microblogging site (which accounts for
about 18% of social media users in the country), chances are you saw the flurry of calls to
help people reeling under Kerala’s worst floods in a century. In the first three weeks of
August, 2.62 million tweets were shared under #Keralafloods, as the state and ordinary
citizens campaigned to rally aid. Donations poured in from people around the country and
abroad (the Chief Minister’s Relief Distress Fund received over Rs 700 crore, or $97
million, in a fortnight), and volunteers flocked to help.
Social media laid the foundation for this mass mobilisation—but there’s an ugly side to
the tale too. For one, the trolls didn’t take a break, with some saying that the floods were
divine punishment for “beef eaters”. The ideological battles, naturally, raged on.
Another, less malignant but equally conflicting debate took shape on the issue of charity
itself:
Donating is one thing, helping on the ground is another
A donation should be just that and not about expecting anything in return
Why name only some celebrities who donated, why not all?
Publicising your donation is like retweeting praise
the-ken.com-Down the rabbit hole of donation shaming 1/4 161

The politics of giving, especially when it comes to public proclamations of philanthropy,
can be cruel—which brings us to donation shaming. Something that nobody perhaps
knows better now than Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma*.
The billionaire in a soup

Sharma on 17 August announced on Twitter that he had donated Rs 10,000 (less than
$140) for the relief efforts, and called on others to use Paytm, the digital payments app his
company operates, to do the same. The Twitterati were not amused.
Columnist Rajyasree Sen, who has over 17,000 followers, was quick to call out the Paytm
founder for using a natural disaster to promote his own services:

That brickbat was only one of many, as Twitter users piled on.

“Talking about your donation takes away the altruism of it,” Sen says over email. “Much
like how news about donations by Salman Khan emerges in the media.” Not only does
Sharma lose on this count, but his donation of Rs 10,000, she adds, is paltry in context of
his billionaire status (Forbes puts his net worth at $2.2 billion as of 8 September).

Emergency Use Authorisation and the perils of fast-
tracking drugs
the-ken.com/story/emergency-fast-tracking-drugs
August 13, 2020
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Indian media called it the Biocon breakthrough. On 11 July, the biopharmaceutical
company’s made-in-India drug Itolizumab had just received emergency authorisation by
the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for the treatment of moderate to severely ill
Covid patients. Originally created to treat a skin disease called psoriasis, Itolizumab was
repurposed and tried on Covid patients to avoid the onset of a cytokine storm—or when
the body’s immune system begins to attack the body, often fatally.
But even as Biocon’s “breakthrough” was being celebrated, its 30-patient, randomised
control trial conducted over four hospital sites in India had already come under fire. The
paltry size of the trial was being offset against Biocon’s tall “mortality benefits” of the
drug. “As a lay person, if I read the Biocon press release, I would think this drug has a
90% chance of preventing mortality. I wouldn’t think twice about taking it off the
market,” says a Bengaluru-based senior clinical trials scientist, who requested anonymity
as he’s not authorised to speak with the media.
What got lost in the fine print, says the expert, was that Itolizumab was given a marketing
license under a contentious, little-used regulatory fiat called “restricted emergency use” or
Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA).
The rapid clip at which Covid infections and deaths have grown across the world has
governments, regulators and doctors against the wall. India now has 2.2 million recorded
cases, and as of 12 August, it’s adding the highest number of new cases in the world.
Yet, no single drug or therapy has been approved for treating Covid-19. “We can’t afford
to wait in a pandemic. In such a situation, the regulator has the discretion to allow use of
new drugs, or repurposed drugs, without going through a sequential, multi-stage trial,”
says Santanu Tripathi, head of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology at the Calcutta
School of Tropical Medicine. Along with Itolizumab, drugs like Remdesivir, Favipiravir
and convalescent plasma therapy have been given the EUA nod.
EUAs are a handy, if imperfect, tool to save lives in a life-threatening pandemic. But
they’re far from being a well-tested, detailed blueprint. The science behind why an EUA is
granted to a particular drug or therapy is dynamic. By their very nature, they can’t be too
rigid since they only kick in during emergencies. The concept of actually granting EUAs is
alien to India’s drug regulators.
“EUAs didn’t strictly exist in India before Covid. Drugs are either approved all the way or
rejected.
the-ken.com-Emergency Use Authorisation and the perils of fast-tracking drugs 1/2 165
Covid Catch-22
From the homegrown Itolizumab to foreign exports like

Remdesivir, experimental drugs and therapies for Covid-19 have
flooded in, under the contentious, first-time clause of EUA. But
the market doesn't understand 'emergency' doesn't mean
everything is okay
Olina Banerji, 13 Aug 2020
Covid-19 infections are crossing a dangerous 2 million in India. The need for new forms
of treatment is crushing
Emergency Use Authorisation is a tool to test out new treatment drugs. The challenge is,
authorisation often precedes evidence
Without much evidence, drugs like Favipiravir, Remdesivir and Itolizumab have been
given marketing licenses
But the drug controller has no exit strategy for these drugs. What happens if they don’t
work?
the-ken.com-Emergency Use Authorisation and the perils of fast-tracking drugs 2/2 166
Endgame Ola
the-ken.com/story/endgame-ola
August 2, 2016
When the news of Uber China’s merger with Didi broke, many Ola employees did not
know how to react.
Some were initially happy that Uber had apparently been beaten (or even that it could be
beaten), but as the implications became clearer, there was anger.
“Did they just give money to our competitor? Did they just hand a war chest to Uber to
beat us in India?” wondered a senior executive. He was also apprehensive about the
operational data Didi had on Ola thanks to their (now dead) anti-Uber alliance. Would
Uber somehow get access to that?
Another executive was more circumspect. “The Didi-Uber deal does not look good in
hindsight,” he rationalized. “We can’t go to any other country where the alliance exists
and there is no market Ola sees in Europe. So, we are stuck here,” he said, before adding,
“But one good market is still big enough.”
It would be hours before many would get over their emotions to only realize that their
arch-nemesis was now also a shareholder.
Because as part of merger, Uber became one of Didi’s largest shareholders with a 17.7
percent stake (coincidentally, that number is fairly close to Uber’s approximate market
share in China). And since Didi had invested $30 million in Ola just last September,
indirectly Uber had become a shareholder in Ola.
The world had just shifted from under Ola.
China – The Long Con?
Did Uber lose in China? Let’s consider the facts.
the-ken.com-Endgame Ola 1/7 167

Since quietly launching its China operations in Shanghai in August 2013, it is estimated to
have spent around $2 billion to gain a market share of around 20 percent. After
yesterday’s merger, Uber now controls 17.7 percent of Didi Chuxing at a valuation of $35
billion.
Which means Uber’s made over 3X of what it spent in just over two years. That too as
stake in a company that is indisputably in control of the entire Chinese ride-hailing
market and will easily continue to grow in size and valuation.
Many venture capitalists would *kill* for those kind of returns, especially at the scale.
But Uber wanted to conquer China, you say. A face-saving merger isn’t a victory by those
standards.
Sure, if you think Uber’s founder and CEO Travis Kalanick was so enamoured with his
ambition to conquer China that he never objectively considered the impossible odds he
was facing.
In truth Uber never had a chance to become number one in China because it started too
late and because the Chinese government never lets foreign companies win any market it
considers vital to its economy.
Most reasonably smart people – analysts, opinion writers, experts – had long written off
Uber’s chances of ever winning the Chinese market. So perhaps, just perhaps consider the
fact that Kalanick was smart enough to realize this eventuality.
What then would his next best option for Uber in China be?
Something that would read pretty much like yesterday’s announcement.
This could mean either of two things: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is gutsy and pugnacious
enough to go fists swinging into a market he knows he cannot win, and still walk out
stronger; or that Kalanick managed to pull a long con over some of the sharpest brains
and elbows in the world and walk out stronger.
In either case, that makes Kalanick someone in whose sights you don’t want to be.
Unfortunately for Ola, they’re next.
Leapfrog Market
On the face of it, India doesn’t make sense for Uber to really spend too much time on. In
August last year it was doing around 200,000 rides a day, and was expected to hit 1
million rides a day by May.
In comparison, Uber said it was doing 150 million trips a month in China (that’s 5 million
a day) and over 2 billion trips across all its countries annually. Didi, its new partner,
claims to do 11 million rides daily in China alone.

Why bother with India then?
Because, leapfrog.
In sector after sector, India has confounded many traditional market sizing experts who
underestimated its large middle class’ propensity to “leapfrog” traditional product
adoption curves.
That’s happened in Telecom. Internet. Smartphones. E-commerce.
Given affordable pricing and the network effects provided by connectivity, India has the
propensity to become a game changer for many sectors.
Ride-sharing is a case in point. Car ownership in India is less than 20 for every thousand
people, compared to 128 for China and nearly 800 for America.
There’s no reason Indians will first buy cars before realizing the convenience of using
without owning – they will directly leapfrog to it.
Thus, any player that wins in the nascent Indian market of today gets to control a
lucrative and massive market of tomorrow.
Float like a butterfly…
The number one ride-sharing provider in India is Ola. On that there is consensus.
But by how much does Ola lead? No one has a clue.
Both Ola and Uber India have perfected the game of feeding utterly made up statistics
about their respective market leadership figures to the press, which now means no one
really trusts either of them.
Sometimes Ola says it has an 85 percent market share, till Uber counters saying it has 50
percent.
Whatever the numbers, it is Ola that has more to lose.
Since starting operations in India from tech-driven Bangalore in September 2013, Uber
always had a bias towards larger cities and richer, more tech-savvy customers. For over a
year the only way to pay for Uber rides was by linking your credit card to your account,
thus allowing Uber to direct its subsidies and marketing efforts towards a valuable sliver
of Indians (just 21 million Indians own a credit card, in a country of over 1.3 billion
people).
This paid them off well as there’s now a clear preference and loyalty for Uber among well-
off customers in India’s biggest metro cities like Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.
With that as its core, Uber has gradually expanded to more cities (26 at last count) and
payment options (pre-paid wallets in Dec 2014 and cash in July 2015).

In contrast, the main strategy behind Ola’s expansion has been an aggressive move into
smaller cities, newer users and a broadening range of vehicle options.
Compared to Uber’s four ride segments UberPOOL for ride-sharing and UberGo, UberX
and UberXL for private taxis, Ola has nine: Share (ride-sharing), Micro, Mini, Prime, Lux,
Auto (three wheeler auto-rickshaws), Rentals, Outstation, and TaxiForSure (a brand it
acquired).
Ola also claims to be present in over 100 cities compared to Uber’s 26.
Like a boxer constantly increasing the size of the ring so he can avoid having to face his
stronger opponent at close range and for too long, it is hard to shake the feeling that Ola’s
market share is to a large extent dependent upon newer markets and segments that Uber
has not, *yet*, chosen to play in.
Or in strategy terms, no “defensible moats”.
This means Ola’s market leadership is not only ephemeral, but dependent on it constantly
expanding into newer markets and categories. At some point either the options or the
money will run out.
Ah yes, the money. Make no mistake. Ola’s survival rests on its ability to raise money –
lots of money – going forward.
A knife to a gunfight
Ola’s last funding round was in September, when it raised $500 million at a valuation of
$5 billion.
But that valuation is extremely fragile, dependent on it staying number one in terms of
market share.
The moment investors sense that Uber has equaled Ola’s market share (or even reached
striking distance), Ola’s asking valuation will fall. And with it, its ability to raise fresh
funding of any significant amount to continue fighting Uber.
Didi merging with Uber also means the collapse of the other great hope – the global anti-
Uber alliance comprising Didi, Ola, Grab and Lyft.
Within Ola, there’s a sense of betrayal at Didi for throwing in its lot with Uber.
And then there’s Ola’s exisiting investors.
Softbank: 22.5%
Tiger Global: 20.35%
Matrix Partners: 11.45%
DST Global: 8.4%
Accel Partners: 2.81%

Helion Venture Partners: 1.93%
Others: 20.6%
Founders: 11.95%
It’s important to note that the two biggest investors in Ola – Softbank and Tiger Global –
are both currently going through a slower phase of investing in India and are unlikely to
lead any fresh funding rounds.
Meanwhile with its exit from China and a cash pile that was over $11 billion in June, Uber
can easily afford to increase its spending in India till as long as it wants to.
Replace China with India in this recent quote from Uber’s Kalanick below, and you get an
idea of things.
Travis Kalanick
The good thing though is when you have profitable cities around the world, those
profitable cities can then help us to invest more deeply in this country so you take like
the…top 30 cities that we're in around the world, we're already generating a billion dollars
in profits from those 30 cities a year today and those cities are growing by 2, 3, 4 times
per year. And so that is sort of the fuel that allow us to go to places like China and invest
deeply to make, to make the system work and to work in a big way.
This combination of cash-on-books, cash flow and single-minded focus to win at all costs
is reminiscent of another US company currently giving sleepless nights to its local,
market-leading competitor: Amazon (and Flipkart).
Perhaps the only card left for Ola now is the one that cost Uber, China – regulations and
government.
Of course, there’s the Hail Mary
Yesterday when Kalanick wrote an internal blog post on Uber China merging with Didi, it
promptly got leaked to WeChat, China’s most popular communications platform.
This was utterly ironic, because Uber China has had a tumultuous relationship with
WeChat. Starting with March last year, when its official account was first blocked by
WeChat, to December, when dozens of Uber accounts were summarily deleted by WeChat
for “malicious marketing”,
Uber has been bravely fighting with both its hands tied in China.
And there, the ropes were provided by Chinese regulators and the government.
The Chinese government has made no secret of its preference for local players to
dominate and control all key aspects of commerce, online and offline. Transportation is
no different.

For years, taxi-hailing and ride-sharing apps have operated in the absence of clear laws,
or even worse, against existing ones. And enforcement has been arbitrary, strict, or lax,
depending on who you ask.
In May 2015 Uber China’s offices in Guangzhou and Chengdu were raided by regulators
who accused the company of running illegal operations.
To be sure, Didi’s offices have been raided too. But the fervour was always lesser. One
reason could be because the Chinese government was a Didi investor too.
Oh yeah. Did we forget to tell you that?
In August last year China Investment Corp. (CIC), the state-controlled sovereign wealth
fund invested an unspecified amount in Didi. CIC’s other big tech investment is in the
Alibaba Group (since this is China, Alibaba in turn is also an investor in Didi).
Then in May this year, Apple suddenly invested $1 billion in Didi in a move many analysts
viewed as a way to curry favour with the Chinese government to safeguard its second-
largest market globally.
Perhaps the final nail in Uber’s China coffin was the new rules for taxi ride-hailing that
had been in “draft” stage for years. Released on July 28, they come into effect from 1st
November. Broadly, they bring ride-hailing apps under the licensing authority of local
regulators and impose certain conditions on the drivers and cars.
But they also reaffirm the primacy of local regulators who have the right to mandate a
“government guidance price” whenever they feel necessary. Also, the rules prohibit
players from “unfair or illegal pricing behaviour” that “disrupts market orders, damages
state interests or other operator’s legal rights”.
As any reasonable person would surmise, those are wide enough for regulators to drive a
truck through any time they choose.
The rules also forbid setting prices below cost to push competitors out or to dominate the
market even though that was exactly what Uber China and Didi had been doing all this
while.
Ola and Uber in India share many of the exact same regulatory conditions as in China.
From Delhi to Bangalore to Mumbai, Ola and Uber have been subjected to wave after
wave of regulatory attacks that curb surge pricing; define price bands; mandate driver and
vehicle conditions; and even the use of physical tripmeters, display boards and alarm
buttons.
Unfortunately for Ola, creating a scalable and replicable playbook using regulations to
thwart Uber will not be easy. That’s because unlike China’s one-party rule that extends
across provinces and cities, India is a messy democracy with different parties in charge of
the biggest markets. For instance, Bangalore is governed by the Congress, Delhi by the
Aam Aadmi Party and Mumbai by the BJP.

As things stand today, Hail Mary can take Ola only so far.
Up till now, Ola has been a hard-charging, gritty competitor to Uber in India. Against all
odds it has fought to maintain its leadership and refuse to be cowed down by Uber’s
aggression, dirty tricks (the company is a past-master at those) and almost infinite
funding.
But as things stand today, the future appears very bleak for Ola. There are no easy
markets for it to expand into, whether domestic or foreign. No potential buyers, especially
after a valuation round of $5 billion. No investors with the patience to wait for an exit,
whenever it comes, or the stomach to fight a bruising battle with Uber.
Much as we hate to say it, it’s endgame Ola.

Error 404: BharatNet’s connectivity issues
the-ken.com/story/bharatnet-connectivity-issues
September 26, 2018
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Nuh in Haryana is not a particularly remarkable place. Located just 47 kilometres from
Gurugram, it looks like the poor cousin of Gurugram. But as one drives past the market
centre, and into the village of Tain (pronounced Ty-eeen), a signpost stands out. Not for
its ostentatiousness, but for the text that adorns it—Smartpur.
The name is no accident. Smartpur is part of Finnish telecom gear manufacturer Nokia’s
efforts to digitise 500 villages across the country. Nokia has partnered with the Digital
Empowerment Foundation (DEF)—a non-profit that works on bridging the digital divide
in underserved areas—to turn Tain and other villages like it into smart villages.
Housed in the local village council building, the DEF’s office stands as working proof of
the Smartpur mission. In one of the rooms occupied by DEF, it runs digital literacy
courses and plans to start telemedicine services. All of it powered by WiFi from Airtel.
In the same building, the CSC (Common Service Centre), a citizen-centric government
initiative that helps people apply for PAN cards and seek government services, also uses
DEF’s WiFi. But the CSC shouldn’t need to do this. Stashed in the CSC room is a trove of
equipment. A modem, router, GPON equipment to ensure the single optic fibre feed can
serve multiple users. The works. Red and green lights on the equipment blink repeatedly.
But the internet the equipment is supposed to enable is but a dream. The WiFi doesn’t
work anywhere in the building, let alone the CSC. It doesn’t even show up on the list of
available WiFi networks. Locals say this has been the case for days.
If this were just any other internet connection, no one would bat an eyelid. But it isn’t.
The connection is part of BharatNet, the government’s flagship digital connectivity
programme. Envisioned as the world’s largest digital infrastructure project, BharatNet
the-ken.com-Error 404 BharatNets connectivity issues 1/2 174

aimed to provide broadband connectivity to a whopping 250,000 gram panchayats
(village councils) across the country.
According to a Department of Telecom (DoT) reply to the parliamentary standing

committee on information technology, Rs 10,286 crore ($1.4 billion) has already been
spent on the project. 92% of the funds allocated for phase 1 of the project. A BSNL official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity, puts the net spend at closer to Rs 12,000 crore
($1.6 billion).
However, seven years after the program was conceived, things haven’t quite panned out
as intended. Instead, BharatNet has become an example of how government processes
and bureaucratic structures can destroy a well-intentioned project. Despite the small
fortune spent on the programme, the scheme has been criticised by both government and
private organisations alike. Reports from DEF and ICT policy and regulation think-tank
LIRNEasia concur that the internet has mostly been non-functional in BharatNet-
connected areas.
the-ken.com-Error 404 BharatNets connectivity issues 2/2 175

eSanjeevani—The government-owned dark horse in
India’s telemedicine race
the-ken.com/story/esanjeevani-the-government-owned-dark-horse-in-indias-telemedicine-race
March 19, 2021
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When Chennai resident Latha Ramesh’s father fell sick in August last year, her options for
help were limited. Covid was still rampaging through the country, nearby clinics were
shut, and hospitals were both crowded and risky. Racking her brain for a solution, she
remembered a WhatsApp message about an app, eSanjeevani, that offered free
teleconsultations from the safety of her home.
Ramesh downloaded the government-run app on her smartphone and sought help.
Within ten minutes, a doctor from Dharmapuri—a town 300 kilometres away—flashed on
her screen. After describing her father’s symptoms to the doctor, he was diagnosed with a
urinary tract infection and prescribed medicines to treat it. He didn’t improve. The next
day, she noticed a terrible swelling on one of his legs.
Suspecting a misdiagnosis, she went back to the app. This time around, she was
connected to a Dr Sivakumar from Dindigul—a city around 420 kilometres away. Over the
course of a video call, the doctor was able to correctly diagnose her father’s condition as
lymphangitis, an infection of the foot. He prescribed a course of antibiotic injections,
which was duly administered by a local health worker hired by Ramesh.
Ramesh is one of over 2.1 million Indians who have benefitted from eSanjeevani over the
past year. The platform was originally meant to connect doctors at government medical
colleges with workers at local health centres for the purpose of training. It was retooled as
a free telemedicine platform just as Covid’s shadow touched Indian shores, with its
current avatar launched by the central government in April 2020.
Of the three million-odd consultations eSanjeevani facilitated as of 17 March, around

900,000 were arranged by health workers. The remaining ~2.1 million were sought
directly by patients. On a daily basis, eSanjeevani now holds 35,000 consultations pan-
India, according to the health ministry. Ministry officials anticipate this number will cross
100,000 by the end of 2021.
Largest telemed network

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan has even grander ambitions. At a review meeting in
August 2020, he told attendees that eSanjeevani has the potential to handle 500,000
consultations every day
the-ken.com-eSanjeevaniThe government-owned dark horse in Indias telemedicine race 1/2 176

The health ministry doesn’t see eSanjeevani as an end unto itself, but rather a vital cog in
the healthcare machinery. If ministry officials are to be believed, the plan is to link the
telemedicine service with unique patient health IDs, an ongoing initiative under the
national digital health mission (NDHM).
Doc at my doorstep
In just under a year, the government-run telemedicine platform

has already clocked over 3 million consultations. Can it succeed
where its well-funded private peers like Practo and DocPrime
have failed?
In the last three months alone, eSanjeevani has grown threefold, crossing 3 million
consultations over the past year
But it is not merely a telemedicine service. The govt has plans to link it with the National
Digital Health Mission, making it a crucial cog in aggregating patient health records
States like Tamil Nadu have seen massive traction on the platform, yet there are glitches
in the case of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, partly because of a shortage of doctors
While health minister Harsh Vardhan has ambitions to grow the platform to 500,000
daily consults, there are hurdles to overcome first
the-ken.com-eSanjeevaniThe government-owned dark horse in Indias telemedicine race 2/2 177

EV batteries get their own identity. EV makers face an
identity crisis
the-ken.com/story/electric-vehicles-batteries-identity-crisis
September 10, 2020
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For an electric vehicle (EV), a battery is like its central nervous system. A good battery can
ration power supply to the vehicle, generate data-based feedback on performance, and
prevent an EV from flaming out before its time. Without the right battery, an EV is little
more than a flimsy metal frame. Buying an EV without a fitted battery would be a bizarre
idea for any customer.
Not for the Indian government, though. On 13 August, the Ministry of Road Transport
and Highways (MoRTH) issued a notification allowing the sale and registration of EVs
without batteries. Batteries, it said, can now be independently registered and sold.
The timing of MoRTH’s notification was probably no coincidence. With the Covid-19
pandemic having decimated all types of auto sales, it fits in well with a renewed interest in
EVs and personal mobility options. EV companies like Hero Electric, Okinawa, and Ather
have signed up for innovative sales models; e-commerce giants Flipkart and Amazon have
pledged to make a significant portion of their delivery fleets electric.
“The government is coming good on its promise to reduce the upfront cost of EV
ownership,” says Priyank Agarwal, vice president of strategy and business development at
Exicom, a Gurugram-based energy management company. Cleaving the battery from the
vehicle halves the upfront cost of an electric two- or three-wheeler. “It will unlock new
business models and let consumers source batteries directly from battery manufacturers,
instead of just vehicle makers,” adds Agarwal.
The notification, say industry experts, is also a clear signal in favour of battery-swapping.
An alternative to regular charging, swapping can reduce the recharge time from two-to-six
hours to a few minutes. This logic, coupled with the allure of the low upfront price, is the
main pitch for companies that offer batteries as a service (BaaS), such as SUN Mobility
and Ola Electric.
“Now, vehicles without batteries can enjoy the same privileges as those fitted with one,”
says Ajay Goel, chief operating officer at SUN Mobility. The firm has tied up with the
Indian Oil Corporation, India’s largest oil marketing company, to set up battery-swapping
stations at its fuel pumps. SUN is hoping to piggyback on IOCL’s distribution network and
increase its stations to double digits by the end of 2020.
the-ken.com-EV batteries get their own identity EV makers face an identity crisis 1/3 178
EV manufacturers, however, aren’t enthused by the idea. On paper, they should be happy,
since they can arguably sell more units at a cheaper cost.
going solo
The Indian government is hoping its recent notification allowing

the registration of electric vehicles without batteries finally ends
the hesitation over battery-swapping. It has, however, sparked a
tug of war in the sector over battery safety and standards
Olina Banerji, 10 Sep 2020
Selling EVs without batteries is now allowed in India. It gives battery-swapping a boost,
reducing recharge time to a few minutes
EV manufacturers aren’t thrilled; issues of safety, standardisation haunt them. EVs

without batteries also halve their revenue from each vehicle
BaaS providers like SUN Mobility, Ola Electric can use this opportunity to get direct
business from battery makers and fleet operators
Without standardisation, EV manufacturers and consumers are unlikely to switch over

to swapping; is it time for more government intervention?
Evaluation over valuation: The public superstructure
exposing Indian edtech’s vanity metrics
the-ken.com/story/exposing-edtechs-vanity-metrics
January 4, 2021
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On the penultimate day of 2020, Unacademy, India’s second largest edtech unicorn,
added a new company, NeoStencil, to its growing kitty of acquisitions. A government test-
prep platform, NeoStencil was Unacademy’s sixth acquisition in the past 12 months.
The move bookended a breakout year for India’s edtech industry, which surged as
educational institutes shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Edtech solutions, for the
first time, went from being mere after-school remedial “supplements” to the main fare for
over 285 million students.
The impact was telling. In total, India’s mainstream edtech sector raised a cool $2.2
billion, and almost every edtech company added millions of free users after initially
lowering their paywalls. Byju’s, the undisputed leader of the pack, now boasts 70 million
users for its interactive video content. Its rivals also grew in leaps and bounds.
Unacademy quadrupled its paid user base between February and September to 350,000.
Vedantu—a competitor to both Byju’s and Unacademy—claimed a 10X growth from its
January 2020 user base of 50,000.
Impressive as these growth metrics may be, they gloss over a question that’s become most
relevant in 2020—does online, at-home learning actually work? Till date, edtech
companies haven’t put their financial heft towards creating a metric to measure learning
outcomes. Or even if they have, the data isn’t publicly available.
“The first phase of edtech growth, the focus has been on customer acquisition.
Stakeholders like parents and VCs rely on engagement and user experience as a proxy
indicators. There isn’t a demand for deeper metrics yet,” says Vikas Verma, the
investment director of VC firm Avaana Capital, who is familiar with India’s education
sector.
Billion dollar valuations for these edtechs are still based on the immense headroom for
growth these companies continue to have. For the most part, their English-first,
smartphone-friendly lessons are largely only accessible to elite, metro audiences—a mere
10-20% of the student population. By far, the most impacted group of students in India
are the 113 million government school students (~50% of the total student population),
who typically study in low-resource settings and have limited access to smartphones and
online content. For them, school closures could mean a precipitous fall in learning levels.
the-ken.com-Evaluation over valuation The public superstructure exposing Indian edtechs vanity metrics 1/2 181
In response to this need, a ground-up, open-source, “public” edtech superstructure was
set up almost overnight. Powered by a motley crew of non-profit organisations like Avanti
Fellows, Central Square Foundation (CSF), as well as state education departments and
government teachers.
learning gap
India's edtechs had a breakout year in 2020. Byju's now boasts

over 70 million users, while Unacademy entered unicorn territory.
What these edtech behemoths haven't done, though, is go
beyond India's privileged students or prove their efficacy. Now, a
patchwork of non-profits is working with state governments to
take e-learning to the masses, while also proving their methods
work
Olina Banerji, 4 Jan 2021
India’s edtech sector took off like a rocketship in 2020. Shuttered schools meant
unicorns like Byju’s minted both revenue and new users
Despite the billion-dollar valuations, does online learning really work? More so, for 50%
of students who can’t afford English-only, high-tech solutions
A new collaboration is paving the way for a new “public” edtech infrastructure. One
study shows 83% engagement with lessons sent over WhatsApp
A public system's search for metrics has put a spotlight on the lack of any
measurements in conventional edtech
the-ken.com-Evaluation over valuation The public superstructure exposing Indian edtechs vanity metrics 2/2 182
Exit in sight, Gates Foundation hopes India will foot the
vaccine bill
the-ken.com/story/bmgf-vaccines-india-govt
October 15, 2019
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On 25 September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was felicitated with the Global
Goalkeeper Award by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). On the surface, it
was recognition for the PM’s Swacch Bharat Abhiyan scheme—a programme that sought
to eliminate the practice of open defecation. But there was a lot more riding on this award.
It was the culmination of a years-long effort to make an ally of a man seen as critical to
BMGF’s continued success in the region.
Instituted by BMGF in 2017, the Global Goals Awards are meant to recognise champions
of United Nation General Assembly’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Enshrined in
2015, these serve as a blueprint for a sustainable future without poverty, hunger and
preventable child deaths. For Seattle-based BMGF, which has worked towards preventing
child mortality since its inception in 2000, the SDGs are something of a north star.
This sort of focus made India a key proving ground for the Foundation. In fact, with the
country accounting for just under 1 million child deaths a year—a fifth of the global child
mortality burden—BMGF set up an office in India in 2003, just a few years after the
charity’s conception.
Since entering India, BMGF has also learned of three situations unique to the country.
First, unlike countries in, say, Africa, where the Foundation is particularly active, the
Indian government can afford to provide a decent standard of public health but doesn’t.
For a developing country with a growing GDP, India is one of the lowest per capita
spenders on health—with only around 1% of GDP spent on healthcare compared to the
global average of 6%.
Big spender
With $47.9 billion in assets, BMGF spends about $5 billion annually across the developed
and developing world. It is also the single largest donor to the World Health Organisation
Second, India’s massive population blunts the impact of direct grants. Although BMGF
spent more on India—$282.5 million—in 2017 as compared to any other country, the per
person spending came to 21 cents (Rs 15). In Uganda, where it spent only $34.9 million,
the per person spending was closer to 85 cents (Rs 59).
the-ken.com-Exit in sight Gates Foundation hopes India will foot the vaccine bill 1/3 183
Lastly, it has understood that it can’t just foster innovation, affordability and access. It
needs the Indian government to adopt whatever it sets in motion and take things forward.
All of this made it clear to the Foundation that there was only so far it could go without
having the Indian government decidedly onside. So, for the first iteration of the Global
Goals Awards, the leadership of BMGF was sold on the idea of Narendra Modi being one
of its inaugural awardees.
quid pro quo
After pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into building India’s

preventable disease vaccine market, the $48 billion Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) wants to step back. But if the
Modi government doesn’t pick up where BMGF left off, the house
the Foundation painstakingly built could come crashing down
Ruhi Kandhari, 15 Oct 2019
Despite lots of opposition, the world’s largest charity—Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (BMGF)—gave the Global Goalkeeper Award to Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi
The award was part of a charm offensive as the Foundation realises its success in the
region is contingent on the Indian government’s support
Having built a vaccine market—helping to fund both vaccine makers and also footing
part of the government’s tab—BMGF now wants to step back
But it needs a buyer for all the vaccines it has brought into the Indian market. Can it
convince the Indian government to foot the bill for its 25.7 million-strong birth cohort?
Faasos
the-ken.com/story/fassos
February 10, 2017
BY THE NUMBERS
Set the flame to high burn

Ashish K. Mishra, 10 Feb 2017
Your subscription ends in 26 days. Upgrade today with our exclusive subscription!
Whichever kitchen Faasos is working out of, it is not smelling good. The company has
been around a long time now, and it has been trying a whole host of things. It has got
some marquee investors: Sequoia, Lightbox, Ru-Net South Asia, Beenext, RB
Investments and Anand Lunia (Partner at IndiaQuotient). But the stuff Faasos is selling,
food and beverages, it is not quite clear if there’s money in it. The pointlessness of this
enterprise can be traced to its cost structure—there, it will be fair to say, that the kitchen
is on fire.
Total Funding
$60 million
Fassos
Fassos Food Services Private Limited
As per MCA records
Jaydeep Barman
Founder
Pune
Headquarters
the-ken.com-Faasos 1/4 186

Read more
Investors
Sequoia Capital
Lightbox Ventures
Beenext
RB Investments
Read more
Competitors
Box8
HolaChef
Freshmenu
Read more
What has Faasos been up to in the last year?
A lot actually. As we’ve written before in our story, The twists and rolls of Faasos, just in
the last eighteen months, Faasos has changed its business model thrice. And four times
in the last thirteen years. It tried to become a Quick Service Restaurant (QSR), then a
dark kitchen, which means no storefronts, followed by a marketplace and then, a multi-
brand cloud kitchen. Is this last pivot going to work? Jaydeep Barman is an optimist. He
says that he is finally on to something, which will make money. It is another matter
altogether that Faasos’ numbers should make any mortal man worry about the
challenges that lie ahead.

Results:
Rs 62 crore: That’s the money Faasos made from operations as of March 2016. That is,
selling food and beverages and from commission income. In the previous year, as of
March 2015, the company recorded income from operations of Rs 37.5 crore. Faasos’
income has almost doubled year on year.
Rs 168 crore: This was the total expense recorded by Faasos as of March 2016. This is
a significant step up over last year. As of March 2015, Faasos recorded a total expense of
Rs 58 crore. Expenses have gone up almost 3X, year on year.
Rs 111 crore: That’s Faasos’ loss as of March 2016. In the previous year, it recorded a
loss of Rs 24 crore. For every crore in the pocket, Faasos lost about Rs 2 crore.
Rs 14.5 crore: For the standalone results, this is Faasos’ cash & bank balance as of
March 2016. It is a significantly low balance compared to the previous year’s amount of
Rs 91 crore.
Rs 36 crore: That’s Faasos’ cost of food items. According to the filing, the company did
not have the details of the broad classes of food consumption. Roughly understood, the
company spent Rs 36 crore in food items to sell food and beverages of about Rs 62 crore.
In the previous year, Faasos spent Rs 18.8 crore on food items.
In partnership with Tofler
Rs 47 crore: As of March 2016, that’s the money Faasos spent on advertising, publicity
and sales promotion. Almost a 10X increase compared to the previous year when the
company spent just Rs 4.6 core. Almost the entire jump in income (from Rs 37.5 crore to

Rs 62 crore) seems to be riding on the back of increased spending on advertising. There’s
a similar increase in the salary cost, which went up from Rs 18 crore as of March 2015 to
Rs 47.7 crore as of March 2016.
50%: Sequoia’s cumulative shareholding in Faasos*
Addendum (10 February): *The number 50% shareholding is for preference shares
only.
AUTHOR
Ashish K. Mishra
Ashish edits and writes stories at The Ken. Across subjects. In his last assignment, he
was a Deputy Editor at Mint, a financial daily published by HT Media. At the paper, he
wrote long, deeply reported feature stories. His earlier assignments: Forbes India
magazine and The Economic Times. Born in Kolkata. Studied in New Delhi – B.Com
from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University. Works out of anywhere, where
there is a good story to be told.
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Facebook has an anonymous astroturfing problem
the-ken.com/story/facebook-anonymous-astroturfing-problem
December 8, 2017
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Tuesday morning. 14 November. Girish Mallya, a publisher at T3 India magazine, wakes
up to an alarming dollar figure charged to his credit card. A transaction of over $1,100,
and some more. “I got alerts for two transactions, I saw dollar and I almost fell off my
chair.” At first, Mallya thinks his bank account has been compromised, but then he
checks his statement and quickly realises it’s the credit card. He immediately calls his
card issuer, Citibank. The bank informs him that two of the transactions have been
claimed “by the merchant”, and there are three more. Unclaimed.
“I asked the bank to dispute these two and asked them to take a standing instruction for
a proactive dispute for the pending three,” Mallya tells us about a fortnight later, holding
out his bank statement.
Within 48 hours, he got notified by the bank—“Your provisional credit has been done”.
“The standard procedure [banks] follow is 60 days provisional credit, so you don’t have
to pay the bill because they are disputing the transaction, and they take up to 60 days to
verify with the merchant and to give a final redressal to the issue,” he says. After this,
there was another transaction a day later. This has been disputed as well.
In all likelihood, Mallya will get his money back. He has already got a new card on which
he has capped the credit limit at Rs 20,000, and as an extra precautionary measure, he
even plans to memorise the CVV number and then erase it.
But this isn’t another ‘credit card fraud’ story; we’re more interested in what the
transactions were used for. Namely, Facebook ads. And why is that interesting? Well,
because today, Facebook has enough user data to tie-up with the Indian Election
the-ken.com-Facebook has an anonymous astroturfing problem 1/2 190

Commission (EC). And that makes it accountable, at the very least.
All the six payments using Mallya’s card were made to run advertisement campaigns on
Facebook. But why spend on Facebook ads using stolen card details? To conceal the
identity of those behind these ad campaigns.
Loopholes in Facebook’s payment setup are allowing astroturfers and hackers to run
anonymous propaganda and phishing campaigns on the platform using stolen card
details. Astroturfing is the practice of false advertising with the aim to manipulate
popular opinion and gain momentum. The extent of astroturfing on Facebook, though, is
no secret. Recently, the company had to put out a reassuring post after some US users
were targeted by fake Russian accounts.
Spreading misinformation to shape public opinion has been an integral part of politics.
With the help of social media, the speed of dissemination and penetration of such
propaganda has increased manifold. Take the example of the recent US Presidential
elections, where Russian Propaganda ads were found on Facebook, Google, Twitter and
other social media platforms.
Ad revenue
For FY16, money from ads made 97% of Facebook’s revenue and 88% of Alphabet's,
Google’s parent company.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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Facebook tests the waters for a walled payments
garden in India
the-ken.com/story/facebook-tests-waters-walled-payments-garden-india
February 14, 2018
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On 8 February, Facebook-owned WhatsApp quietly launched the much-anticipated
feature in India—person to person payments. To almost universal rave reviews. (The Ken
originally broke the news of this being in the works back in April 2017).
Can’t get over how elegant @WhatsApp payments are. Stunning. And viral too. Have
helped onboard 10 people at least by now. @nikhilkumarks @NPCI_BHIM - amazing work.
— Satyen V Kothari (@saty_77) February 13, 2018
Bloody hell just set up WhatsApp payments and sent @snegho money, all in less than 30
secs. Hands down best UX for P2P payments I've seen. If they're able to keep this just as
fast and error free as they scale, all competitors need to be afraid, very afraid.
— Vinay Kesari (@vinaykesari) February 11, 2018
Whatsapp payments is going to fuck everyone else over. The reach is just incredible and it's
damn easy to use.
— Madhu Menon (@madmanweb) February 11, 2018
It’s a seamless experience! WhatsApp UPI-based payments feature rolling out: Here's how
you can start sending money WhatsApp users will be able to send money to other users from
within the chat. https://t.co/sfYtsMejxi
— Amitabh Kant (@amitabhk87) February 11, 2018
“Payments opens up huge new data stream for Facebook,” said a senior executive of an e-
commerce company who requested not to be named.
Transactional revenue from this is merely incidental for companies like WhatsApp.
Because what’s more valuable is the financial transaction data that it suddenly has access
to. (Sensitive details like account number and pin details are stored in the partner banks’
servers.)
Currently, WhatsApp is battling it out at the Supreme Court on the kind of data that it has
shared with its parent, Facebook.
the-ken.com-Facebook tests the waters for a walled payments garden in India 1/3 192
Facebook waited 17 months before adopting a radical new payments protocol and seems
to have the best product out there. Against competitors like PhonePe (owned by Flipkart),
Google’s Tez, Paytm*, and the Indian government-promoted BHIM.
Close to nearly a million of WhatsApp’s 270 million active Indian users have access to
payments within their apps, said a source who is familiar with the rollout. It’s an
incredible feat of engineering and marketing timing.
Or is it?
Okay, quiz time. Pick the right statement from those below. (Hint: Only one of them is
correct.)
1. Google’s UPI-based payments app Tez allows to only send money to those with a
Gmail address or an Android phone
2. Paytm users can transfer money using UPI only to other Paytm users
3. Flipkart-owned PhonePe allows payments only to Flipkart users
4. WhatsApp users can send money only to those who use WhatsApp and have
enabled the payments feature within it
Do you have your answer?
Pushing boundaries
WhatsApp’s newly launched payments feature in India is a joy to

use. It is also a clear attempt to co-opt an open protocol. But are
regulators realising this?
Arundhati Ramanathan, 14 Feb 2018
WhatsApp payments on iOS allows users to send payments only to users who have
enabled payments
WhatsApp payments does not include a bunch of features that make up for key aspects of
UPI
This could be Facebook's way of co-opting UPI
Just two days before Google Tez's launch NPCI brought in a circular that enabled only
large companies to partner with multiple banks
Facebook’s Express WiFi aggregates hotspots. Or is it
advertisers?
the-ken.com/story/facebook-express-wifi-india
June 13, 2018
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Consider this. City life has worn you down, and you need a break. A vacation seems like a
good idea. Bags packed, you head for the hills. Unfortunately, somewhere outside the city
limits, your mobile data starts to falter. And then, it stops working altogether. Seamless
network coverage is restricted to ads, it seems.
Now, you’re in the middle of nowhere, and you can no longer navigate to your destination.
Resigned to your fate, you stop at a chai stall to gather your bearings. While sipping your
tea, you notice a sign on the wall. Facebook Express Wifi, it reads. Hope springs anew.
You fork over Rs 10 to the shopkeeper, and you now have an hour’s worth of internet. You
download maps to your destination, maybe even some driving music, and you’re on your
way. Crisis averted, thanks to social networking giant Facebook’s latest ploy to corner the
Indian internet market.
This isn’t Facebook’s first attempt. That (now dubious) distinction belongs to Facebook’s
Free Basics, which died amidst a storm of criticism for violating net neutrality laws. The
principle of net neutrality is that all internet services be treated equally and no service
should gain an undue advantage. Free Basics, which offered users a limited, Facebook-
centric experience, was banned by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in
February 2016 after a sustained public outcry.
Express WiFi is Facebook’s decidedly less controversial follow up to it.
An Indian pilot project for Express WiFi, the first such globally, was revealed a few
months after the demise of Free Basics in India. The plan was similar—provide internet
access to people who might not otherwise have any. Facebook planned to partner with
the-ken.com-Facebooks Express WiFi aggregates hotspots Or is it advertisers 1/3 195

“carriers, internet service providers, and local entrepreneurs” to set up more than 20,000
hotspots across the country, which users could wirelessly connect to.
The premise is sound. Though the story of data usage in India seems to be going through
a purple patch with Jio driving tariffs down, the true picture is far more sobering. Major
telecom operators such as Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea Cellular are still having trouble
convincing users to switch from 2G networks (which only handle voice and SMS) to 4G
networks (data networks). Over 70% of Airtel’s roughly 304 million users (as of March
2018) are still on 2G networks. At Idea, the percentage of data customers stands at just
24.06% of the total customer base of 194.5 million.
The urban-rural divide is also staggering. Trai’s December 2017 data shows that out of the
total 445.96 million internet users in India, just 132.03 million belong to rural India.
Express Wifi
Facebook
Internet
Public wi-fi

Tikona
TRAI
WANI

Fantasy sport, real money: Dream11 thrives on betting
minus regulation
the-ken.com/story/fantasy-sport-dream11-betting-regulation
September 6, 2018
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“Dream11 brings out the selector in you,” said celebrated Indian cricket commentator
Harsha Bhogle in a 2017 advertisement for the fantasy sport company Dream11. It was
this advertisement that got Aditya Somani (name changed), a 26-year-old marketing
professional, hooked to the platform.
Now you might be wondering why we would change the name of a person for just playing
a game. It’ll become clearer as we go on.
Headquartered in Mumbai, Dream11 was officially incorporated in 2007, but it was in

2012 that the company found its true calling, when Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth, the
longest-serving directors in the firm, decided to pivot to a freemium fantasy cricket game
on Dream11.com. Now the leader in India’s fantasy sport space, Dream11 has grown from
2 million users in 2016 to over 20 million in 2018. It holds 90% of the market share with
revenues going up from around Rs 83 lakh (~$114,245) in FY15 to Rs 62 crore (~$8.5
million) in FY17. This leap is nothing short of gargantuan.
Fantasy sport platforms allow users like Somani to act as owners of their own sports
teams. On Dream11, he gets 100 credit points to make a team of 11 players in a match. A
fantasy team can have players from both the competing teams and the performance of
that virtual team is then based on how the real-life cricketers play in the match. Points
are then awarded for the players’ batting, bowling, fielding, economy rate and strike rate.
The team which scores the most points wins the tournament. Depending on the
tournament structure, there can be a single winner to thousands, where the money from
the pot is distributed as per the rank of a team.
the-ken.com-Fantasy sport real money Dream11 thrives on betting minus regulation 1/2 198
Somani’s friend, Kiran Chawla (name changed), a 24-year-old sales executive at Amex,
Gurugram, says that this makes watching the matches more fun because it gives a sense
of having some skin in the game.
Once again, we had to change a name. And with reason. Because fantasy sport is very
much in bed with betting. Even English comedian and host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight,
John Oliver, thinks so. He dedicated an entire segment to fantasy sport where he drew
parallels with traditional gambling games. Oliver starts to describe fantasy sport by
saying that these are “the most addictive thing you can do on your phone, other than,
perhaps, cocaine.”
Gambling, games where the outcome predominantly depends on chance, is one of the
most restricted and harshly regulated industries in India. Only three places—Goa,
Daman & Diu and Sikkim—allow casinos to operate within their jurisdiction.
Dream11 is also restricted on the Google Play Store. What then made it grow so fast in a
country quick to narrow its gaze at all forms of sports betting?
A Punjab and Haryana High Court verdict.
An individual called Varun Gumber had lost Rs 50,000 (~$696) on Dream11 and had
appealed to the court to initiate criminal proceedings against the site under the Public
Gambling Act of 1867.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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Favouritism and fake certifications mar India’s
ventilator procurement
the-ken.com/story/ventilator-procurement-problems
May 5, 2020
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The number of Covid-19 cases in India has crossed the 40,000 mark. By the week’s end, it
is expected to cross 50,000. Already, 1,389 people are reported to have died from the
virus. Yet, even as India eases up on its five-week nationwide lockdown, the country is still
desperately short of potentially life-saving equipment in the fight against the virus—
ventilators.
According to projections from PD Vaghela, secretary of the department of

pharmaceuticals, India requires at least 75,000 ventilators. Vaghela, who is leading a
group tasked with procuring medical equipment for the government, says India has fewer
than 20,000. To bridge this gap, the government has reportedly ordered upwards of
60,000 ventilators.
Noida-based AgVa is one of the firms that has been tapped for this. The startup is on its
way to manufacturing half of the 20,000 ventilators that government-owned HLL
Lifecare floated a tender for. With AgVa’s ventilators costing Rs 1.5-2 lakh ($2,000-
2,600) per unit, the whole consignment was to be delivered by the end of April.
To date, AgVa—in partnership with automaker Maruti Suzuki—has only delivered 1,500
ventilators. Missed deadlines, though, are hardly the problem. No other Indian ventilator
manufacturer has been able to deliver a single ventilator yet. Instead, the issue with
AgVa’s ventilators stems from HLL’s tender itself.
Released on 27 March, one of the tender’s requirements was that all ventilators must be
certified by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
AgVa’s ventilator is not FDA certified. Indeed, no Indian manufacturer has an FDA-
certified ventilator. AgVa, though, has a certificate from a third-party company that says it
is FDA compliant.
There are two problems with this. The FDA doesn’t certify companies, just products. And
the FDA compliance can only be issued by the FDA itself.
In 2018, AgVa was certified by Unitas Certification Services, a company with a UK-based
address. Unitas, incidentally, doesn’t appear to exist beyond its website. As recently as last
month, AgVa received an IEC 60601 compliance certificate from NFI Certifications Ltd,
the-ken.com-Favouritism and fake certifications mar Indias ventilator procurement 1/2 200
another UK-registered entity, which appears to be a shell company. According to
company filings, it has assets of £1 ($1.25). AgVa did not respond to questions sent via
email.
Legitimate certification bodies in India are accredited by the National Accreditation

Board for Certification Bodies (NABCB). Globally, accreditation is done by a member of
the International Accreditation Forum (IAF), says Anil Jauhri, CEO of NABCB until July
last year.
VENTILATOR WOES
A tender by state-owned HLL Lifecare exposes favouritism and a

lack of due diligence in the government's attempts to address
India's ventilator shortfall
Shreedhar Manek, 5 May 2020
India’s race to build ventilators is going slow. While almost 60,000 have been ordered,
only AgVa Healthcare has delivered, albeit partially
AgVa’s ventilators cost a fraction of regular ICU-grade ventilators, but inauthentic

certifications may have helped it bag purchase orders
HLL Lifecare also delayed releasing the specifications of the required ventilator—which
it had based entirely off AgVa’s ventilator
Education in the short term and bureaucratic reform with better regulation in the long
term are the way forward
the-ken.com-Favouritism and fake certifications mar Indias ventilator procurement 2/2 201
Fiinovation and the CSR funding pot at the end of the
rainbow
the-ken.com/story/fiinovation-and-the-csr-funding-pot-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow
July 16, 2019
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On 18 February at the World Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Congress in Mumbai,
Soumitro Chakraborty, CEO of Innovative Financial Advisors Pvt Ltd (Fiinovation), was
the toast of the town. The Congress focused on companies helping implement sustainable
development goals in health, education and the social sector. That night, Chakraborty
won the ‘CEO of the year’ award for Fiinovation’s work in the social development sector.
This was hardly a coming-out party for Chakraborty. Indeed, the bespectacled CEO and
his Delhi-based organisation have frequently been conferred with a number of CSR-
related awards. Already a decade-old, Fiinovation calls itself a fundraising consultant
firm—helping non-profits raise CSR funds from corporates.
the-ken.com-Fiinovation and the CSR funding pot at the end of the rainbow 1/3 202
The homepage of Fiinovation's website
Fiinovation’s rise to prominence in the CSR space coincides with the government’s 2014
mandate that companies spend 2% of their three-year average annual net profit on CSR
activities each financial year. This is applicable to firms with at least Rs 5 crore
($730,000) net profit or Rs 1,000 crore ($146 million) turnover or Rs 500 crore ($73
million) net worth, starting in the year ended March 2015.
Ever since then, CSR funding has snowballed. According to estimates by ratings agency
CRISIL, CSR spends by Indian corporates in the four years since the government mandate
crossed the Rs 50,000 ($7.3 billion) crore mark earlier this year.
And as this pot of CSR gold grows larger, it presents an opportunity for shrewd firms like
Fiinovation looking to be the go-between in these interactions between the worlds of
commerce and social work. Fiinovation’s revenue grew by 13% in the year ended March
2018, clocking in at Rs 9 crore ($1.31 million).
But even as revenues grow and accolades come thick and fast, there is a rising tide of
accusations against Fiinovation. Small, disparate organisations across the country claim
that Fiinovation signed agreements with them to raise CSR funding, but never came
through. The upfront payments—the company charges a 10% commission, of which 4% is
paid in advance—made to Fiinovation were, in many cases, never returned.
According to a list accessed by The Ken, somewhere around 5,000 organisations have
faced similar issues. The list was shared by a former company insider who requested
anonymity. The Ken could not independently reach out to each one of them, but of the
thirteen we reached out to, all told a similar story—Memorandum of Understanding
(MoU) signed, no funds raised. Only two of them got a refund of commission.
The Ken also has a copy of the police complaint filed against Fiinovation by one of the
organisations—Samekit Jan Vikas Kendra, a Christian non-profit based in Jharkhand. In
addition, The Ken has accessed a letter sent by 35-year-old NERD (Non-conventional
Energy and Rural Development) Society, Coimbatore, as well as a copy of the MoU and
receipt issued by Fiinovation to Tarapur Social Development Society (TSDS), West
Bengal.
Fishing with dynamite: India’s contact tracing
overreach
the-ken.com/story/fishing-with-dynamite-indias-contact-tracing-overreach
April 14, 2020
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Update: After publication, Arnab Kumar, program director at NITI Aayog, spoke to The
Ken to provide inputs on Aarogya Setu. On 12 April, he said, Aarogya Setu’s privacy
policy had been changed to be more specific about a few details. This included
information about data being purged from the server side in 45 days or 60 days
depending on the risk-level of the user. Kumar said Aarogya Setu was always intended
to be one-stop app for Covid-19. The GPS information, according to the revised privacy
policy, would be used to “identify emerging areas where infection outbreaks are likely to
occur”. Users, however, were not notified about the change of the policy.
If you’re in India, chances are your SMS inbox is deluged with messages from both
businesses and government agencies asking you to download Aarogya Setu. The app,
released on 2 April by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), is the latest weapon the
government has drafted into its fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the surface, the Aarogya Setu app is for contact tracing. It uses Bluetooth to keep a
constant log of other app users who are near one another. Later, if a user tests positive for
Covid-19, all Aarogya Setu users who were in her proximity can be notified to quarantine
or get tested.
Tech giants and arch rivals Apple and Google are joining forces to build a similar
Bluetooth-based solution for their respective operating systems. That, however, could
take months. For a country like India, which has been under nationwide lockdown for
three weeks already, time is not a luxury it can afford.
With the number of Covid-positive patients nearing the 10,000 mark, the government is
hoping Aarogya Setu could help expedite the end of the lockdown. Indeed, a University of
Oxford study shows that digital contact tracing can be effective—provided there’s
widespread adoption. In the 10 days since its launch, the app reportedly has gained over
25 million unique users across both Android and iOS.
With India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, hinting that the app could also double as a
movement pass during the lockdown, it will likely only gain more traction. However, even
as the government is on a war-footing to promote the app, questions about its scope have
already surfaced.
Unlike similar tools developed by other countries—like Singapore’s TraceTogether—cyber

security experts say Aarogya Setu goes beyond just contact tracing.
the-ken.com-Fishing with dynamite Indias contact tracing overreach 1/2 205

GOT PRIVACY?
As concerns over data privacy dog Aarogya Setu, states like

Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu already have access to
alternatives
Aarogya Setu is India’s newest weapon to combat the Covid-19 pandemic
However, the contact tracing app collects more personal data than is needed for tracing,
raising privacy concerns
The Indian govt seems to want to use it to generate reports and heat maps, but there are
less intrusive ways to do this
Other countries have developed similar apps, with fewer privacy pitfalls. Even in India,
more transparent alternatives to Aarogya Setu are being developed
the-ken.com-Fishing with dynamite Indias contact tracing overreach 2/2 206

Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal: 10 years, 3 players, 1 e-
commerce story
the-ken.com/story/flipkart-amazon-snapdeal-e-commerce
December 27, 2019
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The past decade has practically been a whole lifetime for e-commerce in India.
Right from birth to baby steps to exponential rises to pivots to crashing halts—to even
buyouts. Indian e-commerce—both in terms of Indian companies and companies that
have entered India—though big on drama, still only make up 3% of India’s $650-billion
retail industry.
Three percent. Why should a 3% market share matter?
Because within retail, e-commerce has occupied the limelight over the last 10 years.
According to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), India has been the fastest
growing market for the sector, and will grow at an almost implausible 51% rate. Plus, how
entertaining is the sector? There’s Flipkart stumbling before being scooped up by
international retailer Walmart; there’s Amazon entering India and capturing both the
market and people’s imagination; there’s Snapdeal…
Yes, Snapdeal.
While focusing on the loss-making business that’s e-commerce—the four big e-commerce
companies Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and Paytm Mall raked up losses of over Rs 10,000
crore in the year ended March 2019—there are three larger stories that emerged in the
past decade. From three different companies.
One of a crazy stroke of luck. Flipkart.
the-ken.com-Flipkart Amazon Snapdeal 10 years 3 players 1 e-commerce story 1/2 207

One of parental support. Amazon.
And one of trying till you die. Snapdeal.
All have something in common. The existential struggle for e-commerce in India. For an
industry touted to grow to $200 billion by 2027, according to global financial services
company Morgan Stanley, Indian e-commerce has a long way to go. Morgan Stanley had,
in 2018, predicted this $200-billion growth by 2026, but pushed it back by a year early in
2019. This was the second time it revised its estimate.
The company blamed this new revision on India’s latest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
rules. “The new regulations released in December 2018 strive to tighten the functioning of
ecommerce companies in India….We believe these regulations will pose headwinds to
growth in the near term as some of the prominent companies restructure their businesses,
processes and contracts, to be compliant,” Morgan Stanley said in a report.
Even without the latest FDI rules, though, it would be very hard for this fast-growing e-
commerce industry to get to that $200 billion number in eight years. We wrote about this
over-projection in mid-2018.
To get to that figure, the market size has to grow to 10X from its current size in a period
of eight years. Possible? Sure, if you believe in pies in the sky.
the-ken.com-Flipkart Amazon Snapdeal 10 years 3 players 1 e-commerce story 2/2 208

From groceries to smartphones: Flipkart’s hyperlocal
deliverance
the-ken.com/story/flipkart-grocery-hyperlocal
September 9, 2019
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On 22 August, Amazon gained a yard on its peers in the grocery race in India. It launched
Amazon Fresh, a hyperlocal grocery distribution chain which delivers over 5,000 items—
including fruits, meat and dairy—within two hours. After rolling out the service in rival
Flipkart’s home turf of Bengaluru, Amazon is now closer to cracking the hyperlocal supply
chain—the delivery of products within mere hours—something it has struggled with in the
past.
The Indian grocery market is currently a $400-$500 billion market, according to Ankur
Pahwa, head of e-commerce and consumer internet at advisory services firm EY.
However, says Pahwa, the penetration of e-commerce in this space is just 0.5% at the
moment because of the supply chain challenges involved. Despite this, Pahwa predicts the
share of online groceries will double by 2021.
With a multi-billion dollar opportunity waiting to be realised, the next wave of growth for
e-commerce companies will likely be through your grocery cart. And the battle lines are
already drawn. In addition to Amazon, online grocery players like Bigbasket and Grofers,
and even food delivery company Swiggy and on-demand delivery service Dunzo are in the
fray. All of them backed by deep-pocketed investors. Alibaba for Bigbasket, SoftBank for
Grofers, and Naspers and Google backing Swiggy and Dunzo, respectively.
Walmart-owned Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce firm, is no different. Already, the e-

commerce giant has made its ambitions for its groceries arm ‘Supermart’ clear. Flipkart
expects grocery to be one of its top categories in the next 3-5 years. To do this, it intends
to expand the online-only Supermart stores beyond India’s major metros and into tier-II
and -III cities in the coming years, says its grocery head Manish Kumar.
Flipkart started Supermart in 2017 after a short-lived hyperlocal grocery pilot in 2015.
The service is now operational in five cities, primarily selling staples, packaged food,
snacks and beverages. This, obviously, is a far cry from Amazon’s latest offering. Missing
from Flipkart’s arsenal are fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy products. To be a full-
stack grocery provider, Flipkart needs to bridge this gap. Fresh food, after all, requires
more frequent top-ups compared to, say, rice or pulses, which are typically monthly
purchases.
Flipkart has been working to fix this. Over the last year, it’s been running a fruits and
vegetables pilot in Hyderabad. This, according to an executive in its grocery segment, is to
figure out the supply chain for perishables as well as understanding the customer demand
the-ken.com-From groceries to smartphones Flipkarts hyperlocal deliverance 1/2 209

for perishables.
But Flipkart doesn’t just want to play catch-up. It wants to leapfrog its rivals. The
company has a hyperlocal pilot planned for December to see how it can extend its
hyperlocal capabilities to deliver regular products from its site within a few hours as well,
say two executives at Flipkart. This could be a potential game-changer, turning Flipkart
from a laggard to a pioneer.
Grocery gamble
From grocery space laggard, Flipkart is aiming to not just draw

level with its rivals, but overtake them. Along the way, it could
finally realise Walmart’s vision for it
Abinaya Vijayaraghavan, 9 Sep 2019
While Flipkart bit the groceries bullet a while ago, it’s only now coming around to
offering fresh produce
For the last year, Flipkart has been running a fruits and vegetables pilot in Hyderabad,
trying to crack the complex supply chain for perishables
Even as it tries to crack the notoriously tough grocery market, it plans to develop
hyperlocal delivery with grocery, and wants to extend this even to products like
smartphones
Ambitious, sure. Easy? Not in the least. Flipkart must solve myriad issues which have
stumped e-commerce firms and pure-play grocers alike
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Future of meat: The meat-ing point for non-veg lovers
and vegans
the-ken.com/story/future-of-meat-india
May 18, 2019
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On a white-hot skillet in a kitchen populated by burger buns, mayonnaise, lettuce, and
tomatoes sit two patties made by a company that just left cab company Uber in the dust. If
we eat with all our senses, then the patties’ meaty char, intense sizzle, and saliva-inducing
aroma are banquets unto themselves. And it’s primarily for these reasons that plant-based
meat company Beyond Meat is now the best initial public offering (IPO) in the US in
2019. Compare that to Uber, for whom elegies are being written after its stock fell 18%
just two days after it went public.
Varun Deshpande, managing director of Good Food Institute (GFI), India, has another,
even better Beyond Meat product to offer in his south Mumbai home. It’s the Beyond
Sausage Brat Original, a plump, coarse-textured, bratwurst-style sausage whose umami
juices flow when the casing snaps open. There’s a gaminess to it that’s absent in Beyond
Meat’s patties, and a mouthfeel that underlines why pork, in one’s opinion, is more
versatile than beef.
Except, neither of Beyond Meat’s products has animal origins.
The ‘animal fats’ that ooze on the skillet? Those are coconut, canola, and sunflower oils.
The medium-rare appearance? Beet extract and fruit-vegetable juice. The brat casing?
Derived from algae. And the proteins? Made from peas, broad beans, and rice. All held
together by potato starch, methylcellulose, and other product-specific ingredients like
apple fibre and bamboo cellulose.
This is the next frontier of meat. In a finite world occupied by a burgeoning human
population, plant-based meat could do something about the unsustainability of industrial
animal farming. Science tells us a third of the world’s freshwater, and 26% of the planet’s
ice-free land is used for livestock alone; and that we’ll need plant-based flexitarian diets
and technological interventions in food production to save us from ourselves. These
drivers, alongside animal welfare, are why Beyond Meat and perceived rival Impossible
Foods, which raised $300 million via Series E financing on 13 May, are touted as the Coke
and Pepsi of alternative meat.
the-ken.com-Future of meat The meat-ing point for non-veg lovers and vegans 1/4 211
Traditional meat consumption is increasing, but so is veganism. Which means the quest
for mass production of alternative, or alt meat, is now a mad race between the
traditionalists. Fast food chain Burger King offers the plant-based ‘Impossible Whopper’.
Tyson Foods—the world’s second-largest chicken, pork, and beef processor—has invested
in cell-based meat company Memphis Meats. Cargill Foods, the world’s third-largest meat
producer, is betting on Israel-based Aleph Farms, a startup that wants to make cell-based
steak.
The promise of cell-based or cultured meat supersedes the promise of plant-based meat
because it’s straight out the future playbook of the Century 21 Exposition. It’s an
eventuality where animal cells will be cultured in bioreactors, meaning the meat on your
plate will be from poultry or livestock, but minus the slaughter.
Upping the steaks
Beef, mutton, and dairy without bovines. Pork without pigs.

Chicken and eggs minus the hens. How long will it take for
scientific and commercial breakthroughs in plant and cell-based
meat to hit Indian shores?
Roshni Nair, 18 May 2019
Concerns over climate change and resource depletion are pushing startups and
researchers to consider new solutions for food security and sustainability. These include
plant-based and cultured or clean meats
Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are the biggest players in the global plant-based
meat space. Traditional meat companies like Tyson and Cargill, meanwhile, have
invested in cell-based meat startups
India's poultry consumption is set to grow manifold. It's also one of the largest beef-
exporting countries. No wonder then that institutes in Hyderabad and Mumbai are
already looking at cell-based meat research
Will alternative meat take off in India within 5-10 years? Plant-based meat stands a
better chance, because cellular agriculture is beset with regulatory and scaling issues.
But India just may surprise itself
Gatekept
the-ken.com/story/gatekept
October 28, 2016
Rohin Dharmakumar, 28 Oct 2016
It’s 8.00 a.m in India and traffic to the Times of India’s website is just warming up. Some
visitors have typed its URLs – timesofindia.com or timesofindia.indiatimes.com – into
their browsers; some have landed on one of its tens of thousands of pages via a web
search; while others clicked through to one of its stories from tweets and posts on social
networks.
Say you’re one of the visitors. And let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that you were joined by
another 9,999 visitors that day.
Perhaps you read a few stories and then head off for work. Then come back just after
lunch to check on what’s new. Some of the other visitors that day don’t come back at all,
while others make three-four visits through the day. Perhaps an average of 1.5 visits per
day might be a good number across all 10,000 of you. Meaning 15,000 visits or
“sessions” that day.
During each of those visits how many pages would you have viewed? Three? Four? Let’s
assume five.
That means 75,000 “page views” by the end of the day between the 10,000 visitors. It’s
the Times of India, so, of course, most pages have ads on them. Some have four, others
perhaps just one. Let’s say two ads for every page on average.
That’s 150,000 ads that the Times of India’s servers might show to your 10,000-strong
visitor group.
the-ken.com-Gatekept 1/7 215

The Times of India is one of India’s most sought after, premium sites. So it charges an
average of Rs 60 per thousand ads (eCPM, or effective cost per thousand impressions).
Which means it earns Rs 9000 from its advertisers for those 150,000 ads it served.
And 90 paisa. That’s what your daily browsing generates for a premier site like the TOI.
Or Rs 25-30 per month.
To flip the equation, that’s what you could possibly pay the Times of India to let you read
their entire site free of all ads.
#TOIFresh?
On 30 June, print subscribers of the Times of India, India’s leading English newspaper,
were greeted with a peel-off sticker on the front page saying, “Dear reader, thank you for
being a TOI subscriber. We’re kicking off #TOIFresh today – a sharper, cleaner and
more feature-filled website with far fewer ads for discerning readers like you. Visit
timesofindia.com/toifresh to unlock your introductory family offer.”
At the same time, all visitors from India to the Times of India’s website were met with a
similar message overlaid atop the home page, saying, “Dear reader, thank you for
choosing the TOI. We’re kicking off #TOIFresh today – a sharper, cleaner and more
feature-filled website with far fewer ads for discerning readers like you. If you’re an
existing print subscriber, take a few minutes to create a free user ID on our website and
get 6 months of complimentary access to our all-new “ad-lite” website, including for an
additional family member. From the fourth month, you just pay Rs 99 extra for
unlimited access to our website”
Within hours, thousands of print subscribers had signed up to activate their online
subscriptions, by simply entering their names, addresses, and phone numbers. They
immediately received confirmation SMSes containing a unique code to validate the
identities and subscriptions.
Meanwhile, non-subscribers too were signing up at a brisk rate, albeit at a slightly higher
price of Rs 149 monthly for access to the “ad-lite” version of the Times of India’s website.
Compared to the 6 months print subscribers were getting free, they were offered three
instead. But they too could add another family member to their account.
Both plans came with exclusive subscriber benefit programs linked to Times Internet-
related services like Uber, Gaana, Dineout, Timescard etc.
Those who didn’t want to pay were presented with another option: “Yes, you can
continue to read our website for free. But we hope you’ll understand and appreciate the
fact that hundreds of journalists and other staff who strive tirelessly to bring you the
news every day deserve a fair compensation. Please either switch off your ad-blocker
while on our website or simply whitelist our site in your ad-blocker’s settings.”

By noon, tens of thousands had signed up as new subscribers. As the new users logged
in, they found that not only had the number of ads on the site decreased drastically but
that the ones that remained were better designed and unobtrusive.
The same campaign was in play at sister publication Economic Times’ print and online
editions too.
Within the fortnight, Times of India and Economic Times had added nearly 250,000
new subscribers, which went up to 350,000 once you included many who had added
their family members to their accounts too. There was talk if these figures could be
added to the respective newspapers’ readership figures, since these were, after all,
additional readers.
Sure, there were some (or many) who grumbled about having to pay for news online, but
they were still a minority.
The ad sales and analytics teams at Times of India and Economic Times were ecstatic.
Even after adjusting for the many cases of inaccurate subscriber data, they had never had
such quality information about their readership. They now knew the gender, city,
occupations and even news preferences of their subscribers, something that till now they
were only surmising using various surrogate indicators.
The hashtags #TOIFresh and #ETFresh were leading Twitter trends as tens of thousands
of users started tweeting about the pleasant, clutter-free experience of reading the new
“ad-lite” sites.
None of this ever happened, though.
In reality, here’s what happened:on 30 June, ten of India’s leading news websites
including The Times of India, The Economic Times, The Hindustan Times, NDTV etc.
coordinated a synchronized move to ban ad-blockers. Visitors using ad-blockers to most
of these sites were blocked and given just one option – either turn off their ad-blockers
or whitelist the sites (so their ads could still bypass the ad-blockers).
Hundreds of thousands of loyal and longtime print subscribers to many of these

newspapers were suddenly treated like anonymous freeloaders. Regular online readers
had the doors shut in their faces unless they were willing to be crammed down with ads.
Many merely closed the website tabs on their browsers and went elsewhere. Others
Googled and started installing “anti-anti-adblockers” that let them bypass these
blocks.Some, we presume, must have switched off their adblockers because they either
weren’t tech-savvy enough to bypass the anti-adblockers or because they were convinced
by the newspaper’s arguments.
This is what they got.

Economic Times front page
Times of India front page
It’s no surprise why India is reported to have nearly 122 million Internet users who use
an ad-blocker, a number that’s second only to China’s 159 million according to PageFair,
an ad-tech company.
Eyeballs, yes. Attention, no?

“The chances of someone clicking on a display ad are equal to being struck by lightning.
The basic banner ad doesn’t work, but we still have a lot of the 90’s era advertising,” says
Samir Patil, publisher of online news site Scroll.in.

And yet, newspaper sites stuffed to the gills with all sorts of display ads. Why?
With a few exceptions, online versions of newspapers all started out and continue to be
run as step-children. Kept at arms-length by print editorial and management teams, the
websites of most major newspapers evolved into sort of semi-autonomous organisms
with their own cadence, style, and quirks.
“You’ll find that while the print editions (of newspapers) are relatively serious, their
websites are prurient. It’s almost schizophrenic. In fact, editorial is often an afterthought
when it comes to online,” says a senior news professional who used to work for Bennet
Coleman and Co. Ltd., the parent company of the Times of India Group.
The result? Ad sales teams that aggressively sell “roadblock” advertising units, i.e.
advertising that takes over reader’s entire screens with no regard for readership
experience. Pages stuffed choc a bloc with remnant text ads delivered by Google. And no
one responsible for either an editorial voice or a readership experience.
“You have 6-7 different people vying for reader’s eyeballs, but none for their attention,”
says the person mentioned earlier.
In this downward spiral, ad-blockers represent tech-savvy readers taking control into
their own hands because the newspapers couldn’t be bothered.
Says the editor of one of the major newspapers, “We want to stop serving crap ads to
readers, and instead give them the option of an ad-free experience. I find it surprising
that there are no such options.”
No such options exist because newspapers have been asleep at the strategy wheel for
decades.
Most do not have a direct relationship with their print subscribers because that’s
handled by vendors and distributors. They do not have a direct relationship with most of
their digital readers too (beyond setting a cookie on their devices and tracking them
around the web), because most readers see no value in logging in with their real identity.
They do not have visibility for many of the ads that appear on their site because they’re
served by third party ad networks. Finally, they do not know how their content will be
treated by powerful technology platforms like Facebook and Google that today control
the distribution and discovery of content.
The print newspaper model is famously called a “print and dump” operation because few
newspapers in India have a direct connect with their subscribers, preferring instead to
offload its products to large distributors and in turn, vendors, who deliver them to
customer homes.
Even when newer and nimbler newspapers want to encourage direct subscriptions, the
legacy structures make that unviable.

For instance, Mint, the youngest (and second largest) business newspaper claims to sell
over two-thirds of its copies via direct subscriptions to its readers. In comparison, most
of its peers sell “line copies”, or ones distributed by vendor partners.
But ironically, Mint gets hit by a double whammy because of this. Firstly, it discounts its
printed price by 40-50% in order to attract direct subscribers. And then, to add insult to
injury, it pays a further commission of 30-35% to vendors (because print copies must
still be distributed).
Mile wide, mile deep

Most newspaper groups haven’t made adequate investments in advertising technology or
audience measurement. For instance, at the Hindustan Times, even the use of
commercial analytics that can help mine reader data, like Google Analytics, Omniture,
and Chartbeat, are relatively a recent phenomenon.
The exception is the Times of India group. Under its enviable Times Internet, it has been
investing aggressively to build its own proprietary ad platform, Colombia.
A team of nearly 50 employees under Times Internet CTO Swapnil Shrivastav has been
building Colombia and weaving all of the Times Group’s various properties into it.
Already the top 30-40 ad and media agencies are learned to have been provided direct
self-serve access to Colombia, so they can create and manage their own ad campaigns
across all the Times properties.
For major advertisers, Colombia is already the third port of call after Facebook and
Google, especially for a campaign that involves massive scale.
While currently the self-serve campaigns are limited to basic demographics, location and
Times Group properties, there’s a lot of proprietary data being fed from various Times
Internet services into Colombia. For instance, close to 4 million data points are sent to
Colombia every month from Smart App, a mobile data usage tracking app. The data sent
includes things like prepaid vs. postpaid users, monthly data consumption, ARPU etc.
Meanwhile, the Smart Spends app sends data related to various spend categories of its
users. This data can then be correlated or merged with that from, say, Gaana, Times’
music streaming site.
Thus, Colombia can allow advertisers to target people who spent more than a certain
amount on annual vacations or those who are interested in mutual funds or large cap
stocks.
“Their core businesses, TV, regional content and digital sites are all growing. So legacy
players are limited by nothing. There is a shift, but people think it’s easy. But the
challenge is a mile wide and a mile deep,” says Patil.
AUTHOR
Rohin Dharmakumar

Rohin is co-founder and CEO at The Ken. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of
Management, Calcutta and an engineering degree in Computer Sciences from the
R.V.C.E., Bangalore.
View Full Profile

Glenmark, Cipla or Zydus? The winners and losers of
Covid (stocks aside)
the-ken.com/story/glenmark-cipla-or-zydus-the-winners-and-losers-of-covid-stocks-aside
January 29, 2021
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One would think that the one industry that rapidly shot up last year during the pandemic
would be pharma. One would be wrong. India’s pharma industry, worth $20 billion,
which was previously growing at the rate of 9.5-10% year-on-year, slumped to less than
half at 3-4% over the last year.
India is home to more than 3,000 pharma companies, but 26 companies control up to
70% of all drug sales. Of these, the top five domestic players are Sun Pharmaceutical
Industries, Abbott India Ltd, Cipla Ltd, Mankind Pharma and Zydus Cadila. To
understand the industry’s drop in growth, The Ken analysed sales values for the top 26,
and presented the top five in Covid and Non-Covid drug categories. The data is sourced
from pharma market research company AIOCD AWACS.
the-ken.com-Glenmark Cipla or Zydus The winners and losers of Covid stocks aside 1/4 222
Now, imagine these five companies in a Formula One car race. Each player inching past
the other, wanting to zoom ahead. But mid-race, the weather changes to stormy clouds
and rain—think: the pandemic—and sets them all back by many laps, making the finish
line of projected yearly growth impossible to cross.
It’s a bit like that.
In 2017, drug sales of Sun Pharma which were growing at 9.28% on an annual basis, grew
only 4.43% in 2020. Zydus, meanwhile, had registered 7.18% sales growth in 2017,
peaking to 12.67% in 2019, it sharply plummeted to 3.99% growth in 2020.
This is despite the unfettered sale of Covid-related drugs. Cipla and Zydus, for instance,
sold hundreds of crores worth Remdesivir, a crucial antiviral used for serious Covid
patients. While Zydus’ growth fell massively, Cipla barely managed to stay afloat with 8%
growth year-on-year from 2018 to 2020.
This is probably because Covid-related drug sales were merely a drop in the ocean.
That’s right, despite the raging pandemic that has led to over 10 million cases in India, the
sales for Covid-related (allopathic) drugs—anti-virals, antibiotics, certain categories of
vitamins and supplements from the top 26—totalled to Rs 4136.8 crore ($570 million).
This is less than the total drug sales value—all ailments considered—of just Zydus, which
saw an overall drug sale of Rs 6128.4 crore ($840 million). 
(If you’ve noticed the one company that sticks out for doing phenomenally well in 2020—
Glenmark—we’ll get to that shortly. For now, just remember that it recorded a 16.13%
growth in sales last year compared to 9.93% growth in 2019, making it the only company
to register a positive growth.)
Here’s the catch.
Pharma frenzy
Whether or not their drugs sold through the pandemic, most

pharma companies in India did well on the stock market in 2020.
But stocks don’t tell the sales story. We dove deep into data to
understand where the next Covid station is. And will the pharma
bubble hold up?
The sale of Covid drugs was merely a drop in the domestic pharma ocean, and yet there
was a blind bull run for the stocks in financial markets
Experimental drugs like Hydroxychloroquine, Remdesivir, Favipiravir and Tocilizumab

(which are yet unproven) dominated the market
Towards the end of the year, cheap steroids like Dexamethasone were found to be the
only drugs working to treat serious Covid patients
Where Covid drugs took centrestage, eyecare, sexual health, even a disease as serious as
cancer took a backseat. The drop in sales tell the story
Google India’s 2017 Focus
the-ken.com/story/google-indias-2017-focus
January 5, 2017
Long may it rain
Having conquered India’s consumer internet market, Google’s

next frontier: Enterprise solutions
Venkat Ananth, 5 Jan 2017
Only 32% of SMBs in India were using Google’s digital tools i.e maps and search listing
Google's next major play in India will be around extending its products to local
entrepreneurs, SMBs, and startups
With its active participation in the Digital India programme, Google has managed to
carve its own terms of engagement with the government
The government wants them to do more – in areas like smartphone manufacturing,

increased localisation and cybersecurity
Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai took to the stage on 4 January in New Delhi, and
announced two new initiatives — ‘Digital Unlocked’ and ‘My Business Websites’. For the
gathered media, this was a departure from Google’s usual big ticket product launches.
His audiences were elsewhere, perhaps in the bylanes of Chandni Chowk or even Zaveri
Bazaar in Mumbai. Pichai, in effect, was addressing the 51 million small and medium
businesses (SMBs) in India, who have yet to embrace the internet or go digital.
the-ken.com-Google Indias 2017 Focus 1/5 226

“I think of small businesses as the backbone of India’s economy,” Pichai said, citing
examples of entrepreneurs who had benefitted from Google’s tools like search listings
and maps. “Anyone can harness the power of technology. The internet is as much for an
established local merchant as it is for a high-flying startup. And with the internet, even a
small business can become a large one in the blink of an eye.”
Pichai cited three examples of SMBs successfully embracing digital, and benefitting from
it.
First, GoCoop, has been working with traditional weavers, to show them how to harness
the internet’s power to expand a market. While Siva Reddy visited his grandmother’s
village in 2012, he saw the decline of weaving co-ops. They knew how to weave, but they
were struggling to market their cloth. Middlemen were involved, they would overcharge,
so he would convince the weavers, some in remote parts, to put the products on his
platform, GoCoop….Today, more than a third of their customers are from overseas.
Another example, Maganlal Dresswala, a venerable offline business shows how all of this
can work for them just like a high-flying startup. They pioneered costume-making for
Mumbai’s entertainment industry in 1926…100 years later, movies are digitizing, and so
are they. Sarika…has used Google Maps and search to go beyond Bollywood buyers.
Finally, personal finance app Walnut shows how the internet can enable a small business
to become a large one overnight. They started in 2014 with an aim to simplify everything
related to finance…They had over 2 million users in November. But then,
demonetisation was announced. Walnut had become a way for people to find out which
ATMs had money, and which didn’t. You can imagine the volume of users and the
interest they had. They were able to scale quickly to meet the demand because they were
running on Google Cloud, so they’ve gone from over 2 million to over 5 million users in
the past few months.
Pichai’s colleague Rajan Anandan, Google’s vice-president for India and South Asia
added that only 32% of SMBs in India were using Google’s digital tools i.e maps and
search listing. There’s a lot of ground to cover. His, and therefore Google’s, message was
loud and clear. The company’s next major play in India will be around extending its
products to local entrepreneurs, SMBs, and startups.
Google India's 2017 agenda
The company's next major play in India will be around extending its products to local
entrepreneurs, SMBs, and startups
This is not the first time Google has reached out to SMBs. In 2013, it launched Get India
Online, in partnership with HostGator, letting businesses register a domain name for
free (for a year). While the initial response was as per the company’s expectations, it
realised that these users/businesses weren’t renewing their domains in the following
years. The company then came up with another initiative, called MyBusiness in 2014,
where SMBs (both digital and offline), could list their businesses and locate them on
maps. Anandan said that nearly 8 million businesses have benefitted from this initiative

since its launch. The recent initiative, to quote a Google India executive, is like a
“complete package”, where it would seek to introduce SMBs to a digital world, including
training them for services like advertising.
“In the SMB space, it would be safe to say that the only rival in the market to Google
right now is Microsoft,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst, and CEO of Greyhound
Research. “Google already has a mindshare, as compared to its rivals, as it is easier to
use, cheaper, more intuitive and mobile-friendly.”
None of this is surprising. Over the last two-three years, sources close to the
management say, Google has been making concerted efforts to onboard as many startups
and small businesses to its platform as possible. And through a variety of offerings, from
simple listings to enterprise solutions like cloud services and adoption of its suite of
applications like Gmail, Hangouts, Google Drive. Off-late, the company’s enterprise play
has become more visible and vocal. In December last year, it announced the setting up of
a data cloud region in Mumbai. This was preceded by an aggressive effort to woo
corporates and established startups and get them to migrate from their existing
enterprise solution to G-Suite, formerly known as Google Apps For Work.
It was done through two initiatives in 2015. One, where Google offered a cost-free period
to corporates to switch to their app suite, and the other, where it announced $20,000
worth free credits for one year for 1000 Indian startups. Today, it counts companies like
Hero MotoCorp, Mahindra and Mahindra and e-commerce company Snapdeal amongst
its list of clients. Still, cracking an already congested enterprise market could well be
Google’s toughest challenge, with existing players like Amazon Web Services and
Microsoft emerging stronger in the cloud service space, while IBM and Microsoft
pushing hard in the solutions space.
At the risk of reiterating, India is an important market for Google.
And this is why Sundar Pichai is in the country. For the third time in as many years. The
current trip would be his second since taking over as Google’s CEO in August 2015. This
time around, however, it was a mix of year-end vacationing and work. Pichai arrived in
India on 26 December and spent a week in Jaipur where he was on a private visit.
Pichai is believed to have held extensive discussions with Ravi Shankar Prasad, union
minister for law, electronics and information technology. On Thursday, Pichai will visit
his alma mater at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, where he is expected
to address a town hall gathering of students.
India is Google’s second-largest market, and its importance is highlighted by the sheer
scale of opportunity the country offers. “India shapes how we develop products in so
many ways, big and small. We learn as a company that if we solve for the people of India,
we solve for everyone around the world. That has led us to grow our team in India, and
spend more time here to ensure that our products are useful for everyone,” Pichai said

on the stage while making his opening remarks. Google’s revenue from its operations in
India for the year ending March 2016 stood at Rs 5904 crore, 44% increase from the
previous year, where it earned Rs 4108 crore.
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO
We learn as a company that if we solve for the people of India, we solve for everyone
around the world
While it enjoys a near monopoly in areas like search and platform (through Android),
Google took a rather interesting approach in 2016 in addressing problems like
connectivity, utility, and languages, through consumer-oriented products. It was a
calculated move towards winning “the next billion users”, a term Anandan uses
repeatedly to highlight India’s importance to the company. For instance, it rolled out a
free high-speed wi-fi service with state-owned Railtel in January last year. In September,
it announced India-specific products including YouTube Go, Google Allo in Hindi and
Google Stations among others. India was also among the few markets where its flagship
smartphone Google Pixel was launched.
It will be fair to say that not all of them have turned out to be a success. Allo, the
company’s much-touted rival to Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, has failed to take
off in a market where virtual assistants are yet to make a mark or even see large-scale
user adoption. YouTube too is bearing the brunt of a rather crowded video-on-demand
market, with existing content creators moving away from the platform to rivals like
Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hotstar due to sagging ad revenue.
Closer engagement with the government

Google, with its active participation in the Digital India programme, has managed to
carve its own terms of engagement with the Narendra Modi-led government. Such is
Pichai’s or even Google’s importance, that Prasad said, “There was a cabinet meeting,
and I took exactly leave from the Prime Minister, the meeting is still going on, that
Sundar Pichai of Google is waiting for me, he [the PM] said go ahead, you must go
there.” Prasad would later go on to say “Google is as much Indian as it is American.”
If one were to read between the lines, there is a growing bonhomie between Google and
the Indian government. The minister, however, wants them to do more, not just in areas
like smartphone manufacturing, but increase in localisation and cybersecurity. “The
manner in which the people of India have accepted you (Google), on that strength I am
saying, therefore Google has as much obligation for India, as you have for the USA and
the world. Therefore, Google India needs to prosper. Google India needs to tailor its
operations more to suit India’s psyche, India’s ecosystem – local languages, local
aspirations, local products, your system also, as much stationed in India, all the more
better for you,” Prasad added.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology
Google is as much Indian as it is American

“In the larger push, I want Google to be involved in a more meaningful way. I want to
make one last request to you. The more digital payments will go, there will be challenges
also – like cybersecurity, which our Prime Minister has said, is like a bloodless war. I
would appeal to Google to work more to ensure digital security.”
Cloud
Digital Unlocked
Enterprise
Google India
SMBs
Sundar Pichai
AUTHOR
Venkat Ananth
Venkat is currently in his tenth year in journalism. Prior to The Ken, he was Deputy
Content Editor at Mint as part of the newspaper’s digital team. He also wrote in-depth
features on the business of sport for the newspaper. His earlier assignments include
Yahoo! (as a columnist) and the Hindustan Times, where he began his career. Born in
Mumbai, Venkat holds a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) degree from SIES College
of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai and a Master of Arts degree in International
Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently resides in New Delhi,
where he moved nearly five years ago.
View Full Profile

Google India’s experiment to reclaim local search
the-ken.com/story/google-india-local-search
May 25, 2017
Last month, just as the Indian Premier League season was kicking into high gear, Google
India released a rather interesting television commercial. It features a couple moving into
a new house, and the lady desperate to catch up on some live cricket. But with the
television in their apartment not functional just yet, the man tries a rather unusual route.
He searches for sweet shops (or halwais) near his new house, on his phone and upon
finding one, places an order for 30 samosas, which he offers his neighbours, just so his
wife can watch the match. (Watch ad)
A screenshot of the Google India 'nearby' search advertisement
Any other internet company, say Hotstar, would have depicted how the couple could have
watched the match through streaming. Not Google. It was conscious about the product it
was selling: local search, which happens to be its latest initiative in India.
the-ken.com-Google Indias experiment to reclaim local search 1/7 231

The advertisement wasn’t a standalone development. On 13 April, it launched an Android
app called Areo (pronounced as A-ree-yo), on Play Store. Unusually enough, there was no
blog post, no press conference, nothing. The subtlety looked rather deliberate.
Areo is an aggregation service, which features food and service companies. Presently, it is
available only in two cities: Bengaluru and Mumbai. And the companies featured include
FreshMenu, Faasos and Box8 (for food), and UrbanClap and Zimmber (for services).
Google Areo | Source: Play Store
Since its launch, the app has notched up over 100,000 downloads on Play Store (as of 24
May 2017).
It is the first time that Google has launched a specific, standalone app to tap the local
search market in India. It fits its global ambitions to adapt itself to the way people search
and discover things online. More so, in an increasingly mobile world. Be it local events,
which it rolled out in the US or launching a separate search engine for jobs, which it
predictably called Google for Jobs. In August 2015, it launched a similar feature in San
Francisco, “that lets local businesses promote their services in a special box at the top of
some search results”.
A Google India spokesperson told The Ken that Areo was merely an “experiment” and
there was nothing more to add. That’s Google’s line on Areo. It is in sync with Google CEO
Sundar Pichai’s approach to make India a laboratory for some of the company’s products.

“Increasingly, we realise that we can try things in India—it’s a quick test market—if it
works, we can take it outside,” he told The Economic Times in a January interview.
However, this is an important development. Because Google is trying to solve the local
search problem differently—i.e., going where the searches are happening. In food and
services.
Going where search is
Areo is not about delivery. In fact, Google doesn’t even undertake fulfillment orders,
unlike Swiggy or UberEats, two food delivery companies Areo has constantly been
compared to since its launch. For Google, it is a means to an end. Its thinking is based on
the fact that over time, and on the response it manages to generate, such experimental
apps will become entirely invisible and integrate into its overall product.
Screenshots of the Google Areo app | Source: Play Store
Google wants to be THE destination where people not only search for restaurants and
their preferred cuisines but also make reservations and order food directly from the
search results. It is already happening in the US since 2015.
With Areo, Google is in fact quietly taking aim at other discovery platforms, namely
Justdial and Zomato. “Everyone typically got sucked into this hype about Google entering
food delivery,” said a person familiar with Google’s local search plans in India. The person
declined to be named because company policy does not authorise him to speak to the
press. “This is about local or nearby search. Not about delivery. Google wants a good share
of the food and services discovery pie, which it has lost to startups like Zomato. These are
mini search engines by themselves.”

Customers have good things to say. Since it was made a part of Google’s Areo experiment,
FreshMenu says it has gained significant traction over the last one month, acquiring
several new, first-time customers. This was also partially due to the Rs 75 discounts and
offers Google provided for early users on their first order. “We [FreshMenu] already have
a deeper relationship with Google. We were even selected for one of their startup
programmes. And through Areo, we’ve been able to only enhance our engagement,” says
Rashmi Daga, founder and chief executive officer of FreshMenu. “From our POV, we are
the ones who make the food. And in this case, Areo opens up one more channel where
FreshMenu is accessible to people. It’s like any other platform we’re listed on, Zomato,
FoodPanda, etc.”
Fair. Except, what about Zomato?
In a way, Areo is Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal’s worst nightmare come true. In
August 2015, Goyal accused Google of “ambushing Zomato’s search results” in a tweet.
Deepinder Goyal's tweet on 27 August 2015

Should it expand into something bigger than a mere experiment, Areo is first expected to
have an impact on Zomato’s listings—i.e., Google will effectively start favouring its own
services over others. “It’ll become easier to search in-app. You don’t have to go to Zomato
to search anymore. Just roll down the search bar and type,” says the person quoted above.
“And where it will hurt Zomato more, is if Google ups its search plus transact game.
Which means, you discover food, reserve a seat and place an order, all inside the Google
app, as opposed to now, where you search and then the first link takes you to Zomato,” he
adds.
Which is also why Zomato began engaging with Apple, with its CEO Tim Cook even
visiting its Gurugram office during his India trip in May last year. Zomato has been
integrated with Apple’s Map product—i.e., whenever you search for a restaurant or a cafe
on Apple Maps, it shares reviews from Zomato, besides giving you an option to seek more
information on the Zomato app.
However, it is unclear if Areo in its present form (an app) will remain an integral part of
Google’s long-term strategy in India. Google does not presently earn a cut from the orders
it facilitates through its platform. This is because the product is still in an experiment
phase.
Why local? Why now?

Areo’s timing is closely linked with the realisation about how people search online: mobile
over desktop, and local over general. Not just in India, but globally.
According to Google data, in 2014-15, the term “near me” saw a 1.3X growth on mobile in
the US. While the numbers might be a little dated, they reflect a significant, radical
evolution in how Americans searched online, and what could be expected in the years to
come.
Google also realised that it had effectively ceded search space in key areas such as e-
commerce to the likes of Amazon (globally) and Flipkart (in India), travel reviews to
TripAdvisor (globally), discovery of local businesses and other listings to Yelp (the US)
and food discovery to Zomato in India. Its hypothesis is that most people, at least on the
mobile, primarily search for specific information around their respective locations.This
might include anything from plumbers or electricians to local restaurants and grocery
shops.
1.3X
The year-on-year growth for mobile searches for "near me" in the United States (as per
2014-15 Google data)
And it now wants to win back a good part of that space.

Which is also why it brought Google Flights in India in November last year. As of now,
one can only search for the cheapest flight tickets from one destination to another. While
it is yet to enable booking flights from its search results directly, it is trying to take on
online travel agencies (OTAs) like MakeMyTrip, which are highly search dependent.
According to the latest Alexa data, nearly 48% of unique upstream visits (sites people visit
immediately before this site) come from either google.co.in or google.com. In 2015, when
it launched Flight Search, its precursor to Google Flights, it partnered with Goibibo, an
OTA, which has since merged with MakeMyTrip in October last year.
“These are early days for Google, and its impact has been minimal as far as the travel
space is concerned,” says a senior executive from a travel aggregation company. The
executive declined to be named because of company policy. “What we’re seeing in travel is
that more and more users use apps to discover and book flights directly. Even in the US,
Google hasn’t been a big needle mover.” There’s also a feeling that Google could be
playing cautious simply because it doesn’t want to cannibalise its major revenue source
(read: ads). “It’s almost like two units in the company are having a stab at each other: one,
which is focused on bringing more revenue, and the other, on building a better product,”
he adds.
48%
The number of unique visits to MakeMyTrip from Google (or google.co.in)
At a more, hyperlocal level, Google is trying to onboard as many local businesses as

possible in India, an effort it began in 2015 through Google My Business or GMB.
Through GMB, it seeks to help small and medium businesses create and manage their
information across its platform. For free. Its pitch to SMEs and local businesses is clear:
Come and list with us, and we will help you get more leads.
Even while Google believes it is trying to push more services and businesses to list
themselves on its platform, it’s being held back in India because of Street View, or the lack
of it. Last year, the home ministry rejected its request to launch Street View in India, over
security concerns. Why is this important? Because in the US, Google has now deployed its
much talked about machine-learning capabilities to analyse Street View photos and
extract business names and phone numbers, and list them automatically on its maps.
Google will also get rich data in exchange for these services being listed on its platform.
Everything from location and preferred cuisines to the frequency of delivery and average
transaction costs. What it realises is that two major data streams—food and services—
have largely been opaque to Google. Areo helps bridge that. Equally, an increased focus
on local search helps it collect all the important metadata, which its machine-learning
platforms will use to first learn and later enhance its AI-powered recommendation/search
engines. This forms a significant part of the company’s overall ‘AI-first’ vision, unveiled
earlier this month at the annual 2017 I/O conference.
Impact on aggregators like Justdial

The immediate impact was visible on the Bombay Stock Exchange, where Justdial is
listed. Two days after Google Areo launched, Justdial’s shares fell by 3.2%. The imminent
feeling among analysts was that Google’s foray into the local search and aggregation space
could only dent Justdial stocks further. Because Google would replicate what it did, in
India—i.e., display its own results above Justdial or any other competing service.
Mumbai-based Justdial claims to be the market leader for local listings in India, in spite
of losing traction in major search segments like food (Zomato), doctor information
(Practo), taxi bookings (Uber and Ola) and services (UrbanClap and HouseJoy). The
others in the space include Bengaluru-based AskLaila and Chennai-based Sulekha.
Justdial declined to comment.
Google’s entry is also expected to shake up the market in more ways than one: first, make
self-search a habit and second, using a mobile-first approach. Justdial’s growth largely
came in a phone-driven market, where people dialled a number and sought information
from a human caller at the other end. That trend, however, is on the wane, with people
preferring to search for local information themselves than rely on assisted search. Which
is why Justdial had to ramp up its efforts to launch an app, with additional features like
voice recognition.
“It is great to see Google also enter the bandwagon,” says Bal Krishn Birla, co-founder of
AskLaila.
But local firms like Justdial enjoy a significant advantage over Google with their ‘feet on
the street’ approach, which they feel is integral to the listing process. “The data collection,
sales and retention processes are very different in this domain, which the local players
have a better understanding of,” he adds.
What also works for Justdial or AskLaila is that they’ve stuck true to the old adage of
“local advertising is not bought, but sold.” What Birla means by that is, unlike startups, a
lot of local businesses already run profitable businesses. Which also means that the
likelihood of them approaching a listing service is limited. On the contrary, the listing
services have to reach out and educate them about the benefits of listing on digital
platforms.
Fundamentally, what defines local search is that the intent translates to monetisation.
When someone seeks local information, the intent is to consume.
Over the last few years, going back even a decade, Google’s approach to local search has
been rather wavering. Or half-hearted if you like. Get listings, not follow up. Today, things
have changed. In a smartphone-driven market, it believes it has both the technology and
the capability to not just play but win. Perhaps, it now wants to make up for the lost time.

Google, Microsoft circle as India mulls extracting value
from health data of 1.3 billion citizens
the-ken.com/story/google-microsoft-india-pdp-health-data-sharing
January 6, 2020
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Certain businesses manage to invent the future and win present-day battles at the same
time. In a commercial released on Fox Television in November, for a fleeting second,
Microsoft allows you to glimpse it.
“I am in India, and I’m going to see how Microsoft AI is helping people from going blind,”
says the commercial’s lead actor. For 60 seconds, it’s a wide-eyed trip down a crowded
street. A man on a bike unpacks a fundus camera, and people begin to queue up for eye
screening. The device is made by Bengaluru’s 9-year-old startup Forus Health, but it’s the
AI (artificial intelligence) from Microsoft that is doing the magic. At least that’s what the
commercial implies.
In reality, Microsoft is just getting started as far as screening of diabetic retinopathy (DR)
—a diabetes complication that affects the eye—goes. Out of some 1,700 retinal cameras
installed in India by Forus, the largest by any one device maker, Microsoft AI runs on just
a few. Less than a handful, actually. The two companies wouldn’t talk but sources at Forus
say the association is about screening and validation of the algorithm. The device checks
out a person, sends the image to the cloud, the algorithm screens it for DR, and sends its
interpretation back to the device or the doctor.
The commercial claim, therefore, of ‘helping prevent blindness in India, is over the top.
But that’s Microsoft’s AI in healthcare—top-down, publicity-driven. In sharp contrast to
Google, which is building products and databases bottom-up. In 2016, Google published
its first DR screening work in partnership with Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, and by
early 2019, it officially announced its algorithm had entered clinical use.
Top-down, bottom-up, or lateral entry (think Amazon), big tech has set its eyes on
healthcare. In the race for supremacy and greenfield business, Cloud plus AI is the new
finish line, and healthcare, the new track.
In a press release in August, Microsoft said it had ‘screened’ over 200,000 people using
“the AI-powered API across Apollo Hospitals” for cardiovascular diseases, even predicting
the risk score for some. (There’s no peer-reviewed publication yet.) Medically speaking,
this is a mere warm-up before the marathon. Nearly all hospitals in India have dark data
—unstructured data in PDFs which are hard to mine.
“This is just a fancy way of selling their Azure cloud. Hospitals don’t have digitisation to
achieve AI results. Azure or any other cloud service is just the highway, not the car.
Hospitals will have to build their own car,” says the promoter of a hospital which,
the-ken.com-Google Microsoft circle as India mulls extracting value from health data of 13 billion citizens 1/2 238
incidentally, uses Azure. “Even Starbucks has better technology [than hospitals],” he
quips.
Most big companies don’t have a commercial strategy yet. Certainly not for India, where
healthcare is fragmented and the market for such services non-existent.
set it free
Big tech makes a beeline for health data at hospitals. With the
Personal Data Protection policy in the works, India must define
the rights and permissions of owners and data co-creators.
Mustn’t it also look for its pound of, err, flesh and ask for open-
sourcing data?
Seema Singh, 6 Jan 2020
Google, Microsoft have large studies going on at some of the largest hospitals and
diagnostic chains in India. Amazon may not be far behind
While selling cloud+AI may be the initial goal, rather than selling medical software,
loads of Indian population data is being used for commercial gains
What is fair use? Can a country and an economy as big as India set the trend for making
health data a public good?
The new PDP Bill can set health data free for students, academics, small companies
the-ken.com-Google Microsoft circle as India mulls extracting value from health data of 13 billion citizens 2/2 239
Google wants its share of SHAREit’s sideloading pie
the-ken.com/story/google-wants-its-share-of-shareits-sideloading-pie
November 28, 2018
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In the bylanes of Hazaratganj, in Uttar Pradesh’s capital of Lucknow, mobile phone

retailer Ganpati Mobile is doing brisk business. Each day, around 300-400 customers
walk into its 2,200 square foot shop. But they aren’t all there to purchase cell phones. The
store is also where content—from movies to songs and even apps—is exchanged. And the
shop owners are the digital gatekeepers.
Once a purchase is made, store manager Sunil Yadav first installs Chinese peer-to-peer
(P2P) file sharing app SHAREit on users’ phones. Using this app, Yadav ships essential
apps onto users’ phones. “In three minutes flat I can send WhatsApp, Facebook, Flipkart,
Truecaller, Paytm, Google Tez,” says Yadav. Internet isn’t required for this, a type of WiFi
hotspot is all it takes.
Yadav says that 80% of the people who walk into his store are aware of the app already,
and for the 20% who are not, Yadav tells them about it since it makes his life easier.
This begins to explain SHAREit’s popularity in the country. The app claims to have 400
million Indian users, with about 200 million monthly active users (MAUs)—nearly as
many as the ubiquitous messaging app, WhatsApp. According to app analytics firm App
Annie, SHAREit was the sixth most-downloaded app in India in 2017.
Despite this, it has largely stayed out of the urban consciousness.
A file transfer app owned by the Lenovo Group, SHAREit broke out of the hardware
Chinese multinational in 2015. This was when it reached Indian shores, a time when data
was costly and the idea of sideloading was a panacea for India’s content-hungry and data-
the-ken.com-Google wants its share of SHAREits sideloading pie 1/2 240

starved masses. Back then, shops like Yadav’s plied people with content through the
medium of memory cards. Google’s mobile operating system Android allowed this kind of
sideloading, unlike Apple’s iOS.
Memory cards, though, were cumbersome. Soon, Beijing-based SHAREit took over,
spreading like wildfire. Its adopters were mostly Android users (though it’s also available
on iOS and Windows) who owned cheap smartphones and wanted content. Three factors
—costly data, no access to the Google Play Store, and poor network connectivity—ensured
that people were soon hooked to the app.
But the undiminishing popularity of SHAREit came at a cost for Google. It chipped away
at the idea of the Google Play Store as the sole destination for Android app downloads and
created a blind spot in Android’s app ecosystem. Now, the search giant, which has thus far
remained on the sidelines of sideloading, wants a piece of the action.
Sideloading and sidestepping
It began with the announcement of an engineering tweak. In June, Google said that all
apps on the Play Store will carry a file signature—a marker of sorts for Google to identify
Play Store apps.
the-ken.com-Google wants its share of SHAREits sideloading pie 2/2 241

Govt’s ‘honest mistaken belief’: 100 million rare
disease patients put on hold
the-ken.com/story/rare-disease-policy-india
February 23, 2019
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“I have broken bones while sleeping.”
P* is 34. She lives in Borivali, a suburb of Mumbai, the city where she was born and
raised. She works at an office in one of the city’s commercial hubs and spends hours on
the infamous local trains every day. Much like most people in the city.
But P’s life is starkly different from the 18 million-odd people she encounters on these
trains. She has extremely brittle bones—a result of a disorder called osteogenesis
imperfecta, or OI. “My first fracture was when I turned three, and my mom was calling my
sister and me to have some syrup at night. We decided to race each other and I slipped,”
she says. That first fracture was followed by many more in the years since, along with
eight surgeries to deal with everything from curved bones to hearing loss.
OI is one of the thousands of disorders that are classified as “rare diseases”. Most of which
are genetic disorders and affect a small fraction of the population. (According to the
Indian Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation, about 1 in 10,000 people are estimated to
have OI.)
But collectively, these rare diseases are estimated to affect 5-8% of Indians—between 70
million and 100 million people in all, who suffer from the likes of haemophilia, Duchenne
muscular dystrophy, Pompe disease and spinal muscular atrophy. And some experts think
the number may be much higher.
The majority of these diseases either have no cure, like OI, or require treatment that runs
into hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more—over the course of a person’s life.
India’s health ministry in 2017 put in place a national rare disease policy, which would
use “a multipronged and multisectoral approach to build India’s capacity to tackle rare
diseases comprehensively”. But three months ago, in December 2018, the government
dropped the policy, telling the Supreme Court that it was unimplementable. And that a Rs
100-crore ($14 million) fund to cover state-sponsored treatment of rare diseases had
never been allocated, due to an “honest mistaken belief”.
Earlier this month, in response to a public interest litigation case filed by patient groups
in the Delhi High Court, the health ministry announced it would have a new policy out in
nine months. February is also rare disease awareness month, with the last day celebrated
as a global Rare Disease Day.
the-ken.com-Govts honest mistaken belief 100 million rare disease patients put on hold 1/3 242
Ill defined
The definition of 'rare disease' varies from country to country. In the US, it's anything that
affects fewer than 200,000 people. In Europe, it's 1 in 2,000 or fewer. India? There's no
definition at all
Researchers, advocacy groups and health experts are in equal parts hopeful and sceptical.
Policy limbo
After dropping the "unimplementable" 2017 national rare

diseases policy in December last year, and in the face of multiple
court cases, India's health ministry has promised a new policy in
nine months. But will it be enough for millions with spinal
muscular atrophy, brittle bone disease and more?
Pranav Srivilasan, 23 Feb 2019
"Rare diseases" affect only a tiny slice of the population—but in a country of India's
scale, they add up to anywhere between 70 million and 100 million people
Most of these diseases have no cure or treatment, and all too often, it just doesn't make
sense for pharma companies to invest in them
But thanks to favourable laws and incentives in places like the US and Europe, global
sales of "orphan" drugs have risen far faster than their regular counterparts
Can India—where affordability and access are both huge issues—come up with its own
solution to the intrinsic demand-supply problem of rare diseases?
Gradeup, Lido, Enguru go from niche to norm
the-ken.com/story/from-niche-to-norm-edtech
April 30, 2020
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Six-year-old English learning platform Enguru has an enviable advantage over many
other edtechs. In 2018, less than a year after securing a modest $2.5 million equity
investment from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, it found a home on the
JioPhone, Reliance Jio’s sub-$16 feature phone. It was a match made in heaven—
JioPhone’s target demographic is low-income, first-time internet users, the exact
audience for whom learning English is aspirational.
With the JioPhone outselling smartphones in 2018, Enguru rapidly grew to a solid base
of 35 million users. Monetising these users, though, was difficult. This meant that a
majority of Enguru’s content, pre-recorded videos and online exercises, had to remain
free, says Arshan Vakil, founder and CEO of Enguru.
Until India went into a nationwide lockdown.
The Covid-19 tidal wave crashed over most other businesses but, for the edtech industry,
it was a massive shot in the arm. Now, Enguru’s paid offerings have found an
unprecedented uptake in users.
It took Enguru less than two months to register a 200% spike in attendance for its
recently-launched Rs 5-a-day live classes. The company had to, in a matter of weeks,
repackage content, launch new subscription plans, and push forward the launch of its
“kid-friendly” learning content. The company’s only sources of revenue before this, says
Vakil, were its business-to-business clients like hotels and retail stores, which bought
English-learning packages to train employees.
“Attitudes towards online learning, especially for younger students, might have only
shifted in two to three years. But now, without any other option, most parents are going to
give it a shot,” says Vikas Verma, director at Mumbai-based venture capital firm Avaana.
Verma predicts that the customer acquisition cost for edtechs will drop drastically, from a
pre-Covid high of Rs 25,000 ($329).
“There is an immense pull factor right now,” says Verma. And edtech companies are doing
their best to take advantage.
China Story
Educational apps, according to mobile data analytic platform Qimai.cn, is second-fastest
growing app category in China, moving ahead of social media and entertainment apps
the-ken.com-Gradeup Lido Enguru go from niche to norm 1/2 245

Bigger companies like Byju’s, Vedantu, and Unacademy responded to the crisis by
offering their content and live classes for free. While this will grab eyeballs and potentially
drive sign-ups, says Verma, the business models—of self-learning tools and one-to-many
broadcast classes—are unlikely to fill the school-sized hole in the lives of younger
students.
Front and centre
Niche and medium-sized edtech businesses have a tidal wave of

new users and in the offing is a combination of new products and
business model pivots. But the threats of big edtech and an
unstable investor market are always around the corner
Olina Banerji, 30 Apr 2020
Smaller, niche edtech firms are emerging from the shadows of big players like Byju's
and Vedantu to claim new territory
Enguru saw a 200% spike in attendance in two weeks; customer acquisition cost for Lido
Learning plummeted by 50%
They’re adding new products, online pivots and fresh subscription plans to their offers to
retain their user base
But niche edtech can’t really topple the existing hierarchy, say VCs. Especially not in
this fundraising environment
the-ken.com-Gradeup Lido Enguru go from niche to norm 2/2 246

Grocery and the illusion of an online-offline divide
the-ken.com/story/grocery-and-the-illusion-of-an-online-offline-divide
December 30, 2020
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Grocery retail is a business like none other in India. It’s got large business houses,
multinational behemoths, well-funded startups, and millions of resilient neighbourhood
stores. And all of them are scrambling for the opportunity to become the destination of
choice for a customer’s weekly or monthly shopping. And in a country of nearly 1.4
billion, that opportunity is a gargantuan one indeed.
The pandemic not only made the $460 billion grocery retail market the centre of
attention but also made the offline-online binary seem simplistic.
Urban residents walking to the gates of their apartment complexes to collect their online
orders became a common sight during the lockdown. E-grocers were now a closer
substitute for supermarkets and kiranas (mom-and-pop neighbourhood stores) than
they had ever been.
The coming year will see the already paper-thin wall between them come tearing down.
The future of brick-and-mortar chains is, not surprisingly, in being omnichannel players.
Reliance Retail is a case in point. The country’s largest supermarket chain also wants to
be an online giant. In May, Reliance rolled out its online grocery service, JioMart , in
200 cities.
E-grocers would be able to serve more pin codes faster if they could deliver from a
network of supermarkets in addition to their warehouses. JioMart went one step further
—it relies not just on Reliance’s 800 supermarkets but also on a vast network of kiranas,
giving it an on-ground presence unlike any other company.
the-ken.com-Grocery and the illusion of an online-offline divide 1/2 247

That train of thought was also what prompted Amazon to buy a 3.6% indirect stake in
Future Retail in August 2019, with an intention to up its stake later. Future Retail owns
the BigBazaar chain of supermarkets. The move could have also given Amazon an edge
of its arch-rival, the Walmart-owned Flipkart.
But Reliance pipped Amazon at the post four months ago by striking a deal to buy Future
Group’s retail, wholesale, and logistics businesses for Rs 24,700 crore ($3.4 billion).
Amazon has contested the acquisition, which is now the subject of a legal battle .
AUTHOR
Seetharaman G
Starting out as a business journalist in 2008, Seetharaman has written about energy,
climate change, retail, banking, and technology. He has worked with Business Today, a
fortnightly, and the Sunday edition of The Economic Times.
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-Grocery and the illusion of an online-offline divide 2/2 248

GSAT-11 delayed; will Isro allow private satellite
broadband now?
the-ken.com/story/gsat-11-delayed-will-isro-allow-private-satellite-broadband-now
April 30, 2018
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Space is a ruthless environment, and space business, a battle of resources and grit. Every
time a big satellite or rocket goes up, an epic event of adventure and exploration is part of
the fare. The last two weeks brought to light all of this and more. The Indian space
agency’s heaviest satellite till date, GSAT-11, which was parked in French Guiana for a lift-
off in mid-May, was recalled due to a snag. The only official communication to come out
of Antriksh Bhavan in Bengaluru was that it was “rescheduled”, and that “the revised
launch date will be communicated subsequently”.
Once again, the signalling was lost. And we are not talking space. Increasingly, the Indian
Space Research Organisation (Isro) looks to be in a reactive mode. GSAT-11 is a high-
throughput satellite with 40 transponders in frequency bands, Ku and Ka, that are
primarily meant for direct broadcast and broadband from space. Who are its customers?
State-owned telecom companies who need to take broadband to unserved regions under
the aggressive “Digital India” drive? Or satellite operators and service providers who’d be
happy to consider satellite as an option to sell high-speed broadband to people across the
country? It’s not public yet, but most likely, it’s the former.
Before the GSAT-11 news broke, in a closed-door meeting in Delhi on 18 April, the Isro
chairman, K Sivan, met leading broadcasters who’ve been airing the view that the space
agency has gridlocked their industry. Indian broadcasters, who are using transponders on
foreign satellites, have been asked to shift to Isro satellites.
You’d think if the government is forcing the move, it’d offer some benefits to the industry
in lieu of asking to break contractual agreements with foreign satellite operators. No,
nothing of that sort is in order. Instead, people privy to the 18 April meeting say, once
again, Isro has given no clarity on its transponder capacity or timelines on the GSAT
series of communication satellites.
I see a lot of interest and enthusiasm among young Indian entrepreneurs. I am concerned
and worried that this enthusiasm may soon fizzle out and die for want of decisive and
encouraging action from the authorities
Raghu Das, founder Aniara Communications
As it happened, after the discussion, the Isro chairman’s team was “embarrassed” at the
way the space agency has engaged with the industry so far. He promised to make
transponder capacity and satellite details available on their website soon. “The chairman
the-ken.com-GSAT-11 delayed will Isro allow private satellite broadband now 1/3 249
said he did not want to comment on what his predecessors did, but agreed to bring out a
stakeholders engagement plan,” said a person who followed that meeting.
All of this brings us to GSAT-11 and its follow-on satellite GSAT-20, both meant to be in
orbit this year to beam internet from space. Assuming their launch is not further delayed
(also assuming that unlike in the past, they have a business plan in place to utilise all the
broadband transponders), Isro transponders will still not be sufficient to address the gap
that broadband services have.
Give Me Some Space
Private companies eager to bring broadband to India. A capacity

glut in the global market. Crashing prices. Foreign capital at
hand. A widening chasm between demand and supply—a perfect
storm to usher in internet from above. But Isro has other
thoughts
GSAT-11 was supposed to beam 14Gpbs broadband from June. Its delay might also
push GSAT-20, to launch later this year, further out
Private companies are eager to enter satellite broadband or Ka-band services in India,
but Antrix has kept them at bay
Given the recent collision of TV broadcasters and Isro, the chairman, in an 18 April
meeting in Delhi, promised more transparency and engagement with the users
With regulatory clarity, dish TV became a successful industry. There's no reason why
dish internet cannot do the same
Has Mumbai lost the startup fight to Bengaluru?
the-ken.com/story/has-mumbai-lost-the-startup-fight-to-bengaluru
October 21, 2016
City wars
Mumbai or Bengaluru is a subject that has been discussed ad

infinitum. Yet, it is something that trips many founders up and
rankles many others. We take you through one long evening to
show how
Patanjali Pahwa, 21 Oct 2016
The presence of legacy companies in Bengaluru makes it easier to hire talent in
technology
Real estate in Mumbai is another stumbling block for startups
Bengaluru saw angel investors make 70 deals in 2016 with almost $15 million in capital
infused into firms. Mumbai, on the other hand, saw 32 deals and $14 million
investments
Let’s assume The Ken can give you access to a time machine. It will take you back two
years from today to Powai in Mumbai. No, you can’t take back an almanac. Those are
them rules. Humour us.
Now, it is 2014, look around. Mumbai is bursting with great ideas. Rahul Yadav’s
Housing is doing some crazy things, raising big money. Ola is starting to lay groundwork
for a $200 million round from Softbank. Quikr just announced a $60 million capital
the-ken.com-Has Mumbai lost the startup fight to Bengaluru 1/6 252

infusion. This new food tech company, TinyOwl, seems to be finding its wings.
PepperFry and Craftsvilla are cornering a niche. Mumbai is the place to be.
We’re back in 2016. Housing is dying, TinyOwl is dead. Ola and Quikr have left for
Bengaluru. Porter.in, which came up, just after you left, too, has moved cities. Is
Mumbai’s promise as a startup hub over?
Yes, there have been Twitter spats over this, Quora posts and Facebook notes. But we
want to have our say, and show it too.
Quikr says when it had to scale, it had to leave. Bangalore gave it a cheaper and deeper
talent pool. The real estate costs were lower and its legacy of being home to Infosys and
Wipro meant that people were just more entrepreneurial. “Networking is better. It is
easier to meet people at short notice once you are in Bengaluru,” says Atul Tewari, COO,
Quikr.
Ola mirrors the line and Porter says South India is more receptive to technology.
Damning statements.
But there are a few entrepreneurs in Mumbai who can’t help but disagree. It isn’t hard to
find them either. They meet every two weeks, get drunk and talk. Most of them are angel
funded and are part of a 256-person WhatsApp group, which was started by Shubham
Rai. He is the co-founder of a professional social networking app called Nodd. And a few
Thursdays ago, there was one such meet at an upscale Bandra pub.
Atul Tewari, COO, Quikr
Networking is better. It is easier to meet people at short notice once you are in Bengaluru
Let’s get it started

It is 9pm, almost everyone has settled in. The bar is open and pizzas have been ordered.
A few of them, who have had some craft beers, are trying to flirt with two attractive
women. No, they are not part of the party. One works in advertising, the other in a small
startup. On the big screen, a rerun of the Olympics plays and is summarily ignored. The
bar is full and so are the tables. The music is loud. Everyone is buzzing.
A simple question is asked: Three of the biggest startups in Mumbai have moved base to
Bengaluru. Is Bengaluru the be-all and end-all of startups?
The questions start to make their way across the group. The typical reaction is to roll
their eyes and focus on the beer and the work at hand: score a lead for the business.
In Mumbai, it is always dhanda first.
Zainul Abbasi is not drinking. He has to drive. After being coaxed into a beer, he decides
to take a stab at the question.

“Why do most startups go to Bengaluru? Easier access to technology? What technology?
Most companies that have moved are app-based. Are you telling me they can’t find Java
developers in Mumbai to work on your app?” yells Abbasi, co-founder, Phi Robotics. The
pint was drained reasonably quickly. He really wants to make the point and insists on
stepping out. And, to be fair, very few can beat Sia telling the bar that she loves cheap
thrills.
Once outside, he fishes in his pocket for a cigarette. The smoking zone is dominated by
others from the group making connections and a few have spent almost the entire
evening there. A young couple is smoking weed on another floor. Bins are already
overflowing with empty cigarette packets.
Through the haze, Abbasi dismisses the argument that the talent pool isn’t deep enough
in Mumbai. Bengaluru has an IIM, an IIT in neighbouring Chennai and ISB in
Hyderabad. Mumbai has an IIT, an SP Jain and a flock of engineering and business
schools in Goa.
Okay, hiring freshers is never a problem, hiring experienced hands at reasonable costs is
the issue. Quikr, for example, went from a 70-person tech team in Mumbai to a 400-man
army in Bengaluru. “Seasoned hands with a few years of experience are difficult to find
in Mumbai,” says Quikr’s Tewari.
Arnaud Lorie, an Israeli national in Mumbai running a jewelry marketplace called Joolz,
who is also at the party, agrees with Quikr. He is nursing a beer. His company raised
around $500,000 recently and wanted to hire a CTO but the salaries were twice as
expensive as they would be in Bengaluru. He ended up outsourcing the tech functions.
Abbasi is not around to hear any of this. He is now ambushed by a woman who runs a
garbage disposal startup. She is trying to explore “synergy”. Both awkwardly smile and
nod.
Location, Location, Location

Rai wanders over. He is on his third rum and coke and is very pleased with himself. Over
60 people have come to the party. This group is an eclectic mix–entrepreneurs, angel
investors, lawyers and a few heads of banking verticals. The same question is posed to
Rai. He travels to Bengaluru often and loves the ecosystem there but believes Mumbai is
still the next big thing. He disagrees that real estate costs force people outside the city.
He presents PepperFry as an example, which has a huge office in an unfancied suburb of
Mumbai: Kanjur Marg. Craftsvilla has its offices in Goregaon. He leans to his right when
he has had a few to drink. A little has sloshed on his shirt. There is cigarette ash on his
polished black shoes.

The woman is gone and Abbasi joins the conversation again. He has an office in Thane.
Five others who have gathered to listen to the conversation agree that real estate can’t be
the reason to move, they argue that the rent in Navi Mumbai and Thane is comparable to
Bengaluru. It’s suddenly become a Bengaluru vs Mumbai fight. The gloves could come
off, but the presence of a journalist stops them. Most of them are too jaded from the beer
and the fact that it is approaching 11.30pm. But they want to be heard. “Will I be
quoted?” asks one. Sure. “Please don’t. I am not sure if my investor would like me
badmouthing Bengaluru,” he says. Others laugh. “I did that once in front of him. Big
mistake,” he explains. Suddenly, the mood darkens. Offending investors is serious
business.
But traveling to Mumbai’s satellite cities could be a pain, right?
“It takes me 90 minutes to drive from my house in South Bombay to my office in Navi
Mumbai. It takes the same amount to drive to Whitefield from Koramangala,” says the
entrepreneur.
Let’s leave the party for a bit once again.
The real estate argument is a fallacy. Mumbai is more expensive than Bengaluru. If you
really want to compare apples to apples, then the far reaches of Bengaluru will still be
cheaper than Mumbai. The rent in Mumbai’s top business district, Bandra-Kurla

Complex, is Rs 240 a square foot and in Bangalore, MG Road, is a shade less than Rs
150.
The costs
The rent in Mumbai’s top business district, Bandra-Kurla Complex, is Rs 240 a square
foot and in Bangalore, MG Road, is a shade less than Rs 150
“When you want to grow at scale, Mumbai just does not make sense. It becomes too
expensive. The Rs 90 difference is biting,” says Ashutosh Limaye, head of research,
Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj.
The cheapest business district of Bengaluru—Whitefield—offers rents at Rs 45-55 per

square foot, compared to Andheri-Kurla, which offers at Rs 100. Even home-renting is
cheaper in the Karnataka capital compared to Mumbai. The rents in the poshest districts
in Bengaluru are comparable to those in Bandra.
The economics simply favour Bengaluru.
One for the road

It is 1am and the party has now whittled to three people, the others have gone home. But
the question still seems to rankle those remaining. So, a decision is made to move to
another bar, which finds a way to serve its patrons until 6am. We’ll keep the name and
location of this bar under wraps. Getting into the bar requires a secret variation of a clap
and a climb up three flights of stairs into the catacombs of a building that doesn’t appear
to have more than one floor.
Our group has ruled out real estate costs now. And the suggestion that it could be
weather has been laughed at. Another round of beer and rum is ordered.
Now, they conclude that the only reason startups shift to Bengaluru has to be because
there is pressure from VCs to move closer to them, considering that most big-ticket
investors such as Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners are headquartered in Bengaluru.
They have essentially made the accessibility argument and may have stumbled onto
something. According to a survey conducted by the government, in 2015-16, there were
19,000 tech-enabled startups in the country. A Nasscom report released in 2015 states
that 26% of the startups in India are headquartered in Bengaluru, 23% in Delhi NCR and
just 17% in Mumbai. A year before that, Bengaluru saw almost 30% of the country’s
startups headquartered within its limits.
So, obviously, the VCs set up shop in Bangalore. And that meant more cash was floating
in the system.
According to Tracxn, Bangalore saw angel investors make 70 deals in 2016 with almost
$15 million in capital infused into firms. Mumbai, on the other hand, saw 32 deals and
$14 million investments while Delhi saw 63 deals and $11.5 million in investments.

So, more companies got funded in Bengaluru, compared to Mumbai. When you look at
Series C and beyond, Bengaluru saw 16 deals worth $535 million in 2016; Mumbai,
meanwhile, saw 12 deals worth $400 million and Delhi NCR saw 16 deals worth $1
billion. If the WalMart investing $1 billion in Flipkart reports are to be believed,
Bengaluru blows Mumbai out of the water. Not to rub it in, Mumbai does not have a
single unicorn.
“Mumbai is right now playing the role of an incubator. It will take time to see results,”
says Rai as he pours himself another drink.
Just like an incubator, the companies, however, will have to graduate and step into the
real world. As soon as companies need to scale in a big way; real estate, access to capital
and cheap talent starts to play a part. None of that is available in Mumbai, right now. It
means that the real world, in Rai’s metaphor, is Bengaluru.
But what about Delhi, you ask? We’ll tell you next time.
This post was updated to correct a spelling error.
AUTHOR
Patanjali Pahwa
Patanjali has spent over seven years in journalism. He last worked at Business Standard
as Principal Correspondent, where he wrote on startups, e-commerce companies and
venture capital. He has worked at an array of institutions, which include Forbes India,
Caravan and Outlook Business. He is a Mumbaikar, born and brought up. Patanjali did
his BSc in IT from Mumbai University and then got his journalism degree from IIJNM in
Bangalore. He is enamoured by Ernest Hemingway and Tom Waits and may try to sneak
in references to them in his stories.
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HCG is fighting the govt to keep cancer drugs costly…
the-ken.com/story/hcg-is-fighting-the-govt-to-keep-cancer-drugs-costly
April 24, 2019
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Having spent over three decades practising Oncology in the US and India, Dr BS
Ajaikumar is hardly one for the limelight. Just last month, however, Dr Ajaikumar,
chairman and CEO of Healthcare Global Enterprises (HCG), India’s largest private chain
of cancer hospitals, found himself the villain of the piece on social media.
He was branded “morally bankrupt” for challenging a government price control order in
court. An unpopular move, given that the government order is expected to benefit 22 lakh
cancer patients in the country and lead to annual savings in the ballpark of Rs 800
crore ($114 million) for the affected people.
Dr Ajaikumar, though, isn’t fazed by the criticism. “My patients know what I am. I am
fighting this case based on principles. If I cared about optics, I wouldn’t have come this
far,” he says candidly, seated in his plush corporate office in Bengaluru. Indeed, his
opposition to the government order aside, it is hard to see the man as an antagonist. On
the walk to his conference room, for example, it’s impossible to miss the pictures of cancer
patients served by HCG that hang on a thread within one of the various many cabins.
“I came to India with a vision—to make cancer care accessible,” he says, matter-of-factly.
Bengaluru-headquartered HCG, which he founded in 1998, now has 26 centres across the
country. Each year, the chain provides advanced cancer care to 75,000 new patients and
500,000 follow up cases.
Yet, as we sit across from each other, it’s clear to both of us that Dr Ajaikumar is decidedly
unpopular with the masses. Here’s why: In a bid to help cancer patients reeling under
high treatment costs, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), India’s apex
pharmaceutical pricing authority, capped the trade margins of 42 non-scheduled cancer
drugs at 30% on 27 February. This brought down the retail prices of many brands of
cancer medication by up to 87%. This came into effect on 8 March.
the-ken.com-HCG is fighting the govt to keep cancer drugs costly 1/3 258
February’s price-capping is in addition to 57 cancer drugs that were already under price
control as scheduled formulations. All told, this accounts for some 517 brands whose
prices have been capped. After the latest order, while 73 are priced above Rs 10,000, the
vast majority—434 brands—are priced below Rs 10,000. A single 60mg injection of the
drug cabazitaxel under the brand name Arbaz, for example, has seen its price slashed
73.85%—from Rs 48,000 to Rs 12,552. This is the order that HCG has challenged.
But if Dr Ajaikumar claims to be about cancer access, and the price-capping is seemingly
pro-access, then what explains the HCG head’s opposition?
Self goal
So the poor don’t end up subsidising the rich instead

Suraksha P, 24 Apr 2019
On 27 February, India's apex pharmaceutical pricing authority capped the trade margin
of 42 cancer drugs at 30%
All told, some 517 brands of cancer medication have now seen their prices drop as a
result of price control. Some by up to 87%
HCG, India's largest private chain of cancer hospitals, challenged the order in the
Karnataka High Court
While HCG has faced backlash for this, it argues that price control will only hurt the
vulnerable patients it was meant to help
Healthy, Wellthy & Cipla: a digital therapy reminder for
Indian pharma
the-ken.com/story/digital-therapy
April 2, 2019
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It’s now or never.
Indian pharma has watched from the sidelines as e-pharmacies like 1mg and Medlife have
swooped in, tossed distribution channels out, and increasingly become the direct link
between pharma companies and patients. They hold patient data and monetise for
behaviour; which, in pharma terms, is a bit of a superpower.
It’s now or never because if Indian pharma can’t fix this, it loses its connection with the
one thing that matters—the patient.
The only way out of this tricky situation for pharma companies is to beat e-pharmacies at
their own game. Enter digital therapy.
Digital therapy is a kind of software, typically a mobile app, used by the patient to
complement the treatment of the disease. For instance, the application nudges patients of
chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes to exercise and eat right. It is technology
that aids pharma companies in improving clinical outcomes, their compliance with the
drug regime, and their understanding of patients’ behaviour, as in the case of Welldoc and
Omada Health, internationally.
Now, in a first for India, drug manufacturer Cipla has bought a stake in a digital therapy
company, Wellthy Therapeutics. And in a first for the world, one can finally draw a
comparison between a pharma company and a fast-food chain—for McDonald’s, too, has
the-ken.com-Healthy Wellthy amp Cipla a digital therapy reminder for Indian pharma 1/2 261
invested in machine learning to feed their customers’ needs better. Both mark a shift
towards the focused use of a new generation of digital tools, with big companies across
sectors realising their significance.
This partnership between India’s largest (in terms of sales) drug manufacturer and a
three-year-old startup attempts to combine drug therapies for diabetes and
cardiovascular disease with digital therapies that manage these diseases via a mobile
application.
Nifty? Yes. But also a sign of things to come.
Cipla, which earned a revenue of Rs 15,219 crore ($2.2 billion) in the year ended March
2018, the highest among all Indian pharma companies, isn’t the only pharma company
adopting digital therapy in the near future. Because why else would it bet on a startup that
earned a meagre revenue of Rs 12 lakh ($17,000) after burning Rs 3.8 crore ($546,000) in
the same year its own revenues soared over the $2 billion mark? And bet Rs 10.5 crore
($1.5 million) on an 11.71% stake at that.
Cipla’s investment is built on the hope for a digital treatment for Indian pharma. One
through which digital therapies manage diseases by pushing patients to stay healthy—
exercise, eat right and do whatever the physician says, specifically, never missing a dose of
the prescribed medicine.
In fact, this sort of therapy could be key to arresting the widespread growth of certain
diseases. Lifestyle diseases, for one, cannot be cured with pills alone.
the-ken.com-Healthy Wellthy amp Cipla a digital therapy reminder for Indian pharma 2/2 262
Herbal drugs get a Covid push but at the cost of your
liver
the-ken.com/story/herbal-drugs-get-a-covid-push-but-at-the-cost-of-your-liver
March 31, 2021
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By now, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, doctors have an idea of what to expect. Viral
pneumonia. Blood clots. Long-Covid . But there’s a second-order effect that has been
quietly and insidiously slipping through the cracks, hidden amidst countless such cases
brought to the hospital—liver injuries.
The increasingly unfettered, over-the-counter (OTC) consumption of “immunity

boosting” ayurvedic herbs as a safeguard against Covid is taking its toll on the liver, the
organ that’s basically a processing plant for the body’s toxins.
At Mumbai’s two leading hospitals—Apollo and Jaslok—of all the liver injury cases its
senior hepatologist Aabha Nagral handled during the pandemic, over 10 patients were
diagnosed with liver injuries induced by herbal medicines. One of them was a 20-year-old
who had consumed over-the-counter ayurvedic drugs for three to four months. He
showed classic signs of jaundice and his bilirubin levels were through the roof—almost
20X the normal. Nagral ruled out viral sources that could have caused him infection.
Neither was he obese or alcoholic.
“During the pandemic year, we received at least six cases of giloy – induced liver injury,”
Arvinder Soin told The Ken. Soin, a liver transplant surgeon, is the chairman of the Centre
for Liver Transplantation at Gurugram’s Medanta-The Medicity Hospital.
Among the close-to-300 cases of liver failure the Centre sees in a year, up to 15 can be
traced to Ayurvedic Herbal Medicine (AHM) or Complementary and Alternative Medicine
(CAM)-induced liver injury. “Two of the six cases we saw in 2020 reached end-stage liver
failure but could not receive a liver transplant. The rest are slowly recovering,” says Soin.
the-ken.com-Herbal drugs get a Covid push but at the cost of your liver 1/3 263
According to data from Ministry of AYUSH , close to 677 suspected Adverse Drug
Reactions have been reported between January 2019 and February 2021.
The hidden deal
Immunity boosting herbal powders, teas, concoctions are all the

rage now but most of them are over-the-counter preparations and
are taken with little to no supervision from licensed practitioners.
The result is a quiet but insidious uptick in liver injuries
Maitri Porecha, 31 Mar 2021
Herbal medicines are the second-most common cause for liver failure after anti-
tuberculosis drugs, say some doctors
Their easily-available nature means they are prone to being stocked up, much like
instant noodles
Centre and state governments are also guilty, advocating for and distributing various
herbal concoctions
There’s little to no information about the safety of these medicines; the $10 billion
industry is poorly regulated with variable standards
Higher quality, lower costs: India’s cancer grid promise
the-ken.com/story/higher-quality-lower-costs-indias-cancer-grid-promise
July 4, 2019
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No matter the time of day, the visitors in queue at Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital
(TMH) always have a discomfiting poise. Most have travelled long distances; but the
group seems curated by one illness, cancer. An illness that can be manageable, like a
chronic disease, but often isn’t.
In 2012, the leadership at TMH, the largest cancer centre in the country, took a decisive
step to address parts of the colossal task at hand. Having brought existing centres in
Guwahati, Chandigarh and Visakhapatnam into its fold that year, it set about framing
common standards, setting up an IT platform, and sharing best practices—the entire
structure for a functional network.
Then, in a benevolent gesture, they decided to open this up to scores of regional cancer
centres across India. Thus, the National Cancer Grid (NCG) was born. An unprecedented
initiative to tame a disease that the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates will
affect one in three household in India by next year. The numbers look ominous—1.73
million new cases by 2020, with only 12.3% of patients receiving early treatment.
Already under Ayushman Bharat—the government’s universal healthcare insurance

scheme which covers 40% of the population—30% of reimbursements are for cancer
treatment. Is that money optimally spent? It’s certainly worth examining since there are
rumours the scheme may be expanded to cover more people.
Seven years on, the NCG sees 700,000 new cancer patients pass through its network of
177 centres each year. Some of the world’s leading cancer centres are even helping the
NCG build out its capabilities since it’s also serving 40-plus countries in one way or
the-ken.com-Higher quality lower costs Indias cancer grid promise 1/2 266
another. These include the National Cancer Institute and American Society for Clinical
Oncology in the US, King’s College London, and Cancer Research UK.
Fast emerging as a global health centre, could NCG also impact the sprawling, yet largely
unregulated, private healthcare providers in India which serve the remaining 60% of
cancer patients? CS Pramesh thinks it could. A director at TMH, Pramesh, a practising
thoracic surgeon and the lead architect of NCG, talks about this democratic, ground-up
machinery that has caught the world’s attention.
The Ken: Why have a cancer grid?
The single most important mandate of NCG is to have uniform standards of care. Look at
the patients that come here or at any top centre; only a small percent comes from the state
where the centre is. At TMH, only 15% of our patients come from Mumbai; 25% from
other parts of Maharashtra. We geotagged 75,000 patients (map below). A large
percentage comes from pockets like North, East, or North-East; not so much from the
West or the South.
Overall, the biggest challenge for patients is to stay here with their family. Think of the
cost of staying in Mumbai, the loss of income for the family… So our main aim was to
provide the same level of care close to their homes.
the-ken.com-Higher quality lower costs Indias cancer grid promise 2/2 267
Home in time for Christmas
the-ken.com/story/janice-pariat-christmas-shillong
December 23, 2018
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Home is wherever we happen to set up the crib at Christmas.
For the last 18 years this has mostly been Shillong, but before that, it was one tea estate
after another all across Assam. The ritual, though, remained the same. We’d take them
out carefully, those ceramic figurines, and place them on the mantelpiece.
They might have occupied pride of place, but our crib—the model of the Nativity of Christ
—could hardly be considered grand. The figurines less than an inch, but the set complete:
Mother Mary kneeling, brown-robed Joseph, a lowly shepherd holding hat to heart in
reverence, three wise men and their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, an angel in
white, a few barn animals and, of course, baby Jesus looking remarkably content on his
bed of hay. He is placed at the centre; all the others cluster around him in what’s come to
be immutably fixed positions. The figurines have been with us for as long as I can
remember—gifted to my mother by my grand-aunt Grace in 1989.
In a household that didn’t, and still doesn’t, throw anything away unless irrefutably
broken, we’ve never replaced the Nativity set, despite my adolescent pleas to buy
something grander. In my head, I envisioned something close to an Italian presepe—a
miniature village scene, like the one I once saw in Naples, busy as a Bruegel painting, the
manger tucked away in a corner lost amid the playing children, the working men and
women.
To make up for our crib’s diminutive proportions, I’d try and craft elaborate
surroundings. Straw, scissored to tiny pieces, strewn generously around the figurines.
Once, an upside-down crystal bowl as a nativity pedestal. Another December, I enlisted
the-ken.com-Home in time for Christmas 1/2 268

the help of our tea estate carpenter to make a wooden backdrop, before which the holy
family could be arranged.
In all honesty, it didn’t matter. What was important was they were there, and, unlike the
rest of the decorations, simple and unadorned. I realise now, that our crib, tiny as it was,
lay at the heart of our Christmas rituals. And wherever we went, it went with us.
A small portable family, a small portable home
***
I was born in transit. For that was the way of life for “tea planters”—posted to one estate
and then another once every few years. When I was three, we moved to Harchurah TE,
near Tezpur, for an unusually long time. It was my home until I turned 10. And there I
grew up in busy solitude. Around me, a veritable farm with ducks, goats, rabbits,
chickens. Inside, gigantic bookshelves. Ridiculously idyllic as it may sound, that was my
childhood.
When I was sent off to school, it was the winter holidays my sister and I looked forward to
most.
the-ken.com-Home in time for Christmas 2/2 269

Home is where the heart is
the-ken.com/story/prem-panicker-going-home
December 9, 2018
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Name?
Date of birth?
Residential address?
The high-priced, full-service agent scratched my responses laboriously onto a dirty-

cream-coloured application form that, when complete, would get me documentation I
needed urgently.
Permanent address?
My silence made him look up. “Permanent address?” he asked again.
***
I was three days old when my mom and dad took me home from the maternity wing of
Calicut Medical College. I was 30 days old when my parents left me in the care of my
grandparents and went back to Madras, to resume the professional lives I had
inadvertently interrupted.
“Home” was Meledath, the 200-year-old naalukettu that housed the Kelanallur Panicker
clan, a joint family that at the time comprised 21 adults, about a dozen or so of their
dependents and one child—me, the first grandchild.
the-ken.com-Home is where the heart is 1/2 270

I grew up in that enormous house, bookended on one side by a temple dedicated to Shiva
and on the other side by a kalari, the traditional gymnasium where the martial art form
kalaripayattu was taught under the aegis of Bhagavathy, the warlike avatar of the
goddess Shakti. I was weaned on the milk of goat and buffalo, and on tobacco—this last
thanks to Ammalu, a family retainer who, tasked with caring for me, quietened my high
spirits with regular doses of water in which tobacco leaves had been soaked.
I wandered the extensive grounds with my miniature axe and shovel, courtesy my
grandfather who believed that male children needed to learn basic agrarian skills. I
mimicked the moves of the oiled, ripped, loincloth-clad students practicing their warlike
moves in the kalari, and I learned to swim in the temple tank with the help of two dried
coconuts tied together to form an impromptu flotation device.
There was no electricity, no gas. Food was cooked on wood fires. The ceremonial
nilavilakku, lit at sunset, provided illumination. The family gathered around that light
burning bright on the front porch. Granddad and Grandmom told stories. From the
Ithihyamala—literally “garland of myths”, Kottarathil Sankunni’s collection of Kerala’s
foundational myths and legends. From the Panchatantra, the Kathasaritasagara, the
Ramayana, the Mahabharata. Born raconteurs, they made these stories come to life as
the flames flickered and misshapen shadows danced on the walls.
Every morning, I went to the Little Flower School in a rickshaw pulled by Maaku, the
family’s man for all reasons, and I learnt the alphabet and how to arrange the letters into
words, and those words into sentences.
the-ken.com-Home is where the heart is 2/2 271

Hot off the Press(Coin): Inside a changing Initial Coin
Offering
the-ken.com/story/presscoin-inside-changing-ico
June 28, 2018
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UPDATE: At the beginning of this year, PressCoin, the self-styled “crypto-economy for
the Indian press” had grand plans of raising $100 million through a freshly minted
crypto token aptly called NEWS. Except, today, NEWS is nowhere to be found on
crypto listings. How did this happen?
PressCoin raised about $25 million through the ICO of its token NEWS. Six months in, a
lot has changed.
For starters, the old guard is gone. During the ICO, PressCoin had 17 members working
with it. Seven members in its leadership team. Three world-renowned journalists on
the advisory board. And seven other equally-renowned journalists on the participation
board.
Today, that number is down to three. Even Nafeez Ahmed, who was tasked with the
role of Chief Journalist across PressCoin, is no longer on the “team” page of its website.
The present team consists of Amit Rathore as head of product, Abhishek Sharma (a
new addition) as the CTO, and Amit Bansal, who is in-charge of partnerships.
@realPressCoin has @NafeezAhmed left presscoin as well?
— Neo The Seventh (@neo_seventh) June 15, 2018
A mass overhaul like this doesn’t happen overnight. The NEWS token, Presscoin’s
golden goose, could use some MISSING posters. The token, which was supposed to “be
listed on all major exchanges in addition to the CointypeX exchange” as per the white
the-ken.com-Hot off the PressCoin Inside a changing Initial Coin Offering 1/2 272
paper, is notably unlisted. For starters, it isn’t on CoinMarketCap, a website which
tracks the price movement of digital currencies, after six months of being launched. So,
those who did purchase the token don’t have any place to trade or sell it.
Between disappearing board members and missing tokens, much has happened at
PressCoin.
1. Institutional investors exit. In a blog post, PressCoin said that it has cancelled its
purchase agreement with institutional token purchasers as they were “incompatible”
with the group’s “strategy and philosophy”.
2. Product launches. PressCoin has reportedly launched a new platform called

NextElection. Currently, in its beta stage, it appears to be a news aggregator platform
devoid of original stories.
3. Investor panic. A move to apparently bring about transparency has become more
opaque over time.
Why has the list of board members & advisors been removed from the #Presscoin website?
Why are emails, tweets not being answered? Why is the Slack not accessible?
@realPressCoin @AbbyMartin @johnpilger
— ⚡Crypto_Krill⚡ (@Crypto_Krill) February 12, 2018

Presscoin is imploding. Institutional Investors are withdrawing their money. Retail users
will be left hodling their useless coins because presscoin is still not listed on any other
exchange.
— Neo The Seventh (@neo_seventh) March 30, 2018
Six months could’ve helped PressCoin establish its use of blockchain and the NEWS
token.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-Hot off the PressCoin Inside a changing Initial Coin Offering 2/2 273
Hot stuff or hot air: India’s e-commerce market is
smaller than you think
the-ken.com/story/india-e-commerce-market-size
July 31, 2018
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Which of the following statements is correct in the Indian context?
E-commerce is a behemoth that will destroy offline retail and SMEs in India
E-commerce is an overhyped trend that is sustained through billions of VC dollars
If there is a version of truth that exists amidst pink unicorns and black unicorpses, it lies
somewhere between (a) and (b). A cross between mirage, myth and reality, India’s e-
commerce market glistens in the distance, beckoning players with its mystical riches and
tales of untold disruption. But ask anyone how big it really is, and you’ll be surprised at
how many different numbers you get.
Just a few years ago, analysts had predicted a $50 billion market size by 2020 (source:
UBS India Internet Report, Apr 2015). Or 7% of India’s $700 billion retail market.
But according to our analysis, the actual figure comes close to $11 billion. Not 7% of
India’s overall retail market. Closer to 2% now, with little hope of getting close to the
target. Shocking, but there’s a way to understand this—an analytical, numbers-driven
approach, using data from as many sources as we could tap into.
Akin to going through the balance sheet of an organisation, this approach will look at
India’s e-commerce sector through FY18. At the end of this exercise, we’ll revisit our
central question and see where it stands.
Let’s begin with a term that e-commerce players absolutely love to trumpet…
the-ken.com-Hot stuff or hot air Indias e-commerce market is smaller than you think 1/2 274
Hotel California: Gross-to-Net Reprise
GMV, or Gross Merchandise Value, is the holy grail of e-commerce. In common parlance,
it is the value of goods sold on the platform in a given period of time. It is not revenue.
Not even close.
Revenue for e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Paytm*, etc. is, as
per accounting principles, the commission or assorted fees that they charge third-party
sellers. Revenues can typically be found in the annual filings with the Registrar of
Companies and are much lower than GMV. As low as 5% to as high as 30% of their
corresponding transaction values.
Of course, no one talks about revenues. But there’s an entire art form dedicated to
inflating GMV in e-commerce companies. When you realise this, you also realise just how
blatant it really is.
Here’s the rub. If a customer merely books (or “checks out” in online lingo) a smartphone
but cancels it right after the order is confirmed, or the order fails because there is a
payment failure, the order is still counted as part of GMV.
the-ken.com-Hot stuff or hot air Indias e-commerce market is smaller than you think 2/2 275
How an unlikely David felled a Goliath in the cloud
telephony wars
the-ken.com/story/how-an-unlikely-david-felled-a-goliath-in-the-cloud-telephony-wars
October 7, 2016
The Pledge
Mild-mannered.
This is the word most people would use to describe Chintalapati S Murthy, aka CSN, the
founder and chief executive of Ozonetel, a cloud telephony startup in Hyderabad. But
even as mild-mannered and composed CSN was, he couldn’t help but feel butterflies in his
stomach on that day.
November 3, 2011
A day that would change it all for CSN and Ozonetel.
After weeks of parleys, venture capitalists (VCs) from the most prestigious firm in India
were landing in Hyderabad for, what CSN believed to be, the final set of discussions
towards closing a Series A investment in the company. (Series A is typically a company’s
first significant round of venture capital funding.)
Everything seemed to be lining up well.
The founding team consisted of veterans in telephony, hardware and embedded systems.
They were going after a large emerging market of telephony services for local businesses–
an opportunity that had arisen from the unshackling of telecom in India after decades of
stringent government control. Ozonetel was founded in 2007 and had since built a small
but meaningful business with all key metrics trending upwards.
the-ken.com-How an unlikely David felled a Goliath in the cloud telephony wars 1/8 276
CSN Murthy, CEO of Ozonetel
The confabulations with the VCs seemed friendly and transparent; CSN felt the fluttering
in his stomach subside. The VCs seemed impressed with Ozonetel’s numbers and the
discussions ended with a handshake and a pledge to follow up shortly.
CSN couldn’t resist feeling a sense of exhilaration.
Was this the break that they had been looking for?
The Turn
January 19, 2012
It had been more than two months since the VC’s visit.
Often, CSN had tried to get in touch with them. But on all these occasions he got the same
response: “We are working on next steps and will follow up soon.”
CSN wondered if it was time to ping them again. Then he picked up the newspaper and
read the headline in the startup section.
“Cloud telephony company, Knowlarity raises Rs 34 crore from India’s leading VC”
A shiver went up CSN’s spine. The VC, he was banking on, had just invested in a
competitor.
His worst unspoken fear had just come true. Not only would it be difficult to battle a well-
funded competitor, it would be doubly difficult to him to raise money as the
punters seemed to have already picked the winning horse.
Was the end nigh?
The Prestige
March 31, 2015
In the months that followed, Knowlarity raised another huge funding round–bringing the
total money raised to Rs 150 crore.
In this period, Ozonetel raised zero funding.
Knowlarity, which was founded in 2009, expanded its team to 517 people.
Ozonetel had grown to a team size of 40, not significantly different from where they were
two years back.
It wouldn’t be amiss to believe that as a straight-up contest, Knowlarity would have

obliterated Ozonetel.
Right?
Wrong.
For the financial year ending March 2015, these were the figures of the two companies:
For its Indian entity, Knowlarity had an operating income of Rs 22 crore.
Ozonetel?
Rs 20 crore.
Almost at par with Knowlarity.
Provisioning for the different way in which revenue was recognized by the two companies,
Ozonetel probably had a higher apples-to-apples number.
But there was one significant difference.
To get to this revenue, Knowlarity lost Rs 17.5 crore for the fiscal. If other non-operating
incomes were factored in, the company would have lost more than Rs. 30 crore for the
year.
On the other hand, Ozonetel showed a profit of Rs 88 lakh–small but meaningful.
You might say that revenue and profits are fine but surely the difference between the two
would have been in terms of growth. After all, the main imperative for raising VC money
is to grow faster.
The year-on-year growth figures:
Knowlarity: 77% (from Rs 12.5 crore to Rs 22 crore)
Ozonetel: 277% (from Rs 5.3 crore to Rs 20 crore)
Amazingly, Ozonetel far out-performed Knowlarity.
So how did a David fell a Goliath–how did a bootstrapped company get the better of its
well-funded competitor?
Different DNA
The origins of Ozonetel and Knowlarity couldn’t be more different.
Ozonetel was founded by average-joe entrepreneurs, common folks but with deep
experience in the field.
Knowlarity, on the other hand, was founded by engineers with gilt-edged resumes–the
prototypical IIT graduates with experience in a blue-chip consulting firm. The kind of
founders who give most Indian VCs a wet dream.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the latter got funded but the former didn’t. If this was a
battle that was determined only by the perceived pedigree of the founders and therefore
the amount of funding that a startup could raise, it would have been a no-contest.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The differing DNA of the two companies meant that they took vastly different routes.
Different culture
Ozonetel built their business brick-by-brick with a laser focus on meeting the needs of
their customers. The foundation was laid over years of experience in the hardware and
telecom domain, with an abiding sense of purpose.
In the beginning, growth was relatively slow but organic and foundationally strong.
Customers who started off with a single seat expanded the number of agents licensed;
those who began with a single solution expanded the number of solutions from Ozonetel.
On the other side, Knowlarity’s first customer was a political party who gave them an
order of Rs 1 crore. One of the founders, Pallav Pandey, ran a political consulting
company that presumably played a role in it. Pandey has since left Knowlarity.
After getting the order, Ambarish Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Knowlarity stated that
“we came back and decided that though we have the money but we needed to build this
product” and “we had money but not the product. We then built a software in the next 72
hours”. A quick-fix solution to an opportunistic opening?
Different focus
Knowlarity has only one product–a cloud-based telephony solution. The Ken spoke to
many in the industry, who corroborated that such solutions are almost trivial to put
together. There are several open-source and off-the-shelf commercial modules that can be
assembled to contrive a sellable product.
Ambarish Gupta, CEO of Knowlarity
Knowlarity’s antidote to battle this perceived commoditization was to bet the farm on
sales and marketing. Given their funding war chest, focusing on sales seemed like the
rational way to build a competitive moat.
Therefore the organization’s entire focus was on pushing sales and expanding the
customer base. The company hired sales folks aggressively and expanded to cover almost
the entire country and beyond–an international footprint that extended to more than 65
countries.
Unfortunately, an aggressive sales focus is a double-edged sword. While it can bring

customers through the door, at many times the wins are ephemeral as the churn is high.
Typically, customers churn out either because the sales team over-promise and the
product team under-delivers or because the delivery infrastructure and customer support
functions don’t scale to keep up with the growth in sales.
After funding, Knowlarity’s sales team poached several customers from Ozonetel. But
many of them have since shifted back to Ozonetel. While these companies were loath to
come on record on why they made the shift, we are given to understand that at least some
of these companies had problems with the reliability of service and didn’t like the way
they were billed. Equally interesting is the fact that many of Ozonetel’s customers are
large startups that have been funded by Knowlarity’s investor. In spite of having the same
investor as Knowlarity, these startups chose Ozonetel and what’s more, they did this
despite Ozonetel’s pricing being far higher than Knowlarity’s.
On the other hand, Ozonetel had an engineering focus. They expanded their portfolio
from a single cloud-based telephony solution to include a full stack–from the hardware
(PRI cards) to multiple solutions ranging from cloud telephony to voice and text
campaigns to cloud radio. In parallel, it invested significantly in improving the reliability
and scalability of its platform, which was considerably easier since it owned most of the
parts. The company has also moved beyond a solution provider to becoming a platform
through a set of APIs that lets other startups build on top of this layer and offer their own
telephony solutions to customers.
This emphasis on innovation and R&D also meant that Ozonetel spent very little on
marketing–their monthly Google Adwords bill, for instance, was less than Rs 1 lakh.
Admittedly, this was also because they didn’t have the funding firepower to spend heavily
on sales and marketing.
Even with these constraints, not only did Ozonetel grow much faster than Knowlarity; it
did so without once spending more than it earned.
Different markets? Maybe not
Ozonetel and Knowlarity are both cloud telephony companies but are they direct
competitors?
When quizzed, Knowlarity’s Gupta said: “Ozonetel is most of the time not a competitor for
us. They do more on-premise telephony while we focus on hosted telephony. We do mid-
market while they do enterprises. You are kind of comparing apple with half-orange (sic)”.
Whereas Ozonetel’s CSN averred: “We do compete with Knowlarity wherever there is an
opportunity regardless of the segment and mode of delivery, but it need not be considered
as personal rivalry”.
The answer to this riddle lies in the fact that both companies do compete in one segment
of the market–cloud-based telephony solutions for small and medium businesses in India.
This market is like the Holy Grail. Everyone knows it exists and is large, but no one in the
country has figured out how to crack it. The reasons for this are well-documented: Indian
SMBs are laggards when it comes to adopting technology and are loath to pay anything,
much less a meaningful fee, for technology.
Knowlarity’s weapon to battle this challenge is the battering ram: get feet on the ground,
evangelise the solution aggressively, charge low (perhaps unprofitably) and push it to
customers.
Ozonetel’s weapon of choice, in contrast, is a dagger–sharp but measured incisions to

open up key areas but with the flexibility to go beyond just one area. So, the company
doesn’t limit itself to just SMBs but offers solutions to large enterprises such as Unilever
and HDFC. These solutions go beyond plain-vanilla cloud telephony and are flexible; they
allow the customer to choose either a hosted, cloud-based solution or deploy it in-house
on their own premise.
The irony here is that it is generally believed that selling to enterprises requires a large
sales force and big funding but in this case, it is the bootstrapped company that has
opened this market while the well-funded company has stayed clear.
Postscript
Now, can one conclude that Ozonetel won despite being a bootstrapped company and that
Knowlarity lost despite being well-funded? While this might sound reductionist, it is still
an important point that is not necessarily an oversimplification.
So why is this important?
Out of every hundred startups in India, perhaps two get VC funding.
Out of the remaining ninety-eight startups, perhaps one is a bootstrapped company that
has seen meaningful success.
Most of these successful bootstrapped startups–the likes of Zoho, Fusion Charts, Kayako,
BrowserStack and Visual Website Optimizer–share a common facet. These startups made
a deliberate choice to be bootstrapped. The founders of these startups either had
philosophical reasons for not taking external funding or didn’t need it because of a profit-
generating revenue stream that they chanced upon early in the startup cycle.
But beyond these outliers, the vast majority of startups, ninety-seven out of hundred
startups are like Ozonetel. They don’t have any fundamental reasons to avoid VC funding
but have just not been able to successfully do so.
In public perception, this translates into slotting the company in the lowest rung of the
startup caste system. The ones who make up the numbers, the ones whose best outcome is
to build a small “lifestyle” business before they meet their inevitable fate of withering and
dying, unnoticed and unheralded.
Ozonetel is important because it has demonstrated that even an average-joe startup, one
that hasn’t received the benediction of any VC, can not just survive but thrive.
Today, Ozonetel is one of the fastest growing startups in India–it has figured in the
Deloitte Technology Fast 50 twice in a row and was ranked in the top five last year. It
currently handles more than 1.5 billion calls from 200 million unique phone numbers and
counts the likes of Zomato, Practo, BigBasket, Unilever and HDFC as customers. It is on
track to clock $6m in revenue this year and is considering an overseas expansion.
All this without a single dollar in funding.
This is what CSN has to say about Ozonetel’s journey – “We were not bitter that the VC
didn’t invest in us and [we] didn’t see it as the end of the world. We picked ourselves up
and just focused on building the business with the resources that were available to us”.
What about Knowlarity?
There is no doubt that Knowlarity won the funding battle but has it won the war of
building a meaningful business?
While the jury is still out on that, perhaps the best way to describe its current position is
provided by one of its former employees on Glassdoor, the employer review site:
“Dear Ambarish, when I see you I remember the tail of Icarus” (sic)
Funding is like wings made of feather and wax–it helps you get off the ground and soar
high, a lot faster than others but if you fly too high too quickly, “burn” will send you
crashing to the earth.
So, counting on funding and its attendant trappings as your competitive differentiator is
chimerical at the best of times.
When last heard, Knowlarity was reportedly in talks to raise its next round of funding.
How ANI quietly built a monopoly
the-ken.com/story/ani-video-news-monopoly
October 21, 2018
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28 June 2017. The Election Commission announced it would reveal the schedule for the
vice-presidential elections at a press conference the next morning. Naturally, every major
TV channel covered it, beaming the news to millions of viewers. Interestingly, none of
them were allowed a camera in the room.
28 September 2018. Again, another major government event. This time held by the
ministry of defence, celebrating the second anniversary of a series of widely publicised
military strikes by the Indian Army against Pakistan. Once again, every major network
covered the event. But not a single one was allowed to bring a camera inside.
In both cases—and they are just two of many—only two organisations were permitted to
provide live video coverage. One was state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan and the other
a small, family-run company known as ANI.
Chances are, you’ve never even heard of ANI—short for Asian News International—or
know exactly what it does. But you should. ANI has a virtual monopoly on news video
feeds for television channels in the country, giving it unmatched reach. But more
importantly, it is that rarest of creatures—a traditional news media company which is
consistently profitable.
the-ken.com-How ANI quietly built a monopoly 1/2 284

ANI has become invaluable to TV channels in large part due to its coverage of government
events and press conferences. While many of these briefings are open to all, several (such
as the two mentioned above) limit video coverage to only ANI. And even for those events
that TV channels are allowed to record, many of the smaller, regional channels don’t have
the resources or reach to cover every event.
Which brings us to the other side of ANI’s dominance. The news agency has a vast
network of camerapersons, far more than any single news channel, and offers videos from
the most remote corners of India. A warehouse for alcohol seized by authorities
somewhere in the state of Bihar has a rat problem? ANI’s there. College students hold a
“mini marathon” on women’s rights in distant Siliguri, West Bengal? ANI’s got you
covered. Baby falls into a borewell in an out-of-the-way district in Gujarat? But of course.
Those three videos were chosen at random, from ANI’s coverage over a single 48-hour
period. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The news agency sends out over 100 news
videos (“packages”, in TV parlance) a day to its clients, as well as live feeds.
The history of ANI and its founder, Prem Prakash, spans decades and runs parallel to the
rise of television in India. Along the way, the Prakash family—through a combination of
business savvy and a web of political connections—built a small empire. The Ken dug
through the archives and spoke to more than 20 former employees, government officials,
as well as executives and editors at TV networks and rival firms—most of whom asked not
to be named—to peer under the veil of this company which, despite its outsized role in the
Indian media, remains shrouded in secrecy.
the-ken.com-How ANI quietly built a monopoly 2/2 285

How charity is fuelling a superbug in India
the-ken.com/story/charity-superbug-india
January 31, 2017
The evil superbug is on the lookout for new hosts. The hero has the weapon, he can
conquer it, but only if he is willing.
The superbug is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which causes multi-drug-resistant

tuberculosis (MDR-TB), the life-saving weapon is bedaquiline and the reluctant hero is
the government.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that 79,000 Indians—the largest
number anywhere in the world—were infected in 2015. Without large-scale treatment or
prevention of transmission, it is estimated that at least a similar number of Indians
contracted the superbug in 2016. Doctors treating patients suffering from TB say that the
figures are an understatement as a large number of cases are not even diagnosed, leave
alone reported. One of the best cures is bedaquiline, the first drug to be approved in 50
years for such a resistant TB.
The Belgian drugmaker Janssen, a sister company of Johnson & Johnson (J&J), has
developed the drug, which became available in the global market in 2012. In 2014,
Janssen made a donation for 600 patients in India, which the Directorate General of
Health Services in New Delhi approved for ‘conditional access’. It’s a drop in the ocean,
where at least 79,000 patients are estimated to be infected every year and do not have
access to bedaquiline. A pilot has been going on in five cities but only patients in these
cities could access the drug until a fortnight ago.
So while the donation in the past meant that the drug could enter India, it also meant that
it was not available in the market. Patients are scrambling. Two weeks ago, the Delhi High
Court ruled in favour of an 18-year-old girl from Patna who had filed a case against the
Government of India for denying her access to this drug on the basis of her domicile.
the-ken.com-How charity is fuelling a superbug in India 1/5 286

The distribution of the drug remains a challenge but the government has now sought
more donations—2000 courses out of a pledged package by J&J of 10,000 courses, under
the USAID.
Bedaquiline Donation
The distribution of the drug remains a challenge but the government has now sought
more donations—2000 courses out of a pledged package by J&J of 10,000 courses
“The pilot was used for a programmatic feasibility study, to study any adverse events
through pharmacovigilance. About 200 patients are on treatment, and there have been
three deaths [which is within acceptable limits],” said Soumya Swaminathan, Director-
General of the Indian Council of Medical Research in Delhi.
The restricted use of this drug is fuelling the spread of MDR-TB. Studies in South Africa
have shown that the sooner such patients are put on bedaquiline, the better the outcomes
for them and the community. Then why is the government not negotiating a price and
making the drug more widely available? More importantly, why is J&J donating and not
selling the drug in India?
The answer resides somewhere in between a patent regime that cannot allow patent
violation for cheap Indian generic drugs and a government that makes silent promises to
maintain the status quo.
The reach of the superbug

The WHO’s number of MDR-TB cases in India in 2015 is a gross underestimation because
the private sector, where more than 70% of India’s healthcare lies, does not always notify
cases. Moreover, it’s a number that has most likely grown as the infection spread without
treatment throughout 2016.
“If India continues to drag its feet on daily drug regimens and does not invest adequately
in TB control, then I see the drug-resistance problem getting worse in future,” said
Madhukar Pai, associate director of the McGill International TB Centre in Montreal,
Canada, in an email.
Madhukar Pai, associate director, McGill International TB Centre
If India continues to drag its feet on daily drug regimens and does not invest adequately
in TB control, then I see the drug-resistance problem getting worse in future
Among the cities, Mumbai is the worst hit. One of the studies showed that 25% of the
newly diagnosed and 44% of previously treated HIV-infected patients had contracted
drug-resistant TB in 2013.
“These are some of the highest rates reported in the world, which means that places like
Mumbai will only become further hotspots as this strain can spread extensively in the
community,” said Jennifer Furin, a professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at
Harvard Medical School.

It’s true that not each one of these drug-resistant TB patients might need bedaquiline. As
per a conservative estimate, 26,000-35,000 patients would benefit from access to
bedaquiline each year, said Furin.
But even this ‘conservative’ number can have a multiplier effect because this airborne
disease spreads by just coughing and sneezing. And a slow, exclusive government
programme only for the city dwellers is adding to the burden.
A half-hearted punch
In March 2016, the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) rolled
out bedaquiline at six public health facilities—National Institute for Research in
Tuberculosis, Chennai; National Institute of TB and Respiratory Diseases, New Delhi;
Rajan Babu Institute for Pulmonary Medicine and Tuberculosis, New Delhi; Sewri
Hospital, Mumbai; BJ Medical College & Hospital, Ahmedabad; and Government Medical
College, Guwahati.
Cases started piling up in judicial courts from patients who did not belong to these cities
and were challenging the government programme. They needed the drug. For a
government that launched TB-Mission 2020, proclaiming to eradicate the disease by
2020, the RNTCP has applied for another 2000 courses of ‘donated’ bedaquiline. The
irony couldn’t be starker.
The government has argued that the distribution of bedaquiline needs to be controlled to
prevent further drug resistance among patients. Experts, on the other hand, counter that
resistance develops to any drug over time and that it is no excuse for not providing
patients with treatment.

A request to speak with the deputy director general Sunil D Khaparde on why RNTCP was
looking for more donations instead of making the drug affordable and available in the
market did not elicit any response. In a telephone call, the director of the National
Institute for Research in Tuberculosis in Chennai refused to answer any questions on TB.
It was soon after the Delhi High Court ruling and he said he was not “allowed to talk to
the media; only the Union Minister of Health and the Secretary could answer any
questions.”
High Demand Low Supply

Even if the pledged 10,000 courses were to be donated to RNTCP, it would not treat the
79,000 and counting patients every year.
Even if the pledged 10,000 courses were to be donated to RNTCP, it would not treat the
79,000 and counting patients every year.
First large donation of its kind

India does accept a small number of drug doses as donations from pharmaceutical
companies. But that’s mostly for neglected diseases, like GSK’s donation for elephantiasis,
said Swaminathan. It’s the first time that such a large donation has been offered and
accepted, and that too for MDR-TB, which will turn into a major public health crisis
without adequate access to medication.
There’s a strong correlation to the choice that the present government made last year. In
March, India’s Patent Office made a ‘private reassurance’ to the United States-India
Business Council (USIBC) that it would show ‘restraint in allowing the production of
cheaper versions of the drugs patented with the American firms’. That was the
government’s way of avoiding the tug of war between the local generic drug
manufacturers and patent-holding American drug companies.
It appears that by accepting the donation from J&J, the government has solidified its
commitment to the patent regime. The drug has patent protection until 2023. People in
the government and industry agree that invoking compulsory licensing—a provision
under the World Trade Organisation that allows governments to override patents in a
national emergency—could ensure better access to the drug for the patients who need it.
The drug is not inexpensive. J&J has determined the sale price of bedaquiline at $30,000
in high-income countries, $3,000 in middle-income countries and $900 in low-income
countries.
In an email response, J&J confirmed donating 600 courses to RNTCP. On the 10,000
courses donation, the company said that Janssen and USAID signed an agreement in
December 2014 to formalise a four-year collaboration beginning in April 2015 in which
“Janssen is contributing 30,000 courses of bedaquiline to USAID for use in over 100 low-
and middle-income, Global Fund-eligible countries for the treatment of MDR-TB.” The
number of courses donated via USAID, it said, will be agreed between the Indian
government and the USAID

“Obviously when companies do donations, it is more for PR value. They [usually] do it if
the case reaches the courts,” says DG Shah, secretary-general of the Indian
Pharmaceutical Alliance. “However, the market of drug-resistant TB is so small. There is
no need to feel threatened as of now.”
DG Shah, Secretary-general, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance.
Donation is good [but] it is not an alternative to compulsory licensing, competition and

affordable access because the quantity of drugs donated is limited.
So far, no Indian drugmaker has objected to the donation. According to Swaminathan,

“The government is currently not paying any attention to the compulsory licensing of
bedaquiline. They are just looking at donations.”
The undisputed global TB capital of the world, India has a few examples to follow. Two
countries, Russia and South Africa, says Furin, have negotiated with J&J for affordable
pricing and accessibility of this drug. It’s not a donation. As compared to South Africa,
which has more than 4,000 people on bedaquiline, and Russia, which has more than 1300
people on bedaquiline, India has about 200 patients being treated with bedaquiline
currently.
The glacial government programme surely needs to speed up and show a willingness to
treat patients. More importantly, it needs to spell out its strategy to engage with the
private sector, as a majority of the patients are managed outside of the national TB
programme.

How e-pharmacies escaped death, survived & turned
the tables on their opponents
the-ken.com/story/epharmacies-death-survived-turned-tables-opponents
May 19, 2017
If Zigy, the online pharmacy started by former Infosys senior executive and iGate CEO
Phaneesh Murthy, were a person, the place where it died sometime towards the end of
2016 would now be a memorial.
A memorial dedicated to a fearless, though some would say foolhardy, pioneer that
decided to run guns blazing into the thicket that was India’s pharmacy sector. In just over
a year, it fearlessly took on the powerful offline lobby and outdated government
regulations and expanded into five major Indian cities. And it almost made it.
Because what brought Zigy down, in the end, weren’t bullets from its foes, which it had
many, but running out of money. Even after reportedly raising over $5 million.
If Zigy were a person, it’s tombstone would today read:
“Here lies Zigy. Ambitious, brave, foolish.
Because in losing its battle, it won us the war.
R.I.P. 2015-2016.”
The ‘us’ here are online pharmacies, led by Zigy’s former competitors like 1mg and
Netmeds. And the ‘war’ they won was when on 16 March, the union ministry of health put
out a public notice to announce its stance on the sale of drugs—both offline and online.
Over the next thirty days, the ministry’s inbox was flooded with mostly congratulatory
emails, some apprehensive and one angry, said a ministry official in confidence. And it is
now busy formulating a policy incorporating the feedback, but its intention is clear—e-
pharmacies have every right to sell drugs. And they’re here to stay.
the-ken.com-How e-pharmacies escaped death survived amp turned the tables on their opponents 1/7 291
The war Zigy won for e-pharmacies by losing its own battle for survival.
The hunted become friends

Like ride sharing, e-commerce, Internet telephony and numerous other Internet-enabled
businesses in India, e-pharmacies, too, came up before government policy created the
space for them. Many came up around the 2014-2015 period. And they started growing,
some slowly, some fast. Till they appeared as threats on the radar of their powerful foes—
the hundreds of thousands of small, offline pharmacies they were hoping to disrupt.
Having seen sector after sector collapse to the onslaught of e-commerce, offline
pharmacies were in no mood to roll over. Using threats of shutdowns and lobbying, they
went for the e-pharmacies’ jugulars. The $13.4 billion market for drug sales was theirs
alone.
On their spurring, and aided by ancient laws drafted in the 1940s, drug regulators in
multiple big states then started going after online pharmacies. Maharashtra’s Food and
Drug Administration filed FIRs against several e-pharmacies, including MeraPharmacy,
mChemist, Pharmeasy and their offline partners. Similarly, in Karnataka, the Drugs
Control Department decided to cancel the licences of all online pharmacies in the state
early last year. Although the licences were later revoked, the lost momentum, time and
resources in court cases cost these startups heavily.
By 2016, it did not matter if an e-pharmacy managed to successfully challenge the state
drug regulator in the courts, as funding into the sector had fallen drastically. Data from
Tracxn shows out of the $90 million invested in this sector over 2015 and 2016, $62.20
million was invested in 2015. The number fell sharply to $28.45 million in 2016. An
example of that was Phaneesh Murthy-backed Zigy. It stood its ground, fought and won
the legal battle but found itself strapped of funds.
Waning investor confidence

Tracxn data shows out of the $90 million invested in this sector over 2015 and 2016,
$62.20 million was invested in 2015. The number fell sharply to $28.45 million in 2016
“Soon after an e-pharmacy was set up, it would run into issues with the association of
chemists and local drug inspectors, who would come and harass the offline partner with a
general statement that online pharmacy was illegal,” says Prashant Tandon, who became
the president of the Indian Internet Pharmacy Association (IIPA) in October 2015.
Cornered by their brick-and-mortar competitors and authorities, the likes of Netmeds and
1mg had decided to form an association to secure the union government’s support.
And apart from defense, the IIPA would also play offense.
First, the defense. The IIPA committed itself to explaining its business model to the
policymakers. Since its model involved the collection of prescriptions, which were then
forwarded to licensed drug stores run by registered chemists, which would then deliver
the medicines, the only difference between a traditional chemist and e-pharmacy was that
the latter collected the prescription online and delivered the medicine to the doorstep, the
IIPA convinced authorities.
Then, the offense. For record keeping, e-pharmacies even offered an edge over
conventional pharmacies, the IIPA argued.
“Just like there are pharmacies that do not ask for prescriptions and sell fake products,
the same thing could happen in the online space. It was not about an online versus offline
pharmacy. The debate needed to shift from a compliant pharmacy to a non-compliant
pharmacy. We wanted the government to actively monitor and crack down on those who
are not compliant,” says Tandon. The IIPA made it clear that no one wanted to be
associated with the bad apples in the business.
Just like there are pharmacies that do not ask for prescriptions and sell fake products, the
same thing could happen in the online space. It was not about an online versus offline
pharmacy. The debate needed to shift from a compliant pharmacy to a non-compliant
pharmacy. We wanted the government to actively monitor and crack down on those who
are not compliant
Prashant Tandon, CEO, 1mg and President, IIPA
By going after offline pharmacies’ Achilles heel—the lack of computerised records and
digital operations—the IIPA would turn their native business model into a compliance
weapon against offline pharmacies.
Meanwhile, defense was still very much needed too. In December 2015, the Drug
Controller General of India (DCGI) wrote a letter to all the state authorities to “put a strict
vigil on online sale of medicines”. The IIPA had its work cut out. It began scheduling
meetings and making presentations at the health ministry, the Central Drugs Standard
Control Organisation (CDSCO) and the powerful umbrella policy body, NITI Aayog in
Delhi.
The first positive news came in the new year when the CDSCO formed a committee to look
into online pharmacies from a regulatory lens. Shailendra Kumar, who was director
(drugs) in the ministry of health at the time, says, “We were looking for a way to balance
the pros and cons of online pharmacies.” The benefit—country-wide access to affordable
medicines—was clear to the ministry. All it needed was to balance it against the problem
of fakes, possibility of self-medication and antibiotics resistance. Aware that the Drug and
Cosmetics Act, 1940, which regulates the import, manufacture and distribution of drugs
in India, was out of time and sync with current times, the ministry was looking to update
it.
Over a year later, the IIPA’s efforts are bearing fruit. The ministry has extended an olive
branch and the IIPA has welcomed it. E-pharmacies already possess the digital
infrastructure needed to comply with the proposed policy. They have arisen, not just
resurrected but as role models of entire pharmacy industry—online and offline.
Source: FICCI and Frost & Sullivan
What was their biggest strength was now their foes’ biggest weakness.
Lucky hobby
Tandon, co-founder of 1mg, and president of the IIPA, speaks with the passion of an
entrepreneur, who has raised over $22 million for an online marketplace for medicines.
He tells the story of an app he developed in his spare time that took a life of its own from.
In 2010, he built the first ever drug reference guide of 2500 salts (the basic chemicals that
go into medicines) that are sold using over 200,000 brand names in the Indian market. In
the process, he had discovered the answer to why, even when hundreds of companies
were making the same drug under different brand names, the competition was not
reducing the prices?
“Market structure was broken and not in consumers’ favour as there were multiple
intermediaries in the game (e.g., doctor, pharmacist and other agents), making decisions
for her,” says Tandon. “Two years later, we just put the app out there. There was no
business model around it when we put it out there. The idea was to just break the opacity,
it needed to go into the public domain,” he added.
It was a simple medicine database, where the consumer could search for a medicine, find
out the corresponding salt, all the other manufacturers selling the same salt, compare
prices and ask the doctor or the pharmacist for an alternative medicine that may be
cheaper. By 2014, app downloads had crossed 1.5 million, all on its own. The success
showcased that consumers were hungry for information and prompted Tandon to make it
formal business.
In mid-2015, he launched 1mg as an internet marketplace for drugs. Over two rounds in
the last two years, 1mg raised serious venture capital—$5.5 million followed by $16
million. Its investors included HBM Healthcare Investments, Sequoia Capital and
Omidyar Network. The company now has over 100 offline partners, 8.6 million app
downloads and over 50 million page views every month.
But Tandon owes his company’s success as much to his unique product as to the entirely
fortuitous absence of legal obstacles. When 1mg was growing in Delhi, its competitors in
Mumbai and Bengaluru were fighting a tough regulatory battle.
Victors, now vanquished

The health ministry’s proposed policy has turned the tables in the favour of online
pharmacies. Brick-and-mortar pharmacies may have won round one, but round two
appears to favour the e-pharmacies. According to the proposal, a pharmacy may secure
orders and mail drugs via an online marketplace or at the store, it would have to get
registered, keep electronic records and link them to a ministry-managed e-platform. So
that the government can track the sale of each drug from manufacturer to the consumer,
to avoid the misuse of drugs. The policy is aimed at regulating entire domestic pharma
retail market, valued at around Rs 98,000 crore. E-pharmacies have an advantage this
time – every online pharmacy is equipped technologically to implement the policy in its
current form, unlike its offline counterparts.
Finding themselves technologically unequipped, sidelined and blindsided by the proposed

regulation, offline pharmacies are resorting to threats of shutdowns and agitations. The
All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD) has called a nationwide strike
on 30 May in protest against ministry’s proposal.
Upset offline pharmacies

Technologically unequipped, suddenly sidelined by the proposed regulation, conventional
pharmacies association All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD) are
clearly unhappy. They have called a nationwide strike on 30 May in protest against
ministry’s proposal
But can the government get over 850,000 traditional pharmacies across the country to
digitise their operations? Or can the AIOCD arm-twist the health ministry into
reconsidering the proposed regulation? For now, this proposal is a victory for e-
pharmacies. They have transformed from outcasts to role models to be emulated.
How did this happen?
Our policy, thou art in…

The process for this transformation began in September 2016, when the committee
published its report, recognising the benefits technology offered in tracking the flow of
drug from manufacturer to consumer. A few weeks later, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant
wrote to the health secretary CK Mishra discussing the contours of a policy that would
ensure a level-playing field for e-pharmacies vis-à-vis traditional retailers.
Meanwhile, the AIOCD had made it clear earlier too, in a nationwide strike on 23
November that it was against e-pharmacies. “They thought their business was under
threat and that we would go directly from producer to consumer and break their control
on the market, which is not true,” said the CEO of an e-pharmacy, who did not want to be
identified.
Trying to sway policymakers to reconsider the proposal are also drug manufacturers and
public health activists. On 10 April, the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) wrote a
letter stating that an e-platform may be an ideal solution but given the socio-economic
conditions and infrastructure, it would not be practical to implement it for standalone
pharmacies, especially in rural areas.
Moreover, Chinu Srinivasan, managing trustee of not-for-profit Vadodara-based

(LOCOST) Low Cost Standard Therapeutics, that promotes access to drugs, also sees the
proposed regulatory measure as over-ambitious. In a letter to the ministry on April 13,
Srinivasan expressed his concern over the privacy of a patient’s information, which would
become digitally accessible by the government, if the proposed regulation becomes legally
binding.
From a business standpoint, Mayur Sirdesai, Director at Mumbai-based Somerset Health

Capital Advisors, sees the regulator’s current response as being more supportive, but this
is not the end of the road. Online marketplaces are gearing themselves for a new journey
—from this ‘if’ to an unambiguous legal embrace. They are also evolving to a hybrid model
where offline pharmacies are tying up with an e-pharmacies to build scale. In the future
both, brick-and-mortar stores will co-exist with the online formats as both are targeting a
different share of the market, argues Sirdesai. Going forward, he expects a combination of
offline and online players to serve the symptomatic and acute, and chronic medication
market respectively.
According to Abhinav Shrivastava, senior associate at the Bengaluru-based Law Offices of

Nandan Kamath*, the online sale of medicines is a grey area. The intent of the law is to
check abuse of prescription drugs, says Shrivastava. “The pharmacist is bound by a code
of conduct. In the case of e-pharmacies, there is a lack of procedural compliance of the
Drugs and Cosmetics Act,” he says.
The online sale of medicines is a grey area. The intent of the law is to check abuse of
prescription drugs. The pharmacist is bound by a code of conduct. In the case of e-
pharmacies, there is a lack of procedural compliance of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act
Abhinav Shrivastava, Associate at the Bengaluru-based Law Offices of Nandan Kamath
The proposed policy is expected to resolve legal concerns in favour of internet

marketplaces of medicines.
A Ramesh Kumar, advocate at the Madras High Court, who represented Chennai-based e-
pharmacy Netmeds in the Mumbai High Court says the new rules will favour e-
pharmacies. At least, there’s nothing negative about the proposal.
The IIPA has formally agreed that the proposed regulation is in its favour. Tandon says
that digitising the entire drug flow would make it transparent and ensure accountability of
the entire pharmacy chain.
“When you search for a medicine online or offline, there could be many spurious websites
selling it. For a legitimate business, it is very important for that the shady players are
identified and weeded out, as done in the developed economies. By making registration
compulsory for e-pharmacies and making it visible on the central regulator’s website, the
proposal is helping the consumer make an informed choice in choosing the legitimate e-
pharmacy,” he adds.
Pradeep Dadha, CEO of Netmeds, who has raised $50 million in one round in 2015, has
over a million app downloads and close to a million registered users, also expects it to be
easier for e-pharmacies to track and trace the sale of drugs as they already have the
mechanisms in place.
In fact, the experience has given Netmeds the confidence to expand into the offline space,
as well. It is currently busy working on opening five to ten drug stores in Chennai as a
pilot project to test waters in the hybrid space.
The drugs industry is divided into symptomatic, acute and chronic needs of the patient.
“Say you get a fever, would you order the medicine or rush to the local store to buy the
medicine?,” asks Dadha. A customer depends on the local store for symptomatic or acute
medication, which forms 60-65% of the market. Leaving 35-40% for chronic medication
that is prescribed for a long time and bulk ordered online. “A hybrid model also helps
builds trust and shortens delivery cost and time,” adds Dadha.
Having a few offline stores would also provide some protection against future policy
swings that might target “online only” businesses.
It’s a pity Zigy isn’t around to see all this.
DISCLAIMER: The Law Offices of Nandan Kamath has in the past offered its services to The Ken.
UPDATE: *The article was updated on 19 May to correctly reflect Abhinav Shrivastava’s designation.
How I was wrong about OYO’s Ponzi scheme
the-ken.com/story/oyo-ponzi-scheme
May 8, 2017
Around a year ago, I had written a post on OYO Rooms on LinkedIn questioning if its
business model was the startup equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.
At that time, OYO Rooms was a managed marketplace for budget hotels in India and had
gained fame on account of the tender age of its founder, Ritesh Agarwal (who had started
the company at the age of 18) and more importantly for being one of few early-stage
Indian startups backed by over $100 million in funding from marquee investors like
SoftBank.
The main concern expressed in my post was that OYO’s financials for the financial year
ending March 2015 threw up some serious questions about the company’s business model
—specifically the fact that its model of booking partial inventory in a hotel with an upfront
minimum guarantee gives rise to many perverse incentives and acts of bad faith for both
the hotels and OYO itself. Such acts of recidivist gamification to artificially boost numbers
were akin to a Ponzi scheme.
Today, I realise that I was wrong.
I was not wrong about the pernicious aspect of the upfront minimum guarantee. This was
admitted by Agarwal himself when in response to my post, he wrote that “our take rates
are now positive across the network” and minimum guarantees are less than 3% of the
overall business. So it is clear that the dangers of minimum guarantees were recognised
ex-post facto and done away with. More importantly, by saying that take rates are “now
positive”, it was an admission that they were negative earlier. A negative take rate means
that OYO’s product, for what it was worth, essentially had a negative selling price. Far
from taking a commission from the hotel for a booking, OYO basically paid an additional
fee to the hotel for the privilege of being a partner.
the-ken.com-How I was wrong about OYOs Ponzi scheme 1/5 298

I was wrong because I naively looked at the wrong place to determine if the company was
a Ponzi.
What it costs
A negative take rate means that OYO’s product, for what it was worth, essentially had a
negative selling price
I shouldn’t have looked at the business model in the first place. Business models are
ephemeral—they can be changed over time like OYO seems to have done with respect to
minimum guarantees. But more crucially, no one cares about the business model—the
company, the founder, the investors and the media.
Instead, what they care about is the narrative on which the company is positioned. The
‘vision’ that will disrupt large industries and markets.
This is actually the real Ponzi that OYO succumbed to. The “Ponzi scheme of ambition”.
Originally coined by Anand Sanwal of CB Insights with reference to Uber, the Ponzi
scheme of ambition refers to the inexorable urge of startups to constantly change their
narrative around their vision and the markets they are out to disrupt and in the words of
Sanwal, “keep highlighting their entry into larger and larger markets and so investors
keep ponying up $ for the ambition”.
Let’s explore how OYO played this game.
First, let’s see how OYO has progressed in terms of actual financial results from the time I
wrote my last post (which was based on the company’s results for the FY15). Curiously,
OYO hasn’t actually yet filed its annual returns for the FY16. There is, however, an interim
filing that provides details of the company’s performance for the nine-month period
ending December 2015. The summary is provided below:

OYO financial results for the nine-month period ending December 2015 | Source: RoC
filings
The numbers don’t make for pretty reading. The company had a net operational revenue
of just Rs 6.3 crores (approximately $1 million) for the nine-month period—translating to
just Rs 70 lakhs per month on average. In contrast, the company lost over Rs 350 crores
in the same period—nearly Rs 40 crores per month. To put this number into perspective,
for each rupee in topline operational revenue in this period, the company lost nearly 60
rupees. Keep in mind that at this point in time, OYO had already raised over $125 million
in funding.
But the market is still offline

According to a recent report by global research agency Millward Brown, online hotel
bookings in India are at less than 25% of the overall market. The vast majority still
happens offline
Has it fared better since then?
Soon after, in April 2016, Agarwal claimed that the company hit unit-level profitability,
which would be a tremendous achievement given the gulf between the company’s
revenues and losses in the preceding period.

One is tempted to be skeptical of this claim but let’s assume for a moment that this is
indeed true and explore what sort of numbers it would need to reach this milestone. By its
own admission, the ARR (average room rate) for OYO is Rs 1,500 per night and its take
rate or commission is 15%. This means that OYO’s net revenue per hotel room per night is
Rs 225. According to sources, the company’s CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is
approximately Rs 500 per customer—this is how much OYO spends on average in
marketing and advertising to attract one customer. Add to this the additional costs for
providing the service in terms of customer and operator support and costs around
booking cancellations, and it’s easy to see that the take rates for one-off bookings are not
likely to be enough to bridge the gap between unit costs and unit revenue, much less to get
to profitability on an overall basis.
Of course, one can argue that for a company like OYO, profitability is not a key
imperative. According to a recent report by global research agency Millward Brown,
online hotel bookings in India are at less than 25% of the overall market. The vast
majority still happens offline. And these numbers are even more skewed in the budget
hotel segment that OYO operates in, with less than 5% of the transactions being done
online. Against such a market context, growth rather than profitability is the key goal.
Where's the money?

The average room rate for OYO is Rs 1,500 per night and its commission is 15%. This
means that OYO’s net revenue per hotel room per night is Rs 225. But the company’s
customer acquisition cost is approximately Rs 500 per customer
So has OYO been growing?
In April 2016, the company was witnessing approximately 10,000 bookings per day and
according to industry sources, that this number has approximately gone to up to 15,000 in
April 2017.
Therein lies the rub.
OYO’s stratagem of “buying growth” basically scorched the market—while its own $125
million war chest allowed it to survive and grow, its competitors were eviscerated. Take,
for instance, Stayzilla. In his blog post announcing the company’s shutdown of
operations, Yogendra Vasupal, Stayzilla’s founder had this to say, “This was further
exacerbated by the discounting based growth rampant in the travel industry since 2015.
Forced to match prices, we could not even recoup what we put in, necessitating very large
capital requirement simply to sustain growth.” And “In the last 3–4 years, though, I can
honestly state that somewhere I lost my path. I started treasuring GMV, room-nights and
other ‘vanity’ metrics instead of the fundamentals of cash flow and working capital.” In
OYO’s Ponzi scheme of ambition, competitors were mere collateral damage—forcing other
players in the hospitality space to either shut down, merge or raise unreasonably large
sums of fresh capital just to stay in the game.
But the rot lies deeper.

At the time of its launch, OYO was a unique idea in many ways. A sharp focus on budget
hotels, which was at that point a largely underserved market. A managed marketplace
rather than a free-for-all directory, an asset-light model, a hands-on approach to help
hotels standardise key feature offerings and finally the very idea that a brand could itself
be its own distributor.
Yet OYO has progressively moved away from each of these core differentiators. It is easy
to see how OYO has morphed from its original model towards progressively larger spaces.
From a focus on budget hotels to one that includes premium hotels, from asset-light to
asset-heavy, from India to international, from hotel rooms to tour packages and on top of
this myriad assorted offerings such as OYO Bazar. The cherry on the cake is OYO’s
Townhouse concept that expands beyond hospitality into co-working.
With each iteration, OYO’s ambition and vision have expanded and in step, it has raised
more and more funds with the most recent round of $250 million coming from SoftBank
at a $600 million valuation. This Ponzi scheme of ambition is all the more glaring. Unlike
Uber, which managed to carve out a dominant presence as an alternative to taxis in many
geographies, OYO never got around to dominating or winning in any of the segments it
forayed into.
Wrong moves
Dancing to the tune of your investor’s beat rather than following the song that plays in
your heart is a path to ruination
All this said OYO’s Ponzi scheme of ambition is not all its own doing. Imagine yourself in
the shoes of Agarwal, barely out of your teens and with a small fledgling startup, suddenly
presented with over a hundred million dollars in funding. As a founder, you now have no
choice but to play this game—your moves and ambitions forced to fit into your investor’s
thesis and ambitions. Like we have already seen with Housing and Snapdeal, dancing to
the tune of your investor’s beat rather than following the song that plays in your heart is a
path to ruination. The ambition might be that of your investor but the cost will be borne
by your startup and the larger ecosystem in general.

How India landed in the rabies vaccine doghouse
the-ken.com/story/how-india-landed-rabies-vaccine-doghouse
June 29, 2019
Register or Login
22-year-old Bale Hasda, who goes by the name Sumi, was bitten by a stray dog in Delhi’s
upscale Lodhi Colony on 11 March. She wasn’t the only victim, or even the worst affected.
A few others in the neighbourhood were bitten as well, with one senior citizen dying as a
result of the dog attack.
Fortunately for Sumi, her employer rushed her to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital, one of the
few public health centres in the national capital that still have stocks of the vital anti-
rabies vaccine (ARV). As ARV supplies at other public hospitals dry up, Safdarjung
Hospital has seen its anti-rabies clinic overwhelmed with victims of dog bite cases.
Sumi received a tetanus injection and a shot of the life-saving rabies immunoglobulin—a
serum administered for deep animal bites and scratches—and also a series of five ARV
injections over the next few days. The last of these injections was on 8 April, nearly a
month since her ordeal began. All told, the treatment cost her Rs 3,000 ($44), while the
serum was given free of cost. At a private healthcare provider, this could have cost as
much as Rs 15,000 ($218).
Without timely medical intervention and the availability of the ARV, Sumi’s story could
have panned out very differently. Others have not been as lucky, turned away from their
closest public hospitals due to the non-availability of the ARV in Delhi. Elsewhere in the
country, the situation is equally dire. Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab among
various other states are all running out.
“Various reports in the past few months indicate that several states in the country have
reported 60-80% shortage of ARV, due to a combination of factors including growing
demand, imperfect demand signal, and supply disruptions”
Prasanna Deshpande, deputy managing director of Indian Immunologicals Limited
That this would be the case in India is a bit of an oddity because literally nowhere else is
the need for ARV more obvious. India accounts for 36% of deaths due to rabies
worldwide. Some 20,800 deaths every year, most of them children under the age of 15,
according to a 2015 study published in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal.
India is also home to the largest anti-rabies vaccine manufacturer in the world—formerly
GSK-owned Chiron Behring Vaccines, which has now been acquired by Bharat Biotech.
On its own, Chiron Behring’s facility had a capacity of 15 million doses, almost a third of
the national yearly requirement of 35-48 million doses. In fact, India’s four ARV
manufacturers—Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech and Indian Immunologicals Ltd,
the-ken.com-How India landed in the rabies vaccine doghouse 1/2 303

Ahmedabad-based Cadila Healthcare, and Pune’s Serum Institute of India (SII)—have a
combined capacity of 40-50 million doses annually.
Reality bites
Despite being the country with the most rabies-related deaths

and boasting the largest rabies vaccine manufacturer, India is
staring at an 80% shortfall in the supply of rabies vaccines
Suraksha P, 29 Jun 2019
India has four rabies vaccine manufacturers with a combined capacity of 40-50 million
doses
Despite having a big market in their home turf, makers are finding it hard to supply to
the respective state governments
As a result, citizens are running from pillar to post for the life-saving vaccine
The government is planning to cap or ban exports of the vaccine
the-ken.com-How India landed in the rabies vaccine doghouse 2/2 304

How Indian B-schools could score an A
the-ken.com/story/india-b-school-solutions
May 23, 2019
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Around two months ago, as India’s top business schools sent their latest batch of students
out into the corporate world, The Ken decided to dig deeper into their placement
mechanism. While the usual boasts of near-100% placement and record salary packages
still dotted the pages of newspapers, close to two dozen respondents—past students,
faculties, recruiters and other industry experts—spoke of a rot in the system.
We learnt that placements did not equal job satisfaction. There was a major problem of
attrition among recent graduates, even among the top earners. Many didn’t last six
months.
While there are undoubtedly several factors at play here, a significant factor in this
problem are the B-schools themselves. Their outsized focus on placements rather than
learning; jobs and salaries rather than careers. And while the system is far from ideal,
nobody wants to change it. Students have loans to pay, companies have hiring targets to
meet, and business schools have a reputation to take care of. A reputation based on salary
packages and placements.
So we went back to experts and questioned them about possible solutions to the problems
—some if not all—that ail the Indian business school setup.
The general consensus was that just blindly adopting the Western models wouldn’t work
in a country as unique and diverse as India. “India is a huge country with very different
demographics compared with many nations in Europe or even the US,” says Deepak
Chandra. An independent advisor in the learning space today, Chandra was the deputy
dean at Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, until 2015, a position he held for 12 years.
Chandra and many others, however, believe that many Western solutions could be
tailored to work in the Indian business school ecosystem.
No time to waste
The B-school model that has evolved in India is completely different from how it works in
more evolved markets such as the US or Europe. And a large part of this has to do with
the motivations behind opting for a business school.
Overseas, students in B-schools tend to already have about five years of work experience,
opting to attend business schools once they’ve understood what they want in their careers.
As such, one-year programmes which allow for brisk upskilling before plunging back into
the job pool are increasingly preferred.
the-ken.com-How Indian B-schools could score an A 1/2 305

This is hardly ever the case in India, where the two-year programmes have traditionally
been preferred over the shorter one. The reason? Students with a three-year undergrad
degree or an engineering degree sign up directly for MBA courses without any prior work
experience or idea about what they want careerwise.
So, while the shorter courses are meant to build incremental skills on top of work
experience, the longer courses instil business fundamentals that many without experience
may not have.
Revise, rebuild, reboot
The future of work is changing. And so are the KRAs of the

managers of tomorrow. But are Indian B-schools prepping their
students for this?
Pradip Kumar Saha, 23 May 2019
To solve the issues ailing the Indian B-school system, blindly copying Western models
might not work
But many of their solutions could be tailored to suit the Indian ecosystem
From duration of courses to curriculum and the location of institutes, a lot needs
changing
At stake is the employability of India’s B-school graduates
the-ken.com-How Indian B-schools could score an A 2/2 306

How secure are India’s museums?
the-ken.com/story/how-secure-are-indias-museums
September 23, 2018
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The titan lies, mute, as a toddler runs her pint-sized hand over its seven-foot tusk. Don’t
touch it, her mother hisses. In vain. The girl continues, agog with wonder, as others
gather around the creature and a bored attendant looks on.
Stegodon Ganesha, whose plaque simply reads “Animals that lived millions of years ago”,
is one of 1,700 fossils in the Siwalik Gallery. The air is musty, punctuated by the scent of
ageing furniture. Walk into the colonnaded courtyard and the unmistakable whiff of bat
guano hits your nostrils. Go out the main gate, and you’re hurtled from past to present by
honking cars, the aroma of kathi rolls and Kolkata’s mugginess.
Siwalik is one of 32 sections in the 30,000 sq. ft Indian Museum. “Jadughar” (house of
magic), as the museum is locally called, isn’t just a custodian of antiquities. It watches, as
quietly as Stegodon Ganesha, the shapeshifting world within and outside its walls.
At 204, this is India’s oldest museum. And also its most controversial.
A train of blue tarpaulin runs nonchalantly along its perimeter. For the vendors of
Chowringhee who sell everything from jhalmuri to crockery to terracotta jewellery to T-
shirts, Jadughar’s visitors matter more than its chequered history. A history that includes
a Gupta-era sculpture heist in 1974. A stolen Buddha bust in 2004. Allegations of pilfering
and the display of fakes. A whistleblower missing for four years. “That case is sub judice
and we can’t say anything. But we pray for his return,” says administrator Nita Sengupta
about Sunil Upadhyay, the preservation officer who disappeared in 2014.
the-ken.com-How secure are Indias museums 1/2 307

Here 28 years now, the woman in a crisp taant sari and neat ponytail is no mood to hear
ill of the Indian Museum, and neither are the three men accompanying her. As evening
sets in, a game of factual ping-pong unfolds in the museum security office.
“Sunil had been offered Rs 90 lakh days before he disappeared,” I remember a museum
worker telling me (requesting anonymity). “I suspect that more than half the originals in
this museum have disappeared.”
I wonder what Sengupta and company make of this. More on that later.
On the face of it, Upadhyay’s case seems limited to rampant corruption. But look closer,
and a common thread emerges, connecting seemingly disparate dots of mismanagement,
artefact smuggling and tedious repatriation.
That thread is security.
India has no official protocol regulating the security of our cultural heritage. When
museums are woefully understaffed or have untrained guards, it’s a cakewalk for the mice,
both within and outside, to come out and play.
the-ken.com-How secure are Indias museums 2/2 308

How to kill cash
the-ken.com/story/how-to-kill-cash
February 27, 2019
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There is a general sense of reluctance when it comes to electronic payments in the plains
of offline retail in India.
Merchants aren’t interested in accepting them, banks aren’t interested in convincing any
other than the biggest merchants to accept card payments and most users are not
interested in using digital payments for most things.
The government, eager to drive cashless payments, has tried everything. Slashed the fee
merchants had to pay banks for accepting payments, gave banks targets to hook more
merchants with point of sale terminals to accept digital payments and is looking at
pushing low-cost solution like QR codes.
But all of this becomes a Sisyphean task, because of fundamentally misaligned incentives
for all stakeholders in the digital payments system. But what if merchants who today are
pushed and prodded to accept digital payments actually want to accept digital payments?
And that starts with fixing the card payments before we get to pushing something like the
payments poster child UPI (short for Unified Payments Interface, a real-time mobile
payments system).
Why?
In Jan 2019, UPI hit a record 672.75 million transactions. The National Payments
Corporation of India, which manages UPI, doesn’t split the data, but let’s assume that half
of these volumes are made from individuals to merchants. And more than 90% of these
merchant payments are online—for recharges, bill payments, e-commerce, etc.
The vast majority of commerce is still offline—and cash-heavy
Zoom out a bit here. More than 95% of commerce in India is still offline, and the picture is
quite different there. It is cash-heavy and limited by point of sale (PoS) devices present
only in the large cities.
You may ask why bother about card-based PoS payments instead of faster, better, and
cheaper (UPI-based) QR-code solutions that consumers scan with a smartphone. Aren’t
they an obvious solution to reaching consumers and merchants at scale? Not so fast.
The real picture is sobering. Of India’s 390 million Internet users, about 160 million
transact online, said a recent report by Google, Omidyar Network and Bain & Company.
More importantly, 54 million of the 160 million stopped transacting online after their first
the-ken.com-How to kill cash 1/3 309

purchase—presumably because of a poor interface and other challenges.
Add to this the fact that the average user already has 51 apps on their phone. For QR code
solutions to work at scale, consumers will need a compelling enough reason and relevance
to download that 52nd app. Not to mention having a stable enough connection to
complete the payment instantly at the point of sale. Both of which are optimistic, at best.
It’s perhaps more realistic to persuade a consumer to pull out a piece of plastic that they
already use at an ATM and present it to the merchant.
Kill bill
Electronic payments in India have not taken off because of

misaligned incentives. Merchants have to pay a fee on every
transaction, while the banks who invest in setting up PoS
terminals don't earn much. To fix this, we have to turn the fee
structure upside down
Srikanth Rajagopalan, 27 Feb 2019
The way card payments work at offline retail outlets in India makes it unviable for small
merchants, who can't afford to pay for every sale
On the flip side, for banks, being "acquiring" merchants (getting them to sign up for PoS
services) is an expensive proposition, with little in the way of returns
The fundamental structure actually discourages both sides from expanding the basic
card payments network from the existing set of mid- to large retail shops
But what if we flip the way payment fees work, and have card-issuing banks pay the
acquiring banks, with not a penny coming from the merchant's pocket?

Humanising Algorithms
the-ken.com/story/humanising-algorithms
January 23, 2017
Give me data and I’ll change your world.
Such claims are commonplace in the world of business, governance, healthcare, elections
—any walk of life you may think of. The catch words remind us of late John Martin’s ‘Give
me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age’. One of the catchiest lines ever spoken
by an oceanographer, Martin’s idea of iron fertilisation of oceans, to trigger plankton
blooms that would act as carbon sinks, became popular through the 1990s when global
warming was becoming evident. Martin may have said this in half-seriousness, but big
data fans, today, are very serious about changing the status quo. Sandy Pentland of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology has had ambitions of reinventing human society on
a large database platform.
Now, designers of algorithms, which play a critical role in data generation and analysis,
are getting serious. Because algorithms are proving to be discriminatory, reinforcing
human prejudices, and generally not as objective as they are widely thought to be. And
since the march of algorithms is not going to be stopped—India plans to use it for policing
—the next best thing to do is to create algorithmic checks and balances that can raise the
right flags.
Nearly half of India’s 50 or so algorithm designers, theoretical computer scientists to be

precise, gathered in Mysore last weekend to brainstorm on such issues. To bring
computational lens, a term coined by four Berkeley computer scientists, on other sciences.
It doesn’t mean applying computer science to a problem, rather it’s a way of looking at the
processes of nature (or other disciplines) and giving them a new algorithmic perspective.
Nisheeth Vishnoi is leading the charge. His own work is a prime example of such an
approach. Among other things, he has shown a connection between the dynamical
systems in signal processing and the single-celled organism, slime mould. Currently, at
the-ken.com-Humanising Algorithms 1/6 312

the Swiss Ècole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne, Vishnoi is exploring if more
computer scientists in India could use this lens and if a new Institute of Computation and
Human Sciences would make sense.
“We don’t want to do big data. We want to understand how we are generating the data.
Unless we understand what is special about the data, we don’t have any hope of making
leapfrog progress,” says Vishnoi.
It’s no surprise then that Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys co-founder, who has supported a
few computational science research initiatives in India, has shown deep interest in
backing Vishnoi’s idea. At the Infosys Leadership Institute in Mysore, Gopalakrishnan
kicked off the idea exploration with a fairly broad and ambitious call.
“Computer science is at crossroads. It needs new tools, new algorithms, new software… to
create better ways of using a computer or even making better computers. We need new
kinds of computing, a new architecture to solve problems of society. Let us think without
constraints, everything is possible. It could be in physical groups, virtual groups, a centre
within an institute or a new institute itself.”
Voilá! Those scientists did think without constraints, for full 36 hours.
How do we save humanity from the tyranny of algorithms? Can we embed ethics in
algorithms? Can we create boredom in Artificial Intelligence? To the extent that
algorithms are governing our lives, could there be a Constitution of Algorithms in future?
And in all this, where exactly should we place the human?
Putting the human in the loop
In order to get population-wide insight into data, it is imperative that Indian researchers
develop the ontology. In simple words, a vocabulary that defines a set of data and their
structure so that others, including software agents, can use it. The right way to do it,
suggested Ravi Kothari of IBM Research, is to intervene right at the source, where data is
being sensed. Add small chips in the flow of data to enrich it; add descriptors so that live
stream data is sufficiently tagged.
“While we have a visual cortex and olfactory system, that is not where complex analytics
happens in the brain,” said Kothari. In the human brain, the most complex analytics
happens in the hippocampus, the place where the fusion of information, from multiple
sensing organs, takes place. “Part of the reason, people believe, is that there are a
sufficient number of descriptors that are being attached to the information as it comes
here.”
“But the more descriptors you attach, the more specifically you can profile people who are
privacy-destructive in nature,” intervened Rahul Matthan, a partner at the law firm
Trilegal.
That was the first red flag of the day.

But humans not only make the data more identifiable, they can help improve the
machine-based inferencing too. Most statistical methods are not very good with little
data. Which is why we hear the near universal cry of ‘give me data’. Large data sets are
needed to train the learning algorithms so that they can make relevant inferences.
Humans, on the other hand, can do well with very little data. We’ve all made an
‘impression in the first meeting’.
The discussion wore on. By afternoon, all agreed that we are going to have algorithms,
which no one understands. While deep learning may be throwing results, which people
are happy with, no one really knows what happens in those 10-11 layers of algorithms.
“For instance, in image recognition, deep learning is doing very well but people probably
understand the first layer and maybe the last layer but what happens in the [several]
middle layers nobody knows. People are now trying to understand why machine learning
gives the [good] results that it gives,” Somenath Biswas of IIT-Kanpur later explained.
If so much is opaque in algorithms, can we then bring the human in the loop? Can the
human ‘inductive’ logic either supplement the machine-based inferencing or override it?
“I am wary of bringing humans. Look at the US elections and the wisdom of the crowd.
Better to keep humans out of the loop because they bring all kinds of biases,” interjected
Jayant Haritsa of the Indian Institute of Science.
“You are questioning whether democracy is good or not. You can’t. People chose their
president,” argued Vishnoi.
Then should we trust the experts more than the crowd? “They have been getting it wrong,
too. Look at the [US] elections result,” suggested another academic.
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Keeping the human out of the loop

If humans are introducing biases and discrimination, then they should be kept out of it,
right?
Easier said than done. At the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) in Delhi, officials
have a challenge, which in computer science is termed as ‘entity resolution’. That is,
identifying an individual from tons of data that different agencies collect. Can you
reconstruct a digital entity, say an individual or an organisation, from a plethora of digital
footprints?
‘We want to embed privacy with security. We have humongous transactional data
available but I don’t want anybody to access that. Even if a person from NATGRID is
sitting there, I don’t want her to access the data. Can we encrypt the entire data and then
let algorithm work on it [for identification]?” said a senior Home Ministry official, also a
computer science alumnus from one of the IITs.
Homomorphic encryption (or computing on encrypted data), suggested one. But it’s still
at the research level, countered another.
So, dig some more into theory.
“In theoretical cryptology, there’s a new thing called Zero Knowledge Protocol where you
get the result and yet you don’t have access to more than what you need to know,” said
Susmita Sur-Kolay from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. That’s still pretty far
out in future, one would say.
While a few vendors have partial solutions but they don’t work in the Indian (or even
Chinese) context because data in these regions is very noisy. A person may book his ticket
in one name; reserve his hotel room using an initial; may have made his ration card under
an incorrectly spelt name; stays in a neighbourhood under a nick or pseudo name; and so
on.
All of which gives scope to develop fundamentally new algorithmic methods. “It’s possible
that many of these problems are solved by the National Security Agency [in the US] but
there’s no way to know what innovations are going on,” said Vishnoi.
However, a universally hard problem is keeping bias out of algorithms. Especially so

because one person’s bias is another person’s fact. Fairness is not so much an ethical
question as it is a legal question. For instance, why does IndiGo airline have an all-female
cabin crew? Bias? No, it’s a business decision that makes the aircraft lighter and hence
saves the company in fuel costs. Facts are contextual and time-dependent.
Fairness

A universally hard problem is keeping bias out of algorithms. Especially so because one
person’s bias is another person’s fact. Fairness is not so much an ethical question as it is a
legal question
The discussion got intense. What if an algorithm gives false positives? Many times, people
who develop algorithms don’t disclose what parameters they did not use while defining
their facts or biases.
It was towards the end of the day, and theorems were flying across the room. As Naveen
Garg, from IIT Delhi, got up to present his group’s idea on handling bias, he was candid:
“From the way I am talking, you can make out I don’t understand it very well. It’s so
complex, it requires synthesis of different things, social sciences, law… Is there a notion of
a self-healing algorithm, which adjusts itself to the changing facts over time and modifies
itself? We need a new theory to define some of these things.”
Do algorithms perpetuate the biases of humans? And are humans feeding into the
algorithm through the training data?
“The causality is not clear—whether data is driving human behaviour or human behaviour
is driving the data. Just because something is prevalent right now, doesn’t mean that it
should have been,” said Vishnoi. When a human makes a biased decision, you can take it
to court, can we do that for algorithms? “This is what we want to crack. This should not be
an excuse for humans to perpetuate the bias.”
Driving Data
“The causality is not clear—whether data is driving human behaviour or human behaviour
is driving the data. Just because something is prevalent right now, doesn’t mean that it
should have been,” said NIsheeth Vishnoi.
It was time for Gopalakrishnan to intervene. “Science does not discriminate, people do.
Let’s just build good algorithms.”
‘Science is organised unpredictability’

This statement from Freeman Dyson was in action at the workshop. Computer scientists
swung from Turing-award winning ideas to something as humdrum as getting data from
public utilities, say railways or state transport departments, and allowing engineering
students in 6000 plus colleges to try their hands on data science.
In the age of applications, and in a country where people think computer science is
synonymous with programming, theorists are almost an invisible community. But with
the level of abstraction the theoreticians work at, they probably have the best analytical
tools to solve some of the confounding problems of our times. Be it in privacy or security,
healthcare or education.

I got a glimpse of that in Mysore. From what initially looked like a list of popular tech
jargons—Internet of Things, Privacy Preserving Analytics, Entity Resolution, Dreaming
and Boredom—emerged well-defined grand challenges. They became grander because
Gopalakrishnan encouraged people to think big. For instance, a ‘Heat map of infectious
diseases’ proposed by Vijay Chandru and ‘Microbial signatures in disease and health’, by
the virologist Shahid Jameel, became two interconnected mega ideas that could possibly
change the way we look at disease and health in India.
From the group that was brainstorming on ‘entity resolution’, came the idea of SPIDER—
Secure Personal Identification for Desh Raksha. (The two Hindi words have less to do
with nationalism and more to do with the multilingual nature of the problem.) “If humans
can piece together the information, so can an algorithm. We’ll find that algorithm,” said
Pushpak Bhattacharya, a Natural Language Processing expert from IIT-Bombay who is
now the director of IIT-Patna.
The computational lens will enrich theory, thinks Biswas. “How did mathematics
develop? In trying to solve the problems of astronomy…The [theoretical computer
science] community in India is starved of stimulation. These hard problems will energise
it.”
What this boot camp will finally result in or how the five big ideas will be taken up, we
don’t know. (Gopalakrishnan refused to speak beyond what he had said in the workshop).
But what is apparent though is that the community is ‘becoming more outward’, willing to
touch the reality threshold.
PS: I was invited to the workshop as a media professional, to represent the society voice
as it were. It’s a different matter altogether that I ended up writing about it.

If science is Covid-19’s exit strategy, could India build
its immunity shield on it?
the-ken.com/story/covid-exit-strategy
April 21, 2020
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Despite its insidious and rapid spread to 210 countries and territories, the novel
coronavirus is a stable creature. It is not mutating, the Indian Council of Medical
Research (ICMR) said on Friday. It’s not known how many India-circulating virus
genomes have been sequenced across how many clusters to arrive at this conclusion.
Nonetheless, this corroborates what other geographies are reporting. It isn’t the
capriciousness of SARS-CoV-2, but rather the individual immune and collective medical
response to the virus that has led to a wide variation in how it has ravaged countries in the
northern and southern hemispheres. A viral divide, as it were.
the-ken.com-If science is Covid-19s exit strategy could India build its immunity shield on it 1/4 318
The data on mitigation is too limited and the virus behaviour too novel to make any
inferences on whether this divide will continue or blur in the weeks or months to come. A
pandemic transmission study published in the American journal Science last week says,
among other things, that intermittent social distancing may be necessary as far as into
2022.
It’s a view that many Indian virologists and microbiologists also hold, urging India to
mount serological studies to determine the extent and duration of immunity to SARS-
CoV-2. The earlier correlation of a decades-old tuberculosis vaccine, known as BCG,
providing protection against the virus is turning out to be just that—a correlation. The
World Health Organization (WHO) doesn't recommend it. According to Gagandeep Kang.
director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad,
Haryana, “a recombinant BCG trial has been approved for the Serum Institute of India,
Pune, and will recruit a few thousand participants.”
“Right now, the virus is very virulent,” says Dr Shobha Broor, a former virologist at the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. “When a virus adapts to a host
and spreads like this, the virology says, slowly, its virulence becomes less. Do we have any
evidence of this from the cases so far?”
We must know the number of infections that are severe, at a large scale how many are
asymptomatic, how many are severe and how many are moderate. And then focus our
study on the asymptomatic. Data from other countries shows it is 25-30%, adds Dr Broor,
a former member of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO). She now consults
with the SGT Medical College in Haryana.
“Other than the total number of cases and deaths, no strong data is coming out of ICMR,”
says a virologist who has long been associated with many viral outbreaks.
COVID AND OUT
The virus isn’t mutating, it’s people’s response to the infection

that is varied. As India gets close to lifting lockdown, there’s a
good chance to build human immunity shields and slowly
kickstart the economy. Provided we get a few things in order
Seema Singh, 21 Apr 2020
Drugs are not prophylactic, nor is the old tuberculosis BCG vaccine protective. It’ll boil
down to immunity in the short-term; 30% viral shedding happens when one is
asymptomatic
Mass test with one-prick kits, check antibody levels, identify immune people, and
reintroduce them into the workforce
Forget imported kits; new, cheap peptide-based kits can do this. IISc is racing to make
them
Funds are available for mass production. Now, someone should get down to rapid
research and tie it in to public health response
IIT Kanpur, others race Covid-19 clock to build
ventilators for India
the-ken.com/story/iit-kanpur-others-race-covid-19-clock-to-build-ventilators-for-india
March 27, 2020
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It’s no longer news that there’s an acute shortage of ventilators the world over. With
Covid-19 filling up hospital beds everywhere, India is rushing to avoid an imminent
shortage of the life support machine. The country would need 110,000 to 220,000
ventilators by 15 May, according to projections . It has 40,000.
However, large Indian manufacturers that sell ventilators—like Chennai-based Trivitron

Healthcare—are struggling to import essential parts to build more. “Most medical devices
are shipped through international passenger flights. With flight restrictions in place, such
shipments are solely dependent on cargo flights. As a result, cargo clearances have slowed
down and a huge backlog is witnessed at customs,” said Sanjay Bhutani, the director of
Medical Technology Association of India (MTaI), which represents medical technology
MNCs.
Even if imports do make it, though, there’s a problem with movement within India as the
country is under lockdown. MTaI issued a statement on 26 March saying there’s
“confusion impacting the movement of vital medical devices” within the country. “If the
logjam continues, hospitals could face acute scarcity of medical devices very soon,” read
the statement. This, despite the Department of Pharmaceuticals asking for medical device
operations to be exempted from the lockdown. In this time, however, courier agencies
carrying medical devices have also suffered.
“How can we indigenously make these critical components, or source? When we want to
source something, all the flight areas are stopped. The government needs to allow cargo
flights to come”
Senior executive with Trivitron Healthcare
The need of the hour for India is effective alternatives produced on a tight deadline. That’s
the gap the likes of Noida-based startup AgVa Healthcare, the Indian Institute of
Technology, Kanpur (IITK), Pune-based robotics startup Nocca Robotics, and
Ahmedabad-based medical device company Citizen Industries are trying to fill.
IITK, Nocca and Citizen are working together to build a prototype ventilator by 5 April, if
not earlier. They started work only on 22 March. To put that timeline in perspective, most
products that come out of IITK’s incubator take two to five years. These are desperate
times, though, and the trio has support from the government and private players. They’re
working with a group of doctors specialising in respiratory diseases to vet their product.
the-ken.com-IIT Kanpur others race Covid-19 clock to build ventilators for India 1/2 322
The group’s aim is to create a basic ventilator built with Indian parts, removing the need
to depend on imports. Something that’s easy to produce, scale, and distribute in mere
weeks.
AgVa, meanwhile, built its own low-cost ventilator—from design to manufacturing—back

in 2018.
RACE AGAINST TIME
India may be staring at an unprecedented shortage of ventilators

in light of Covid-19—needing up to 5X of what it has. Now, a
motley group of players is looking to plug this gap with local
manufacturing and innovation
India needs a projected 110,000-220,000 ventilators by mid-may. Currently, it has

40,000, with most in use
The ventilator market is dominated by foreign manufacturers, which dominate 80% of

the market
But with a global pandemic and much of the west facing a crisis, importing ventilators
isn’t possible
Instead, Indian companies and enterprising individuals are coming together to help
avert the impending crisis
the-ken.com-IIT Kanpur others race Covid-19 clock to build ventilators for India 2/2 323
IITians have a weak heart for startups
the-ken.com/story/iitians-weak-heart-startups
December 13, 2016
From the outside, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras looks like an ocean of
calm. It is early December and there is a cool breeze rippling through the rain-washed
campus. But as one gets closer to Sharavati hostel, a ladies’ hostel that has temporarily
been turned into a venue for the yearly job mela called placements, the air is dense with
anticipation. The hallways are filled with a non-stop buzz; jokes, reassurances, and silent
and not so-silent rehearsals for the impending job interviews.
“Bakwaas tha,” says one after attending an interview. (It was utter nonsense)
“I knew all the answers but I got so nervous and I did badly. I deserve it,” says another
and takes a swig out of a bottle filled with orange Glucon-D.
Yet another is playing Candy Crush. “I’ll chew my nails down to its bed if I don’t do
something to distract myself,” says an MTech student as she waits for her turn to be
called.
It’s going to be a long, long day for some of them. A few have been here since 7am and
have interviews till 11pm. If they don’t get placed, they will have to come back the next day
with their game face and repeat the process till they get a job.
The marathon placement sessions are upon the 2016-17 batch of engineers. Hundreds of
companies from every possible sector will visit the 16 IIT campuses each day for 11 days to
interview about 12,000 students, who wear the badge of being the best engineers in the
country. And for these 20-something-year-olds placements are a do-or-die mission. And
it was not always like this, says Manu Santhanam, professor and the placement advisor at
IIT Madras. “It is in the last five years that placements have become larger than life,” he
says. “When I was a student here, most of us chose higher studies, but now almost 70% of
students opt for placements as many of the aspirational tech companies are in India.”
the-ken.com-IITians have a weak heart for startups 1/9 324

Interview jitters at the Sharavati hostel, IIT Madras
Keerthana Ashok Kumar, a chemical engineer, has a face that’s all sincerity. Small built,
she wears a tiny bindi and there is a hint of a sacred-ash smear on her forehead that
almost disappears into her fair-complexioned face. Self-assured and calm, she seems like
the kind of person who scores nothing less than 100 in any test. Well, that’s almost true;
she does have a 9.3 Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA). She likes math and
analytics. And chocolates. “I’ve been eating so many chocolates. After a point you get so
tired smiling and making small talk for so many interviews,” she says with a childlike grin.
“Chocolates helped me last through the placements.” There is little doubt that students
like her will be scooped up on the first day of placements.
So what companies does an A-lister like her apply to? She rattles off a list of
consultancies–JP Morgan, Deloitte, EXL Consultants and the like.
Keerthana Ashok Kumar, a chemical engineer
I am not keen on startups. Especially after what happened last year, I felt insecure about
applying to startups

Now, she is the kind of person which the media routinely calls crème de la crème. At a
time when companies collectively wail about the lack of good talent and see millennials as
having some sixth sense for innovation, can any company afford to not be on the radar of
students like her? Especially a clutch of 25,344 companies, which have almost $21.7
billion in funding (according to Tracxn) and whose USP is innovation? This is where the
bubble bursts.
“I am not keen on startups,” says Ashok Kumar categorically. “It is easy for one to be
swayed by the salaries they offer, but for how long can you be in that job no one can say.
Especially after what happened last year, I felt insecure about applying to startups.”
But why’s that? “When well-funded companies like Flipkart rolled back offers what
guarantee do we have about others?” she asks.
She took the job of a consultant in data analytics consultancy EXL Consultants on day one
of placements for a CTC of about Rs 9.5 lakh. (Quick myth buster: the average salaries at
IITs are Rs 9.5 -10 lakh. The Rs 20 and Rs 25 lakh that you read in the pink papers are for
a chosen few and for many IITians salary is not their first benchmark)
It is not just Ashok Kumar who says she does not want to join a startup. We met 40
students at three of the largest IITs – Madras, Delhi and Bombay – over six days of
placements, and spoke to students from other IITs and found that there seems to be a
change of heart towards startups. Especially after last year. As many as 31 companies
from Flipkart to Grofers to Peppertap rolled back offers they initially made to IITians,
which eventually led to many of them being blacklisted for a year.
Can’t care less
The most common refrain we heard on campus towards startups is that of indifference. Of
the 40 we interviewed, over 30 felt that startups were not such a hot deal after all.
On day one, as the big daddies of campus placements like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs
are staking their claim on top talent, there is no real talk of startups among students.
Students are shuffling in and out of the Lecture Hall Complex, which is the venue for
placements at IIT Delhi.
A confident-looking student in a white shirt and black trouser emerges from the Hall after
interviewing with a Taiwan-based software company, and a few minutes ago, with
Goldman Sachs. He is hopeful for an offer from them. He is slightly nervous as this
reporter pulls him aside for a quick chat. Much more than he was inside, facing recruiters,
he jokes. Sitting on a bench, close to the lecture hall, he muses about the general
placement situation at the campus this year. Nothing about startups, not just yet. Not
least till we broach that topic.
An M Tech Student, IIT Delhi
I just don’t get the craze behind startups. 95% of them do fail, right?

Our conversation was interrupted by a brief phone call, it was his parents. Being an
MTech student he says he has an advantage. He has seen some of his juniors join startups
only to leave the company six months to a year later. Or in some cases, the company even
shut down in that timeframe.
“I just don’t get the craze behind startups,” he says. And why’s that? “Well, 95% of them
do fail, right?” he asks rhetorically.
On day five, the story is no different. Dhawan, a BTech final year student, is walking back
to his hostel, alone. He is waiting for the results from an interview he’d just given with
pharma major GlaxoSmithKline. He is not too confident. “It went well initially, but after a
point, I felt I wasn’t keeping them engaged enough. I could see them getting bored and
disinterested in me,” he says. But he was up for a talk while he waited for the results. It
was, as he put it, his way of switching off from the events that transpired inside.
“If you ask me, I’d rather join an established company and learn the ropes,” he says. “I
wouldn’t want to join a startup only because there’s a buzz around it,” he says adding it
didn’t really matter from a bigger scheme of things.
Things are no different at IIT Bombay.
A mechanical engineer who did not want to be named is pacing in front of the placement
venue. It’s day five and he still has no job at hand. He is early for his interview with
Mercedes-Benz and keeps checking his watch to make sure he gets there on time.
“I am still here. What to do. I didn’t get selected for the first four days,” he says adjusting
his red tie that doesn’t really match with his pink shirt . Now all he wants is a job. Any job.
But given a choice, he wants to join Mercedes, which is hiring for a research profile. “I like
that profile.”
But what about startups?
He snaps and says: “What is this startup startup. I don’t want to join a startup.” He is
tired more than angry. He has reached a point of quiet desperation. It is almost a week
into placements and he is still looking for the nod. Startups don’t make it to his list. Think
about it, a research profile in one of the biggest luxury car makers in the world and a data
scientist at a startup. “No comparison,” he says. He just wanted the conversation to end,
be left alone for his roll number to be called out.
Buzzkill
The IIT campuses are huge and ideas aplenty but despite the excitement of finally
stepping from academia to the market, there is a tinge of apathy. Like a chip on their
shoulder, students just don’t care. They need a job. The halo around these startups have
faded and the expectations more grounded.

Two reasons should help explain this. One the events of last year, and two, experience of
the alumni. “It is true that students’ perception towards startups has changed in the last
two years,” says the MTech student from IIT Delhi, quoted above, who is also part of the
placement committee. It is not just the rolling back of offers. Having also seen many of
their alumni, only to stay there for six months and move on has made students question if
startups are worth it.
If average attrition in tech companies at the entry level is 15 to 20%, in startups it is as

high as 25%, says Anshuman Das, managing partner, LongHouse Strategic Consulting, an
executive search firm that specialises in e-commerce hiring. Das says there are two
reasons for this – A. People get better offers or B. Startups fold up.
Bubble bursts
This is a sea change in attitude, from just two years ago when almost one in nine wanted
to be part of this shape-shifting ecosystem
The MTech engineer quoted above feels somewhere stability in a job has become
underrated. “I don’t want to go to work everyday thinking if my company is going to shut
down in the next two to three months,” he says. He has loans to take care off. “At this
stage of our career, it’s a massive risk.”
This is a sea change in attitude, from just two years ago. Almost one in nine wanted to be
part of this shape-shifting ecosystem. It also helped that many of these start-ups were
founded by former IITians themselves.
If you rewind, you would remember that the haloed day one was offered on a platter to
startups in 2014. And in 2015 startups got more aggressive and asked for day-zero slots.
From biggies like Flipkart to one-year-old companies like CodeNation were calling dibs on
some of the best engineering talent.
Babu Vishwanathan, a professor and former placement advisor at IIT Madras, recalls that
startups were willing to do anything to get early slots as they wanted to lock in students
early on and prevent them from going anywhere else. “They tried gaming the system,”
says Vishwanathan. “If they knew these resources were contingent upon them getting
funding, they should have been more conservative with their hiring.”
But we know that didn’t happen.
Soon after the offers were rolled back, there was a clamour for action. The blacklisting of
startups was a decision pronounced by the All IIT Placement Committee (AIPC). But it
was not just the professors-in-charge, the students too backed the decision of blacklisting
startups, unequivocally. Just about each of the 40 we spoke to felt it was the right message
to send to startups. Don’t mess with our careers.

The chosen one?
To be fair, there was a certain naiveté with which the IITs looked at startups. Take this for
instance: in 2014, startups came waving huge salary packages with CTCs of about Rs 20
lakh. “There was a lot of temptation around the salary, but when our students joined those
startups they reported that what they get in hand is nowhere close to that,” says Sanka
Shiva Saketh, placement head at IIT Madras.
This brought in the learning that startups should disclose the gross taxable income, too,
and not just cost to company (CTC). And this was enforced in 2015 in IIT Madras and
with that, they thought they had a foolproof system. Then came the bigger learning in
2015.
“The reneging of offers was shocking for us and something that we didn’t anticipate at
all,” says Saketh. “So, this year before we invited a startup we looked at all possible
aspects of whether that startup will likely fail and have been very careful.”
The placement team leveraged its biggest asset for this background check on startups – its
alumni. “We spoke to our alumni in all the companies we were interested in and did a
health check on the startup on aspects from its cash flows to whether it’s raising funds to
sustain or to expand,” says Saketh. “And if it’s the former, we don’t want those kind of
startups on campus.”

This caution with which IITs and its students are looking at startups might seem like a
strange contradiction. On one hand, you
Misconceptions
Have the IITs overreacted? IITians can always leverage the fact that they are from the best
engineering college in India and get a job off campus. Right?
have the IITs encouraging their students to pursue entrepreneurship through their
incubators. And even IITians see themselves as entrepreneurs — a survey by IIT Bombay
in 2014 showed that one in four students saw themselves as entrepreneurs in five years.
And then you have a decision like blacklisting; which penalises startups for a sudden
change in the business environment.
So, have the IITs overreacted? After all, these students are from IIT. And it’s not the end
of the world if startups rolled back offers. IITians can always leverage the fact that they
are from the best engineering college in India and get a job off campus. Right?
Wrong, say students. “When we go off campus, first of all, it is time-consuming,” says a
group of students. If we can interview with ten companies in four days here, it takes at
least one week to interview with one company, says one student. Another chimes in
saying: “the pay is also nowhere close to what we get on campus. It’s at least 30-40%
lesser.”
But surely, this happens in other institutes too.
Why even the world’s foremost engineering institute Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) has seen instances of companies rolling back offers made to its
students when market conditions changed, says Gururaj Deshpande, a life member of the
MIT Corporation, the governing body of MIT. Deshpande, an IIT Madras alumnus, does
not agree with AIPC’s decision to blacklist startups. At MIT, he says, the institute only
facilitates connections between students and opportunities.
“The graduates are independent and mature enough to make their own decisions,” he
says, chairman of several companies including Cascade Communication, a
communication equipment maker and Tejas Networks, which makes data networking
products. He adds that educational institutions’ role ends with training students to
develop their own judgments, even if it’s the wrong ones.
So how does the startup ecosystem view all this apathy among students?
Ironically, with a sense of relief.
“It’s a good thing that students are sceptical and are questioning joining startups because
let’s face it, startups will always be risky places to join. They need to be thorough in their
research as to why they want to join one,” says Abhishek Bansal, co-founder and CEO of

logistics firm Shadowfax that didn’t go to the IITs to hire this time. “This way only
students who really want to apply for startups will now apply and most companies, too,
will now think twice of going to hire from campuses.”
Also, as Das says, while startups did many things right; HR was not among them. “They
screwed up their HR,” he says. “So there will be a temporary backlash. It is not just these
students, even laterally it has been tough to fill positions in startups.”
Kaustubha Mohanty, convenor of AIPC
This year, the numbers of startups are at least 50% fewer when compared to last year in
most campuses
Sandeep Chaudhary, CEO of HR consultancy AonHewitt says that blacklisting is actually a

good inflexion point to pause and think, for both the students and firms. Startups need to
go back to the drawing board and think hard about the kind of talent they need, the long-
term engagement they can offer around career and development to students. “The ‘brand
startup’ was built too quick too soon”.
This year, the numbers of startups are at least 50% fewer when compared to last year in
most campuses, says Kaustubha Mohanty, convenor of AIPC. For instance, at IIT
Guwahati only 15 startups came this year when compared to 35, in 2015. At IIT Madras,
about 70 startups came last year, while this year it was about 40. So there are still a few
that believe startups have the coolest gigs to offer in town.
A civil engineer from IIT Madras is walking around the campus with a devil may care
attitude. That kind of look one can have on such days only if one is placed. His mustard
yellow tee stands out from the various shades of formal blue shirts. He is here to see some
of his friends through their job interviews and help them stay focused and calm.
“I have no interest in civil engineering, I’m interested in economics and analytics,” he

says. Even at the end of his first year, he began taking online courses on the side. No
wonder then that Paytm took him in on day two. “I wanted to join startups because this is
where I feel my passion for finance and analytics can come together,” he says excitedly.
But he does add that he researched the company thoroughly before applying. And
demonetisation, for him, further tipped the scales in favour of Paytm.
But these stories have been far fewer, what more, even this year, startups have been
unpredictable.
It is day six of placements. And a BTech computer science engineer storms into the
canteen. He is shaking with anger. Swiggy turned out to be a no-show that day. “I skipped
Mercedes-Benz for Swiggy and they cancelled at such short notice. It isn’t fair. These guys
should be blacklisted,” he says, throwing his bag on a chair. “Why can’t they decide
beforehand? They were offering Rs 14 lakh.”

His friends lean in to comfort him. A few bad jokes later, he calms down. He still isn’t
happy. And this is when rumours get a life of their own. “You know, even Hike is
cancelling,” he says. (Hike didn’t cancel. The NCR-based company went to campuses
across the country. Swiggy, meanwhile, claimed it did participate but could not find the
“right fit”) He adds angrily, “I don’t want to work at startups anymore.” Just because of
this cancellation? “They did it last year, too.” For him the path was clear and that’s why he
chose startups. “Swiggy, then Flipkart, then Amazon then go to the US and get into AWS
(Amazon Web Services),” he counts. And then? “And then machine learning in AWS and
then life is set.”
Venkat Ananth and Patanjali Pahwa contributed to this story

In a post-polio world, India cannot sit still
the-ken.com/story/post-polio-world-india-afp
July 30, 2019
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The global initiative to eradicate polio had big dreams for 2019. It was the latest deadline
for the eradication of the polio virus in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reports in July,
however, indicate that 2019 can be added to a growing heap of missed deadlines. Not only
is polio still rife in both countries, but its prevalence seems to be increasing.
Pakistan has seen four times as many cases of polio thus far in 2019 as it did in the same
period last year. Set against this backdrop, the situation in India seems comparatively
sanguine. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Indian polio-free in 2014, and
it has stayed that way since.
But while polio may be in India’s rearview mirror, other viruses may be rushing to fill the
niche left by its eradication. Back in 2015, reports emerged of 208 children in Uttar
Pradesh, India’s most populous state, developing polio-like symptoms. Given that the
World Health Organization had declared India polio-free scarcely a year ago, the news
triggered panic. Had the dreaded virus made a comeback?
Eventually, a 20 June press release from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
calmed these apprehensions. It said that even though the cases looked like polio, samples
from the children were negative for the virus. What the children had was Acute Flaccid
Paralysis (AFP), a broad basket of symptoms with causes other than polio. “India is polio-
free,” the press release assured.
Four years later, it isn’t clear what happened to these children. Did they recover—many
cases of AFP are transient, and patients make a full recovery. Did some remain paralysed
for life? What caused their illnesses, if not the polio virus? No central or state agency
the-ken.com-In a post-polio world India cannot sit still 1/2 333

knows the answer. This is because India has no systematic program to investigate non-
polio AFP cases, even though 36,338 cases were recorded in 2018.
The lack of research in this critical area is “very tragic,” says C Durga Rao, a
microbiologist at Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science. Rao has studied viruses
associated with AFP in the past.
Even though no central agency investigates every case of AFP, sporadic studies conducted
by Rao and other scientists point to the role of some troubling viruses. Many children
with paralysis are infected by members of the genus enterovirus, to which polio belongs.
This genus has microbes like EV71 and EVD-68, which have been dubbed “the next polio”
because of the crippling disease they can cause.
For example, EV71, which circulates widely in East and Southeast Asia, kills or paralyses a
large number of the children it infects. A study by Rao between 2007 and 2009 and
another by Mumbai’s Enterovirus Research Centre between 2008 and 2012 found EV71
among AFP cases in India.
the-ken.com-In a post-polio world India cannot sit still 2/2 334

In India, driverless cars need a driver
the-ken.com/story/india-driverless-cars
January 31, 2019
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In September 2017, I drove to Kathmandu from Bengaluru and back with two friends. It
was an eye-opening trip—when it came to the degree of disconnect in awareness, both
cultural and infrastructural.
We put a dashcam and recorded almost the entirety of over 5,500km. Looking over these
images, we found obstacles including cows, horses and trucks coming straight at us (no
surprises there) that show how complicated navigating even the national highway
network can get.
It’s tough enough for humans. Now imagine asking a poor machine to drive itself.
Over the past few years, automotive and mapping companies around the world have been
racing to dominate the autonomous vehicles, or AV, market. (More specifically, advanced
driver-assistance systems, or ADAS in industry speak.)
Automobile makers and tech companies are hard at work in the US—as well as China and,
to a lesser extent, Europe—launching self-driving features in cars and running
simulations and extensive trials. Governments in these countries are also working
alongside, measuring the impact on the economy, putting together legislation and
preparing their societies to adopt a potentially massive shift in mobility.
India, however, is nowhere on the radar, with transport minister Nitin Gadkari publicly
stating that the government will not allow AVs. This is a mistake.
Research shows that the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on the economy,
peoples’ productivity, the environment, urban development and public transportation is
nothing to sneeze at. And not to mention road safety—a 2017 report from the road
ministry estimates that over 140,000 people died in road accidents in India that year.
Letting machines assist in or take over driving can help cut down that number
significantly (global studies have found that as many as 90% of accidents are due to
human error).
To get there though, it will take time. And lots of it. India needs to get started right now.
Especially since Indian conditions pose distinct challenges to driverless vehicles—our
highway escapades are testament to that.
the-ken.com-In India driverless cars need a driver 1/3 335

Potholes, bovines and chaos
India’s roads are notoriously bad, and noticeably terrible after the monsoons every year. A
lot of this is an engineering problem. According to the basic road statistics report in 2015-
16, the latest found on the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways website, only 62.5%
of the total road network in the country is paved. Even though the road ministry’s
statistics show that a majority of roads are either concrete-paved or bituminous, quality
and maintenance are poor, as any motorist would testify.
Asleep at the wheel
Auto and tech companies around the world are racing to develop
autonomous vehicles. And governments are helping, because the
potential benefits are nothing to sneeze at—but India is nowhere
to be seen
Sajjad Anwar, 31 Jan 2019
If the global auto industry has one vision for the future of transport, it's automation
(and electric vehicles, but that's another story)
But it takes time and effort to build an AV ecosystem, and cooperation among
carmakers, technology firms and the authorities

The US, China and—to a lesser extent—Europe have already started putting in place
policies to regulate and allow the testing of driverless cars
India needs to get on board, or risk missing out on the many benefits of automation in
the long run—from productivity to environmental to safety

In solar, India is singing its best tuneless choir
the-ken.com/story/india-solar
November 30, 2017
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Solar isn’t as complex as people make it out to be. Sunlight is free. There is the cost of
solar panels, to get as much sunlight as possible. Simply called a photovoltaic system,
which comes with its panel, inverter and battery. Lots of photovoltaic systems put
together make an array. Multiple rows of arrays produce Direct Current (DC) which has
to be converted into Alternating Current (AC), so there’s another largish inverter.
A company’s job is to put all of this together, sell electricity to someone—usually the state
electricity board—and in turn, make money. Year after year. Until such a time, 15 or 25
years in, when the cost of putting all this together and maintaining it over the years
becomes less than the total money received from the state electricity board. Then, you go
home. And party. Pretty simple.
Of course, that is till the time you show up in India. And everything goes crazy.
Sample this. Earlier this year, Uttar Pradesh renegotiated the power purchase
agreements (PPAs) it had signed with 15 developers for a 215 MW solar tender which
was auctioned in 2015. The tariffs for this auction were in the range of Rs 7.02/kWh and
Rs 8.60/kWh. The state then demanded the companies to agree to lower tariffs of Rs
7.02/kWh. Then again, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu’s electricity distribution
authority renegotiated the PPAs for a 1.5 GW solar tender. The tender was awarded to 18
companies but the state signed PPAs with only 16 of them—those which agreed to lower
their original tariff to the lowest bid in the auction. In the second quarter of 2017, more
than 3,000 MW of new tenders were announced, out of which, 2,100 MW of tenders
were scrapped. For myriad reasons. Prime amongst them? High bid prices.
the-ken.com-In solar India is singing its best tuneless choir 1/2 338
There’s more. Early this year, in May, India recorded one of the lowest solar tariffs in the
world, when ACME Solar won with the lowest bid to develop a 200 MW project in
Rajasthan, quoting a tariff of Rs 2.44/kWh. Needless to say, this price piqued the
interest of many solar companies across the world. Hence, the interest of banks to lend
huge sums to solar projects and private equity capital chasing developers. It’s another
matter altogether that the price of solar modules—which are mainly imported into India
from Taiwan and China—has been climbing. According to Mercom research, in Q3 2017,
the price of Chinese solar modules grew by 14% compared to the same quarter the
previous year.
Even as all this happens, India has added 7 GW of cumulative installations in the first
nine months of 2017. This number is important because it makes solar the leading new
energy source in India, accounting for 39% of total new power capacity additions in the
first nine months of 2017.
More often than not, disparate sets of information muddle the true picture. A good case
in point is India’s solar industry.
Acme Solar
Azure Power
clean energy
module prices
ReNew Power
renewables
solar energy
solar tariff
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
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the-ken.com-In solar India is singing its best tuneless choir 2/2 339
In Zerodha’s shadow, Upstox chases an elusive
Robinhood dream
the-ken.com/story/upstox-chases-robinhood-dream
December 15, 2020
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Zerodha is India’s largest stockbroker with over 2.7 million accounts. It remains
bootstrapped , and there isn’t a venture capitalist who doesn’t wish they had it in their
portfolio. But about six or seven years ago, investors weren’t keen on it.
Stock broking hasn’t been a reliable investment option for VCs. The market fluctuates,
and there just aren’t enough people trading in India. But the post-pandemic work-from-
home gang has ensured an uptick in trading. And guess who’s the No. 1 recipient of VC
love for stockbrokers?
Zerodha’s contemporary, now the No.2 stockbroker in India, Upstox. Data from startup
data provider Tracxn shows that $29 million of the $81 million investment that went into
stock broking in the last three years, went to Upstox alone. And a large part of Upstox’s
capital mostly came from one blue-blooded venture capitalist—Tiger Global.
There are upsides
In November, Upstox more than doubled its registered users to 1.5 million accounts, from
a year ago. This put it ahead of traditional leader, ICICI securities, with 1.2 million
accounts.
Upstox’s milestone comes at a time when the stock market is at an all-time high. With
participation from new investors breaching new records. Internationally, this sort of new
investor interest has meant the meteoric rise of a player like Robinhood, which allows
young people to trade in a user-friendly way. The American retail trading app, which first
introduced zero commission trading, now has over 13 million users and is valued at over
$11 billion.
Upstox is seeing a similar crowd getting attracted to it. Tiger’s investment has given
Upstox wings. The millions it raised has allowed Upstox to deploy growth hacks from
referral bonuses to giving free stocks to users to get them to trade, bringing a younger
demographic in.
“We are adding 200,000-300,000 new accounts in a month, now. We saw almost 2x-3x
year on year growth on all our key metrics from user to revenue, this year,” said Ravi
Kumar, the co-founder of Upstox. “The average age of our customers is 31, and 65% of
them are first time investors. And 70% of our user base is from tier two cities.”
the-ken.com-In Zerodhas shadow Upstox chases an elusive Robinhood dream 1/2 340
Kumar believes this trend is here to stay among the millennial investors, who now want to
be in charge of their own money.
Taking stock
The Tiger Global-backed stockbroker has become the second-

largest in India. But for a venture-funded business, stockbroking
alone won't cut it. Upstox now wants to pull off a jack-of-all-
trades Robinhood, but India is no ideal setting
Arundhati Ramanathan, 15 Dec 2020
Zerodha, the largest stockbroker, blazed the path as a discount broker and that too as a
bootstrapped company. Even though Upstox took a similar approach, it couldn't see
similar results
What helped Upstox break into the top league was that it could spend on growth hacks,
thanks to the backing from Tiger Global
Now, as Upstox wants to switch from being a trader-focused product to a retail one, it’ll
find itself wedged between a price war and the inability to monetise at the same time
Stockbrokers find that an Indian Robinhood model is far from feasible in India
the-ken.com-In Zerodhas shadow Upstox chases an elusive Robinhood dream 2/2 341
India makes its maiden entry into 5G standards, pisses
off big telecoms
the-ken.com/story/india-makes-its-maiden-entry-into-5g-standards-pisses-off-big-telecoms
February 14, 2019
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For the last three years, Kiran Kumar Kuchi has been travelling to the global telecoms
standards meetings with resolute regularity. A trip every month. To the high-stakes 5G
standards being drafted during the time, Kuchi and his colleagues from the Indian
Institutes of Technology wanted to add a typically Indian requirement. But the stiff
negotiations at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), driven by big telecoms
gear makers, made sure India was stifled. It had no telecoms company, and hence no seat
at the table. No voice.
Meeting after meeting, India was outvoted. Blocked, or pushed around from one working
group to another. Until February 2018, when, after some backroom drama at the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva, India finally opened its
account. By adding a feature to the 5G standards. The full set of those standards—
mandatory and optional—will roll out later this year.
A professor at IIT Hyderabad, Kuchi and his team have devised a new modification to the
radio signal—which carries information in telecommunications—that can be configured
for two important outcomes. To improve the battery life of a mobile phone and to enhance
the signal transmission range of a base station, from the current last mile distance of 1.7
km to up to 12 km. The use case that India wants to apply this technology for is called
Large Cell Low Mobility (LMLC)—wider coverage, at low speeds. Its specs are currently
being finalised at the ITU—the UN agency overseeing development of the “IMT 2020”
global standard for 5G—as you read this.
This is the first time ever that India can boast of owning an intellectual property (IP) in
telecoms standards. This is also the first time that India has a chance to influence
products for 5G networks. But it may not be the last time. And that has the big equipment
makers worried. In the negotiation chambers of 3GPP, the essential technical features of
Kuchi’s invention were diluted, from 12 km to 8 km, and finally to 6 km at the Toronto
meeting in June 2018.
Much against the wishes of the Indian academics, India’s proposal was also negotiated
down to be included in the optional list of the 5G standards. That means the rest of the
world may choose to never implement it. India though has chosen to make it mandatory
even as telecoms vendors have tried reasoning against it with the Department of
Telecommunication (DoT). Their reaction isn’t surprising; toeing an Indian IP into their
future products is not what big equipment makers are used to.
the-ken.com-India makes its maiden entry into 5G standards pisses off big telecoms 1/3 342
In most technologies, research happens first, standards are developed later. In telecoms,
research gets encoded into standards first, products and solutions are developed later. Put
simply, telecoms standards define what direction future technologies will take.
Participating in and influencing 5G standards, therefore, has become a massive techno-
political exercise.
The traditional telecoms patent holders—Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Nokia—expect to earn

nearly $20 billion in annual licensing revenue from 5G handsets alone.
One small step or one giant leap
As the 5G standards window closes in, India has added a feature

to it. International vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm are
worried. If India continues on this path, it could become a threat to
their cosy club which lords telecoms patents
Seema Singh, 14 Feb 2019
After years of effort, India has added a feature to 5G standards: large cell, low mobility. A
typical Indian requirement for high-speed broadband with low mobility
In numerous international meetings, vendors negotiated down the essential features of

LMLC. Why? Nobody wants to redo their products and build solutions for countries like
India
Still, India managed to get into the optional list of 5G standards to be rolled later this
year. It works with 4G/LTE and 5G gears
India will make it mandatory; vendors will eventually come around to it. But will this
spur local telecoms product development?
India risks Covid-19 testing chaos as ICMR keeps cards
close to its chest
the-ken.com/story/chaos-covid-19-tests-icmr-strategy
March 30, 2020
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Like books and minds, a public health response in the midst of the steadily worsening
novel coronavirus pandemic works best when it is open.
It’s been almost a week since the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex
biomedical body on Covid-19 management, approved test kits from private manufacturers
to supply real-time PCR testing . Meaningful testing, though, has still not happened.
Many of the private labs that were approved subsequently didn’t begin testing until
Saturday, 28 March. While the efforts look substantive on the ICMR website, on the
ground, it’s more chaos, less testing.
Kits are in short supply; some of them are failing; suppliers are jacking up prices; a few
labs are even hoarding kits. Some local manufacturers are caught between the National
Institute of Virology’s (NIV) insistence on 100% concordance and international
regulators’ disregard for it. And so on. Wild confusion reigns supreme in the field.
The reasons are many, but ICMR’s own lack of transparency and organisation have played
a major role in the current morass.
In the name of decentralisation, on 25 March, ICMR added three more government

centres to validate and approve RT-PCR kits. Given that the country is under lockdown,
there was little consideration for the geographical distribution of these centres. Apart
from NIV, which is the nodal agency for all testing approvals, in Pune, the three new
centres are in New Delhi, National Institute of Pathology; Kolkata, National Institute of
Cholera and Enteric Diseases; and, one more in Pune, National Aids Research Institute.
For all their competence and recognition as the biotech hubs of India, Bangalore,
Hyderabad, and Chennai have been assigned no centres for validation and approval of
kits. Manufacturers of kits in southern India are having to send their kits to Pune by road
because flights are cancelled. It’s social distancing gone crazy.
Moreover, until Saturday, the three newly designated centres were not ready to evaluate
kits because NIV, the only agency dealing with Covid-19-positive samples, has not been
able to send them. Without samples, centres cannot evaluate kits.
In short, three new centres but no new work was done for over three days.
the-ken.com-India risks Covid-19 testing chaos as ICMR keeps cards close to its chest 1/2 345
As for the kits, ICMR has listed 15 non-US FDA-approved kits which NIV has tested. (Kits
that are approved by international regulators need not get evaluated by NIV.) Only kits
that have 100% sensitivity (to detect 100% cases) and 100% specificity (to detect 100%
negative cases) have been recommended.
Test run
More testing labs are added to the list, more kits enter the market
but apex biomedical body ICMR’s mythical 100% concordance is
creating confusion, roadblock and delay. It's time ICMR changed
its kit approval as well as testing strategy. Oh, and also became
more transparent
Seema Singh, 30 Mar 2020
As India moves to confront community transmission of Covid-19, it will need
syndromic, wider testing
Even global textbook definitions for tests expect 96-98% sensitivity or specificity. ICMR
wants 100%
Equally baffling is ICMR’s disregard for the southern biotech hubs of Bangalore,
Hyderabad, Chennai while testing kits
As more rapid blood test kits enter the market, the present strategy won’t suffice; India
will need to test many batches from many suppliers. Can it?
the-ken.com-India risks Covid-19 testing chaos as ICMR keeps cards close to its chest 2/2 346
India, the middle kingdom for 5G, is battleground zero
for Huawei and Samsung
the-ken.com/story/india-the-middle-kingdom-for-5g-is-battleground-zero-for-huawei-and-samsung
February 5, 2019
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Late last year, it looked as if Samsung Electronics India had shown up too late to join
India’s 5G race. Not just that, it picked the wrong vehicle too.
To a roomful of technocrats in Delhi, Samsung showed how its 5G tech in Korea was able
to handoff signals between two base stations in a train speeding at 190 km/hour.
Firstly, delivering 100 Mbps on a train wasn’t really India’s leading use case to upgrade
from 4G to 5G. And more importantly, Samsung’s Chinese rivals had demoed 5G speeds
in trains running 300-400 km/hour at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
meetings over the past year.
Nonetheless, Samsung still impressed the Delhi audience. They drew up a plan. To test an
emergency response on a 5G network around Sanchar Bhavan (the offices of India’s
Ministry of Communications and Information), the Parliament, a hospital and a police
station in the vicinity made for an ideal trial location.
That plan is still lying with the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), as are those
from Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. The trials are likely to start anytime in the coming few
weeks once the DoT specifies the use cases.
State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited has even geared up to use Huawei equipment
for the trials, say industry sources. Even though the Chinese equipment maker itself has
maintained radio silence in India. Huawei backed out of a meeting and subsequently
declined to comment for this story.
the-ken.com-India the middle kingdom for 5G is battleground zero for Huawei and Samsung 1/2 347
That was December; this is February.
What a difference a month–January–can make.
Since December, when Canada detained Huawei Technologies Co.’s CFO and the
daughter of its founder, Meng Wanzhou, on sanctions charges, the United States has led a
global offensive against the company, alleging that China uses its equipment for spying.
By January, several developed countries initiated broad reviews of the world’s largest
telecommunications equipment maker’s supply chain and increased scrutiny of its
infrastructure. Even if many of these countries are not banning Huawei outright, they
certainly have put the brakes on its 5G march. Huawei has made a substantial
contribution to the development of 5G standards, but it now finds several countries
shifting their stance. More because of their suspicions of China rather than specific
actions by the company.
“Something is shifting in G8 business. Australia catches a cold when China sneezes; so

much Chinese money goes into its universities, but still, it has banned Huawei’s 5G,” says
a telecoms technocrat in New Delhi. “Taiwan has been told to move out of China… It used
to complain about logistics in India, but now Taiwan says, ‘What can we do here’.”
In this fast shifting market, India is uniquely positioned. It is the only large country which
hasn’t officially taken a stand against Huawei.
the-ken.com-India the middle kingdom for 5G is battleground zero for Huawei and Samsung 2/2 348
India up for a trade war over price control, but there’s a
Plan B
the-ken.com/story/india-ready-for-a-trade-war-over-price-control-but-theres-a-plan-b
June 21, 2018
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“Do not threaten us; let’s talk instead.”
On 8 June, government think-tank Niti Aayog first shared its proposed new price control
policy for medical devices with US-headquartered medical device manufacturers. This
new approach seeks to change the price control policy from one that currently caps prices
on medical devices such as knee implants and stents without any room for flexibility. The
new policy aims to cap margins on 18 other devices mentioned in the Drug Price Control
Order 2013, instead. It came with the request mentioned above.
The request did not come out of the blue—it was in response to the US’ simmering
unhappiness over the existing price control policy. An unhappiness that threatened to
turn into retaliatory action. Just over 10 days on from sharing the proposed new policy,
the threat of US retaliation has materialised. On 19 June, the United States Trade
Representative (USTR) held a public hearing in Washington DC, where it considered
withdrawing trade benefits to India.
With this development, the timing of the Niti Aayog’s alternate price control policy has
become curiouser. The discussion to change the price control policy has been doing the
rounds for about a year, says a representative of an American industry body. But the
government chose this month to share the proposed policy because the pressure from the
US is mounting, he adds.
It all began in October, last year. The global medical device association AdvaMed,
headquartered in Washington DC, filed a petition with the USTR. AdvaMed, which
represents medtech majors such as Abbott, Boston Scientific Corporation, Medtronic and
the-ken.com-India up for a trade war over price control but theres a Plan B 1/2 349
BD, asked the USTR to withdraw trade benefits that the US accords to Indian industries.
This was followed by eight months of conversations, meetings and letters between the
Indian Government, US President Donald Trump, industry bodies and the USTR. All of
this culminated in the 19 June public hearing.
Now, all that is left is the USTR’s decision. This could take anywhere from three months
to over a year, depending on how strongly the two countries stick to their guns. The
Government of India, for its part, has suggested that it will drag the US to the World
Trade Organisation because it has the right to make devices accessible to the poor. Battle
lines drawn, the dispute threatens to turn into a trade war.
The new price control policy could defuse this ticking time bomb. It is the lifeline on
which the future of the $5.2 billion Indian medical device sector—growing at 15.8% each
year—rests, as over two-thirds of India’s medical devices are imported, and the majority
of those are from the US.
the-ken.com-India up for a trade war over price control but theres a Plan B 2/2 350
Indian healthcare in 2020’s rearview mirror
the-ken.com/story/indian-healthcare-in-2020s-rearview-mirror
December 26, 2019
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) called it the “decade of vaccines”. In
2010, the foundation pledged some $10 billion to help research, develop and deliver
vaccines in developing countries, including in India. It spent more in India—$282.5
million—in 2017 as compared to any other country, pouring all of it into building a supply
chain and ensuring demand for vaccines in the country.
And now it wants to withdraw, leaving the Indian government to foot an enormous bill.
This is one of the main reasons the government’s healthcare expenditure could shoot up
in the coming years.
BMGF and the network of vaccine makers it funded is just the tip of the iceberg. The past
decade has seen a slow march towards privatisation of healthcare. This, in a country that
sorely needs government intervention to provide for the millions in need but without the
means to access quality healthcare.
The 2011 census put the population of India at 1.2 billion. That number is expected to rise
to 1.37 billion by 2020. That’s an addition of nearly 170 million people—if it were a
country, it would be the world’s eighth most populous.
Per capita public expenditure on health has grown in the same period. It has gone up from
Rs 621 ($8.7) at the turn of the decade to Rs 1,657 ($23.2) in 2017-18. However, as a
percentage of GDP, allocations for health continue to remain inadequate, lagging behind
neighbouring countries. Including expenditure by states, this amounts to 1.4% of GDP.
Nepal, on the other hand, spends 2.3%, while Sri Lanka spends 2%.
the-ken.com-Indian healthcare in 2020s rearview mirror 1/2 351

With the government taking up more of the burden of preventative healthcare—
vaccinations—on its shoulders, it passed the burden of curative healthcare on to hospitals.
The onus, therefore, was on private players to provide healthcare to those who cannot
afford it.
Through its ambitious $1.54 billion health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, the
government fixed treatment prices, racking up a hefty bill for insurance premiums in its
quest to make healthcare affordable for nearly 500 million people. In parallel, hospitals
had to lose money in the process, too. They were already reeling after the implementation
of the Drugs (and Prices) Control Order (DPCO) 2013, which placed caps on the prices of
various essential drugs.
As a result, both large and small hospitals have either faced losses or been put up for sale
in recent years. The private equity net kept snapping them up. Meanwhile, e-pharmacies
remained in legislative limbo, fighting battles with brick-and-mortar pharmacies that
wanted to keep the retail drug industry, worth some $13.4 billion, to themselves.
Big banner, big problems
In the first three years of its first term, the NDA government accused hospitals as well as
other private healthcare players in the drugs and devices market of profiteering.
the-ken.com-Indian healthcare in 2020s rearview mirror 2/2 352

Indian low-cost AQI startups AMBEE, AirVeda’s
certification up in the air
the-ken.com/story/air-quality-monitor-hyperlocal
December 23, 2019
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Sarita Ahlawat holds up her startup Living Sciences’ air quality monitor against a cold,
grey December sky. Its PM 10 reading—particulate matter measured in micrograms—
flickers before settling on 263. As we carry it out of her office, to the foyer, and then to the
balcony, the reading fluctuates, before it finally settles at 313. According to the National
Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), we’re breathing in “very poor” air.
“Ideally, we shouldn’t even be sitting in this room,” she says. All around her are students
who help her manufacture and collect data from low-cost air quality monitors.
Ahlawat and her team have installed 30 monitors across Delhi’s Indian Institute of
Technology, but want to hit 100 in the coming months. “We don’t realise how pollution
levels change even with a 300-acre campus,” she says.
the-ken.com-Indian low-cost AQI startups AMBEE AirVedas certification up in the air 1/4 353
The Living Sciences air quality monitors sell for $10-$15, their demand increasing faster
than Ahlawat and her team can make them. “Corporates even give them away as gifts,”
she says. By the end of 2019, Living Sciences will rake in Rs 50 lakh ($70,262) from the
sales. Not bad for a two-year-old startup.
The demand is driven by the lack of hyperlocal data that can accurately measure where,
and why, air quality has dipped. And this in a country that is home to 14 of the 15 most
polluted cities in the world. “Hyperlocal data can help identify and deal with hotspots
such as parking lots, where loose dust needs to be controlled. Even simple things like
knowing when not to work out in the open is beneficial,” says Ahlawat.
At a national level, the recommended density for air pollution monitors, as per the Central
Pollution Control Board (CPCB), is 4 per 100,000 people. CPCB also claims India needs
4,000 official monitors to get an accurate representation of air quality.
The current count? 793.
A new wave of engineers, academics and electronic equipment makers such as AMBEE,
Kaiterra, and AirVeda are now trying to plug these gaps. They provide low-cost,
personalised air quality monitors, ranging from as little as Rs 2,000 ($28) right up to Rs
10,000 ($141) on Amazon. Schools, offices, residential highrises all use a network of these
monitors to track indoor air quality. The monitors even come with a personalised air
quality dashboard, connected to an app. In addition to selling hardware, startups like
AMBEE are now also engaged in analysing and predicting the Air Quality Index (AQI) of
unmonitored places.
Growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.6% globally, the nascent air
monitoring market will be worth approximately $5.5 billion by 2024, according to a
market research report. The market includes all types of monitoring equipment, but
continuous and indoor air monitoring systems have the largest share.
Breathe in, breathe out
Sleek, portable and personal—low-cost air quality monitors have

unlocked a $5.5 billion market globally. They can map large
swathes of the country left off the monitoring grid. But their
authenticity is under fire from regulatory bodies
Olina Banerji, 23 Dec 2019
14 out of 15 of the world’s most polluted cities lie in India—bad air quality has already
shaved off 1.7 years from an average Indian lifespan
India needs 4,000+ official monitors to get an accurate picture of air quality levels across
the country. Its current count? 793
A potential hybrid system of official government monitors and commercial low-cost ones
can fill up the data gap
Startups have turned air monitoring into a consumer business. Certification, though, is
a far cry, with CPCB as the formidable gatekeeper
Indian marketplace unicorns are the new incumbents
the-ken.com/story/digital-platforms-perfect-storm
September 3, 2019
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A perfect storm is gathering over the country’s most dominant digital platforms.
Over the last decade in India, billions of dollars have been spent by startups, venture
capitalists and tech multinationals as they seek to rewrite entire sectors. In the process,
they’ve managed market shares that took their “offline” or “old economy” peers decades to
achieve. This has left companies like Zomato and Swiggy; MakeMyTrip and OYO; Flipkart
and Amazon the “last players standing” in sectors like dining and food delivery; travel and
hotels; and e-commerce.
Their venture capital backers have burned billions of dollars in loss-making businesses in
the hope that one day when the fires clear, their companies would end up as natural
monopolies. Free to increase prices and reduce spends.
Well, that day has come. The fires have cleared, but there’s a new problem at hand.
A slowing economy, widespread and coordinated supplier angst, and a tightening

regulatory regime are coming together to target the largest platforms still standing.
Yesterday’s scrappy disruptors, now the incumbents in their respective sectors, are in the
crosshairs of numerous adversaries.
the-ken.com-Indian marketplace unicorns are the new incumbents 1/4 357

In late June, the Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association (KHRA), a local trade chapter
of hotel and restaurant associations from the state, called for a two-day boycott of
hospitality platform OYO. Independent hoteliers who sold their rooms via OYO’s platform
had a litany of charges against the Gurugram-headquartered company. These ranged
from hidden commission fees as high as 40-45% of a booking; rampant deep discounting;
one-sided contracts loaded against hotel owners and opaque delays in payments.
OYO managed to head that off by first threatening to take legal action against potential
boycotters. It then got the Delhi High Court to pass an interim order banning any hotel
association from boycotting it.
As a dominant digital platform, OYO correctly foresaw the risk of tens of thousands of
fragmented suppliers (independent hotels) organising themselves for better collective
bargaining and action. Hence, its extreme response.

But Zomato, one of the two dominant platforms in the food delivery space, misjudged it.
Hundreds, then thousands of restaurants came together under a trade body and accused
Zomato and its peers of practices similar to those for which OYO was criticised.
Aggressive and perpetual discounts; rising commission charges and arbitrary changes to
contracts. Restaurateurs also claimed the food aggregators’ ranking and discovery
algorithms were rigged towards discounts and their own services.
The resulting boycott is still ongoing and has forced both Zomato and Swiggy to adopt far
more conciliatory tones.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring world of retail e-commerce, Amazon and Flipkart are
under the cosh. The e-commerce leviathans are being targeted by multiple trade
associations for the same broad reasons.
Face-off
As the capital-fueled and discount-led fires in various sectors

subside, Zomato, Swiggy, MakeMyTrip, OYO, Amazon and Flipkart
are the lucky ones left standing. Now they must deal with the
perfect storm
Indian e-commerce is a stage set for a massive showdown between aggregators and
suppliers. Tensions have bubbled over to a tipping point
Over the last two years, this cold war has turned into a shouting match, with
independent restaurants, hotels and sellers accusing platforms of killing competition
The customer acquisition arsenal—deep discounting, collecting consumer data, etc.—has

tightened the noose around platforms’ necks
Industry lobbies like NRAI, FHRAI, and CAIT have had enough. They’ve taken the fight
to CCI’s door. Will India’s top competition body finally take notice?

Indian Pharma gambles on a cure for Covid-19
the-ken.com/story/indian-pharmas-great-covid-gamble
May 25, 2020
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In the first week of May, India’s health ministry convened a video call with the country’s
drug makers. As cases of the novel coronavirus continued to mount, the government
wanted to know how they planned to bring remdesivir to India.
An antiviral drug manufactured by pharma major Gilead Sciences, the US drug regulator
had recently authorised the emergency use of remdesivir for the treatment of Covid-19
patients. However, with Gilead focused on more developed (read, more lucrative)
markets, India would have to chart its own path to bring the expensive, patented drug to
India.
India’s drug makers were optimistic. On 13 May, Cipla Ltd. and Hetero Labs Ltd.
announced that they had secured licence from Gilead to produce the drug. Actually
producing it, though, was a whole other matter. A best case scenario for this was three
months. Realistically, double or even triple that.
That lag is a serious problem. Remdesivir’s effectiveness is still unproven . Even the
Indian government remains unconvinced about its efficacy. By the time it is ready to
deploy en masse in India, there’s no guarantee it won’t be superseded by other, more
effective drugs. For Indian drug makers, which anticipate a single vial of remdesivir to sell
for upto to Rs 5,000 ($66) —around Rs 100,000 ($1,326) for the entire treatment—an
assured market is imperative.
At present, though , some 254 therapies are being explored globally to treat Covid-19,
making any investment at this point akin to rolling dice. There are also around 100
projects to develop a vaccine in the works, which would drastically shrink the market for
remdesivir.
A senior executive at Pune-based Serum Institute—the world’s largest vaccine

manufacturer—told The Ken that the company is working with four research partners
globally.
Cipla
coronavirus
Covid-19
favipiravir
Gilead
Glenmark
Hetero Labs
Indian pharma
the-ken.com-Indian Pharma gambles on a cure for Covid-19 1/2 361

Jubilant Life Sciences
Mylan
remdesivir
Strides Pharma
tocilizumab
US FDA
Rolling dice
Indian drug makers are throwing potential Covid-19 cures against

the wall in the hopes that one sticks. At stake are their bottom
lines; the reward, however, could be a global market
Ruhi Kandhari, 25 May 2020
US pharma major Gilead licensed three Indian drug makers—Cipla, Hetero Labs, and
Jubilant—to produce its purported Covid-19 cure, remdesivir
The Indian government and Indian Pharma, though, are sceptical of its efficacy and prefer
not to wait for it to reach the market
Instead, they are banking on alternatives like favipiravir and tocilizumab, which are both
off-patent and can be made available a lot sooner
If any of these drugs come up trumps, Indian pharma companies will be at the forefront
of supplying it globally
the-ken.com-Indian Pharma gambles on a cure for Covid-19 2/2 362

Indian Pharma’s Perfect Storm – Chinese APIs
the-ken.com/story/indian-pharmas-perfect-storm-chinese-apis
September 26, 2017
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Around the time Indian and Chinese diplomacies were flexing their arms in July, a tiny
research company in Noida in the National Capital Region was making up its mind. To
take or not to take. Finally, it chose not to take funding from a Chinese pharmaceutical
company. And the reasons were far from smouldering geopolitical tensions.
In the rarefied business of drug discovery, Curadev has a few molecules under
development. Two years ago, it licensed one set to Roche for $25 million in upfront
payment and is once again in the market to strike out a deal for new ones. A potential
customer it was engaging with was a pharma company from Central China.
“We did not pursue our options in China for reasons that were both geographical in
nature and technical,” says Arjun Surya, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of
Curadev. “There was keen interest in further developing two of Curadev’s programmes
and the commercial terms being discussed were good, especially given how hard it is to
raise funding in India for the kind of stuff we do.”
There’s no risk capital in India for discovering new drugs, neither among investors nor
within pharma companies, but China has. Plentiful.
On 18 September, one of China’s most acquisitive conglomerates, the Fosun Group, finally
closed a deal with Gland Pharma paying $1.1 billion for a 74% stake in the Indian drug
company which largely makes injectables, and for exports.
As these two deals met their logical ends, noises emanated from New Delhi. The draft of
the new pharmaceutical policy released in August is loud and clear on curbing imports
from China and also talks of a few ill-planned moves. In the last decade, as Indian pharma
grew its generics exports to regulated markets like the US and EU, China captured the raw
materials market, of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and intermediates.
Upwards of 60%, both globally and in India. Now the dependence is so high that the
Prime Minister’s Office has raised it as a security concern. But it isn’t as black and white
as it is made out to be in public understanding. Nor is the solution as simple as the
bureaucrats have laid in the new pharma policy.
Reinvent or re-engineer?
In September, many API importers in India received communications from their Chinese
suppliers: Between October 2017 and March 2018, the Chinese government would be
pulling out all stops to control air pollution in Northern China and it would impact their
the-ken.com-Indian Pharmas Perfect Storm Chinese APIs 1/3 363

supply and price of APIs and intermediates. Any Chinese company violating the clean-up
would have to shut operations. So, Indian buyers better bolt-on.
This email from a Chinese supplier sheds light on multiple things: That China is very
serious about cracking down on polluting industries of which chemicals and APIs are a big
part.
Bittersweet pill
Pharma ranks 39th on China’s export list, for India, it’s the fifth
largest. But now as China bulks up its pharma ambitions, India
should be careful about the remedies it adopts to fight cheap
Chinese imports
As Indian dependence on the Chinese raw materials increase, a section of Indian

pharma is asking for level playing field, even protection
The government, looking at it as a national security threat, is happy to oblige with a

broad-brush policy
China is keen on buying assets in India and has even begun body shopping from
formulations plants
It’s the right time for Indian companies to get their house in order to maintain their
lead and not slip back into commodity manufacturing

Indian regulators’ mantra to check the big tech boom
the-ken.com/story/indian-regulator-mantra-big-tech
December 6, 2018
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India’s tech regulators aren’t exactly known for being cutting edge in their thinking or
nimble in their speeds. Quite the contrary.
Besides, it isn’t even clear how many regulators there are, or what exactly each one’s remit
is. It’s an abundance of big egos, old bureaucrats, secretive committees, power plays and
turf wars.
Pharma, telecom, financial services and e-commerce are just a few of the industry sectors
where companies and business models have been either extinguished or supercharged
due to regulatory decisions. A carry-over of this attitude while regulating technology
companies can have disastrous consequences for innovation and conducting business.
Death by compliance.
But could it be possible that India’s regulators may be at the forefront of devising
regulations to check the uncontrolled growth and domination of “Big Tech”?
Could it be that Indian regulators already hold answers for their peers around the world
on how best to control the unchecked dominance of tech giants such as Facebook, Google
and Amazon?
Across the world, there has been a growing call to regulate big tech companies to protect
citizens’ rights and competitiveness of markets. Many smart people have argued that the
free hand given to tech companies in markets like the United States has resulted in them
developing into behemoths, which has, in turn, led to deleterious effects, not just to
economies but democracies around the world.
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Sort of like an overfed, pampered and badly brought-up child growing up to be a bully as
an adult.
So, if someone must discipline these bullies and teach them how to play by the rules, it
won’t be their parent countries, but other countries in which they operate.
Indian regulators had, for the most part, taken a hands-off approach to the tech industry,
similar to the US. This became one of the major factors that led to the growth of tech and
Internet in India. “The fact that we have had a fairly lax regulatory environment,
particularly around data, is itself quite a spur to a lot of innovative activities,” says Arghya
Sengupta, Research Director at policy advisory group Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
But then things changed, as Indian regulators started hitting nails pretty accurately on
their heads across different sectors.
Could India be the hero the world needs, even if not the one it deserves?
Forcing Amazon to choose
Amazon India is very different from Amazon US. In the US, its e-commerce operations
are highly centralised as a corporate.
the-ken.com-Indian regulators mantra to check the big tech boom 2/2 367
India’s 49 million Covid tests hide more than they
reveal
the-ken.com/story/indias-49-million-covid-tests-hide-more-than-they-reveal
September 8, 2020
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Six months into a pandemic and well into its sixth iteration, India’s Covid-19 testing
strategy is still a work in progress.
As of 5 September, India had conducted over 49 million tests for the virus. What this
massive figure obscures, however, is which tests have allowed the country to ramp up its
testing numbers. The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR)—the government body
spearheading the Covid-19 response—released an app to every testing centre and lab to
register every test conducted. But the breakup of what sort of testing has been done is not
in the public domain.
The problem is that, while increasing testing is critical, not all tests are created equal. On
one hand, you have the rapid antigen tests. These offer faster results, and are cheaper and
easier to administer. These can detect the presence of the virus in under 45 minutes.
There is a flip side to this convenience. Rapid antigen tests are less accurate than the ‘gold
standard’ of Covid-19 testing—reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, or RT-
PCR, tests. Considerably more expensive than their quicker counterparts, they take
between two to four days to show results.
While the split between the two types of tests remains unknown, in an August press
briefing, Balram Bhargava, director general of ICMR, offered a glimpse under India’s
testing hood. He stated that up to 30-35% of all tests conducted were through the newer
rapid antigen test technology.
The prevalence of antigen testing should raise a massive red flag. According to the ICMR’s
own evaluation, these tests have accuracy rates between 50.6% and 84%. On the lower
end, this would mean that they could miss one in every two Covid-positive cases.
Consequently, big private lab chains have refused to use antigen tests, while both Tamil
Nadu and Rajasthan have doubted their accuracy. Despite this, the national task force to
fight Covid-19 continues to include rapid antigen tests in its latest testing advisory for lack
of a better alternative.
The follow-up testing required to counter the lack of accuracy among antigen tests has
largely not happened.
It took repeated orders from the Delhi High Court for the nation’s capital to share follow-
up data of those who were tested using antigen tests. In response to a petition that sought
the-ken.com-Indias 49 million Covid tests hide more than they reveal 1/3 368
transparency in testing data, Delhi’s health department revealed that 281,555 rapid
antigen tests were conducted between 18 June and 15 July. Only a fraction of those who
tested negative—1,365 people out of 262,075—were put through RT-PCR testing later.
Even in such a small sample, nearly one in five of these cases turned up positive.
The situation in Delhi is indicative of a wider problem.
Covid chaos
India's testing ramp up hides a worrying truth—the number of

less accurate antigen tests is increasing even as the number of
'gold standard' RT-PCR tests are tumbling down
Maitri Porecha, 8 Sep 2020
India’s daily Covid-19 testing numbers have almost doubled over the last month—from
660,000 to 1.17 million
At the same time, India’s positivity rate has plummeted. From 12.37% in the final week
of July to 7.52% on 4 September
This should mean that India is getting the pandemic under control. The data authorities
aren’t willing to share, though, paint a different picture
One where a huge number of Covid-positive patients slip through the testing net, even
as states and the Centre turn a blind eye
India’s bootless vaccine plans in the face of HLL’s
divestment
the-ken.com/story/india-ivc-vaccine-hll-divestment
October 4, 2019
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In Chengalpattu, about 70 km from the southern Indian city of Chennai, is a cluster of
buildings spread over 100 acres. These house manufacturing lines, quality-control lines
and other units, all set up to manufacture vaccines. This is the Integrated Vaccine
Complex (IVC)—the Indian government’s one-stop solution to be self-reliant in producing
vaccines to feed its national immunisation programme. A plan into which it has pumped
about Rs 600 crore ($84.28 million) so far.
Only, IVC has not produced a single vaccine. In seven years.
Before we get to why, let’s go back over a decade. To January 2008.
Three Indian public sector undertakings (PSUs) were closed after the World Health
Organisation questioned the quality of the vaccines produced at these centres. Following a
hue and cry over the absence of a national vaccine maker, the government in 2012
announced a plan to set up a state-of-the-art unit in three years. The IVC was to be the
nodal centre for supply, research and manufacture, and the supplier of 585 million doses,
or three-fourths of the national immunisation programme’s vaccine requirement.
India, in 2017, under its Rs 9,451 crore ($1.44 billion) national immunisation programme,
allocated approximately $25 per child for vaccines and operational costs. Children born in
India are vaccinated for 12 diseases—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio,
measles, hepatitis B, diarrhoea, Japanese encephalitis, rubella, pneumonia, and
meningitis. Of these, the vaccines the government requires the most are Oral Poliovirus
vaccine (130 million doses) and Tetanus vaccine (110 million doses). The private vaccine
industry estimates that, on an average, the government has a requirement of 120 million
doses of each vaccine based on a birth cohort of 28 million and number of doses. A birth
cohort is a group of people born during a particular period or year.
The plan for an IVC made sense then.
Except the government’s choice to carry out this ambitious plan was…a condom-maker
with no experience in making vaccines. State-owned HLL Lifecare’s vaccine unit, HLL
Biotech Ltd (HBL), was entrusted with constructing the IVC in three years. This despite
protests from political and public parties.
Upsetting mood
the-ken.com-Indias bootless vaccine plans in the face of HLLs divestment 1/3 371
HLL Lifecare is popular as the maker of MOODS condoms. The Indian government in the
past purchased condoms for its social programmes from the company but stopped doing
so a few years ago after which the company went into losses
An epidemiologist with Shimla’s State Institute of Health and Family Welfare, Dr Omesh
Kumar Bharti, who has worked on anti-rabies vaccines, said, “The IVC was opposed by
many people.
Long shot
The Indian government had big plans of moving away from

private sector-produced vaccines. In seven years, it's pumped
about Rs 600 crore into a project involving condom-maker HLL
Lifecare, with the costs now shooting up to over Rs 900 crore.
Just for setting up. Ironically, not a single vaccine has been
manufactured so far
Suraksha P, 4 Oct 2019
Seven years back, the Indian government asked condom-maker HLL Lifecare to make
vaccines for the national programme
HLL Biotech, the vaccine arm of HLL Lifecare, has no R&D unit yet, essential for
vaccine-making
Experts fear India's grand plan of self-reliance in vaccines is being reduced to a

packaging firm
It has been more than a year since HBL requested for funds but to no avail
India’s crops are feeling the heat in a warming world
the-ken.com/story/india-crops-climate-change
June 8, 2019
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Jagtar Singh lost his cotton crop twice. In just over two weeks. First, it was the rains that
lashed Chaina village in Punjab’s Faridkot district in the first week of May, just after
sowing. The unseasonal rains killed them before they could even germinate.
On second sowing, the seeds did germinate. But the crop couldn’t withstand the severe
heatwave around 15-20 May, which again, was “extremely uncharacteristic” Singh says
over the phone.
“Hundreds of farmers lost their entire crop in the village, which has never happened
before.”
Earlier this year, a similar story played out with wheat. Kashmir Singh, a farmer from
Gurdaspur, also in Punjab, says yields fell by 100 kg per acre across his 50-acre farm,
leading to a loss of close to Rs 1 lakh. Wheat yields declined about 20% this year in the
Malwa belt of Punjab due to warmer winter nights, says Umendra Dutt, executive director
of Kheti Virasat Mission, a non-profit, though detailed data is sparse.
According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2019, India is the 14th most vulnerable nation
in the world to the impacts of climate change, in between Niger (15th) and Antigua and
Barbuda (13th).
With every increase in temperature of 1 degree Celsius, global wheat production is

estimated to fall by 6%. India’s mean land surface air temperature in 2018 was 0.41
degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 average, according to the Meteorological
Department.
And agriculture in India, where six in 10 farmers rely on rains to water their crops, is
becoming trickier every season as extreme weather events become more frequent.
Warmer weather is altering crop seasons and harvest areas and also improving conditions
for pests. Erratic rainfall is causing droughts across vast swathes of agricultural land and
flooding in many other parts of the country.
All of this is changing just how everything from rice to apples is being grown—in the
process threatening livelihoods and food security for decades to come.
Wheat feels the heat
The worst hit by changes in weather are the rabi or winter crops and fruits, say experts.
Rising temperatures and warmer winter nights are causing a condition known as terminal
heat stress which is hurting wheat production from Punjab in the north to Bihar in the
the-ken.com-Indias crops are feeling the heat in a warming world 1/3 374
east.
The wheat cycle is getting delayed due to a late harvest of rice as a result of the late onset
of the monsoon. When it gets to the grain filling stage (when dry matter accumulates in
the plant and ends up splitting into the grain, determining the grain weight), nights start
getting warmer, which stunts the growth of the kernel, resulting in lower yields.
On the edge
61% of farmers in India rely on rain-fed agriculture and 55% of the gross cropped area is
rainfed, making farming more vulnerable as the seasons grow more erratic
“Wheat is also facing frequent cases of frost-like conditions,” says S.K.
Burning up
The looming climate crisis is affecting everything from rice to

apples—most for the worse, and some for the better—as farmers
struggle to cope
Pradip Kumar Saha, 8 Jun 2019
Indian agricultural output continues to rise—especially foodgrain production—but that
hides the turmoil that Indian farmers actually face
While erratic weather and disasters from drought to flood hit production in some parts
of the country, productivity gains elsewhere balance it out in total
But the reality is that India could face $7 billion in agricultural losses by 2030, with the
incomes of its vast farm workforce on the line
To adapt and survive, we need to understand just how changing temperatures are
reshaping crops of all hues
India’s cybersecurity firms struggle for a seat at the
government tender table
the-ken.com/story/indian-cybersecurity-firms-struggle-for-seat
December 19, 2019
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India’s biggest nuclear power plant and apex space agency were hacked this past year.
Malware was installed on computers at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) as
well as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
The breaches, only two of the millions reported last year, served to expose just how
vulnerable personal and private data is. As is national security data. And as the Indian
government has made a concerted digital push, the sheer wealth of data at risk has grown
exponentially.
Initiatives like Aadhaar (the Indian equivalent of a social security card) or real time
payments system the United Payments Interface have brought into focus the need for
robust cybersecurity. And seeking to serve this need is India’s nascent but growing
cybersecurity market.
This market for cybersecurity is estimated to grow from about $2 billion this year to about
$3 billion in 2022, with a 15% compounded annual growth rate. This is about 1.5X the
global rate. Public sector, or government spending, on cyber protection is expected to
grow at 13.8% in the same time. In fact, the Ministry of Electronics & Information
Technology (MeitY), has asked all ministries to allocate 10% of their IT budgets to
cybersecurity and appoint chief information security officers as well.
Indian businesses, however, will most likely not be the beneficiaries of this public sector
largesse. Instead, much of this spending will go into the pockets of global cybersecurity
firms.
Cyber crime hub
India is ranked third after the US and China in terms of cyber crime incidents. Cyber
attack incidents reported by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In)
jumped from about 53,000 in 2017 to over 2 million 2018.
There are more than 175 cybersecurity product companies in India, according to a Data
Security Council of India (DSCI) report in 2018. The instances of them winning a public
sector cybersecurity contract, though, have been few and far between. These companies
say that the current system is designed to exclude them in favour of multinational
corporations such as IBM, and Indian system integrators like Wipro and Infosys who
actually implement and maintain the technology.
the-ken.com-Indias cybersecurity firms struggle for a seat at the government tender table 1/3 377
“As a result, many Indian cybersecurity companies lose out on lucrative contracts that
they are technologically capable of fulfilling. This needs to change,” says Quick Heal
managing director and chief technology officer Sanjay Katkar. Quick Heal, with $44
million in annual revenue for the year ended March 2019, is the largest Indian company
in the space.
Now, MeitY has begun taking baby steps towards levelling the playing field and giving
Indian cybersecurity firms a fair shot. This has happened through “public procurement
orders”, the latest of which was released in the first week of December.
No reservations
A nexus between large system integrators and multinational

cybersecurity giants, a broken tender process and a clueless
public sector have kept India’s cybersecurity startups from
participating in government tenders
Pratap Vikram Singh, 19 Dec 2019
Government spending on cybersecurity in India is expected to grow at 13.8%, but
Indian cybersecurity product companies will likely not be the beneficiaries
The public procurement process for the public sector has traditionally been set up to
favour major global players like IBM instead
A recent public procurement order from MeitY instructed that some barriers which have
typically excluded Indian players be removed
Indian firms are not celebrating though. They know the deck is still stacked against
them
India’s digital bet paid off: Charting the payments story
the-ken.com/story/payments-boom-in-charts
May 4, 2019
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Imagine a travel or food-ordering site’s checkout page circa 2010-14. Credit cards. Debit
cards. Netbanking. Cash on delivery. That’s about it.
Then came the wallets. Mobikwik, and Paytm, and FreeCharge. Airtel Money. Amazon
Pay. Phonepe. More wallets from everyone and their uncle. Then came the Unified
Payments Interface, or UPI—the holy grail of instantaneous payments right from your
bank account. And credit-like options where you buy now, pay later.
The past five years in India have been a rollercoaster ride for companies from card
networks like Visa and Mastercard to Paytm and Mobikwik to banks to card payments
firms like Pine Labs and Ingenico to payment gateways like BillDesk and PayU. (There are
now 375 payments companies in India, according to a report by Medici, a fintech-focused
consultancy firm.)
Business models have changed, changed and changed again. Driven by increasing internet
penetration, the rise of e-commerce, and growing smartphone sales.
But most importantly—a series of policy decisions that, sometimes inadvertently, each
reshaped the payments landscape. Into a market unlike any other. (China, the only
comparable country, did exactly the opposite—practically unregulated, a digital payments
ecosystem exploded over the years. Though that might be changing.)
For consumers, this meant that convenience became the order of the day.
Tired of dealing with cash and counting out change? Wallets—the user-friendly digital
cash. Want even greater ease? Meet UPI, where you can send money straight from your
bank account. Then pay later companies offered a different type of ease. And you could
even ask for a payment from someone instead of waiting for them to pay you. That was
the “collect” feature in UPI.
But this also opened the door for frauds. The collect feature saw people being spammed
by collect requests from fraudsters. Failed payments on UPI—and the lack of quick
resolution—became a problem in the early days. Payments banks opened accounts for
customers without them even knowing.
Payments is not an easy business, for companies or for regulators. In the end, though, the
fast-evolving nature of payments in India is changing the very way we deal with money—
and even shaping consumer behaviour.
the-ken.com-Indias digital bet paid off Charting the payments story 1/3 380
So here’s your guide to every twist and turn in India’s payments story—with all the gory
details of policy and market.
The establishment of the NPCI by a consortium of banks more than a decade ago sowed
the seed for large-scale changes in how payments worked in India. The non-profit entity is
owned by banks, but answers to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the government in
general—and often acts as a quasi-regulator for payments.
Money talk
How policy decisions have, over the past three-four years, led to
tectonic shifts in the country’s payments landscape
India has over the past three to four years seen a digital payments system evolve that's
unlike nearly any other market in the world—driven heavily by regulation
This is in stark contrast to China, the other hotbed of payments and fintech, which has
grown its own digital finance ecosystem with barely any regulatory oversight
Consumers have got both increasing convenience and a bevvy of cashbacks from eager
startups, and electronic payments have soared
From two-factor authentication to eKYC to demonetisation to UPI, we trace how policy

decisions have reshaped the payments landscape—in eight charts
India’s digital payments Catch-22 in 2021
the-ken.com/story/indias-digital-payments-catch-22-in-2021
January 1, 2021
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If you thought India didn’t already have enough payment methods—credit cards, debit
cards, wallets, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Immediate Payment System (IMPS),
National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT), buy now pay later—be ready for more in the
coming years.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in February sent out guidelines calling for more entities
to create, manage, and operate new retail payment systems. That means the quasi
payments regulatory body, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is set to
have more rivals.
NPCI was set up in 2011 to grow retail payments in India, and it did just that. It looks
after most retail payments, from ATMs to IMPS to UPI, among others. Before NPCI, Visa
and Mastercard managed India’s ATM network and promoted card payments. NPCI’s
entry expanded payments; digital payments have grown by 55.1% over the last five years.
But among the 900 million Indians who are banked, only 100-150 million are unique
users of digital payments, according to industry estimates. Only 18% of consumption is
paid for digitally.
“Till we are able to increase the spend to 50% and at least 50% of the population, we
need more entities to expand the market,” says Navin Surya, the chairman emeritus of
the Payments Council of India (PCI), a lobby group.
Besides growing the market, RBI felt a rival to NPCI is needed to keep the organisation
in check. After all, NPCI is in charge of a payments hydra like UPI that does two billion
transactions a month, much more than any other payments system.
the-ken.com-Indias digital payments Catch-22 in 2021 1/2 383

So, RBI proposed forming New Umbrella Entities (NUE) as a method to keep NPCI in
check.
The central bank isn’t allowing an individual entity to apply to become an NUE. It wants
groups of companies to form consortiums, with the promoter holding no more than 40%
of the entity, which gradually needs to be pared down to 25%.
Those in the industry expect no more than two to three entities getting an NUE licence.
But like with any licence that RBI gives out, there has been a lot of interest.
Surya’s company So Hum Bharat Digital Ltd is among the first aspiring NUE
consortiums, with Yes Bank, and digital payments provider Infibeam Avenues as
partners. Surya is expected to announce more partners for So Hum over the next few
weeks.
No other company has publicly announced its intention to apply for an NUE licence, but
there are factions taking shape. The deadline to apply is 26 February 2021, when
interested consortiums are also expected to submit their business plans for RBI’s
approval. RBI is expected to then give an in-principle nod later in 2021.
It’s only in 2022 when any new payments system can be expected to launch.
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the-ken.com-Indias digital payments Catch-22 in 2021 2/2 384

India’s instant loan app crisis is made in China
the-ken.com/story/indias-instant-loan-app-crisis-is-made-in-china
January 11, 2021
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Mumbai-based architect Jenis Makwana found something odd while poring over his late
brother Abhishek’s emails. The younger Makwana had accumulated around Rs 1.8 lakh
($2,400) in loan debt. But that wasn’t the odd part.
At the last count, says Makwana, his brother had 72 different instant loan apps on his
smartphone, most of which had lent him bite-sized loans between Rs 3,000 ($40.8) and
Rs 10,000 ($136.2). These included apps such as SuperRupee, CoolRupee, KreditBear,
SweetCash, Cashtime, and Cashvibe.
The lockdown had made things perilous for Abhishek Makwana, a writer who freelanced
for a popular Hindi sitcom. And these small loans with their short repayment cycles—
between seven and 15 days—kept popping up on his radar. They required no
documentation; money would be instantly deposited in his bank account.
The flipsides, however, were the high interest rates ranging from 800% to 1,000% on an
annual basis and the pack of collection agents that hounded him if the repayments were
even a day late. Abhishek Makwana died of suicide in December 2020, but ironically, he
had repaid most of his loans.
“No one is going to commit suicide for dues of Rs 1 lakh ($1,360). It was the constant
debt cycle and the harassment of collection agents that killed him,” Makwana tells The
Ken over the phone. “Even after his death the collection agents harassed me, my family
and my brother’s friends,” he says.
the-ken.com-Indias instant loan app crisis is made in China 1/2 385

Abhishek Makwana’s death is among the many suicides reported over the last few
months, driven by these loan apps and their collection methods. Police have been
making arrests in major Indian cities such as Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and Pune
so far in connection with these cases.
What is common among them, though, is that these apps were allegedly run illegally by
Chinese nationals, who have made considerable inroads into India’s lending sector.
Srikanth Lakshmanan, a researcher with Cashless Consumer , analysed 1,000 instant

loan apps in November 2020. Around 80% have Chinese links. “All of them use cloud
services from Alibaba or Baidu. Many of them also have links to Chinese white label
companies that provide fintech as a service. We could see that most apps were generated
by some of these white labels.
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India’s misinformation crisis: Fake or real?
the-ken.com/story/indias-misinformation-crisis-fake-real
November 18, 2016
Earlier this week, in Bihar’s Chhapra district, as part of the recent demonetisation drive,
income tax officials conducted raids on several doctors. One of them was Dr RB Sinha
(65). The officials reportedly found unaccounted cash worth Rs 6 crore. The stress of
losing all his hard earned cash caused him to suffer a cardiac arrest. He died. Tragic.
Except, it isn’t. Dr Sinha did not die. And I-T officials didn’t break down his door. None of
this happened. Not a single word is true. But it was reported in local papers.
Fake news is by no means a new phenomenon, or a recent invention. But thanks to the
rise of social media platforms, it is giving real news a run for its credibility. It has turned
out to be scarily climactic in the demonetisation drive last week, during the US
Presidential election before that, and during the Brexit referendum a few months earlier.
The top 20 fake news stories outperformed real news at the end of the 2016 Presidential
campaign.
To the heady mix of human psychology, partisan interests, and even malicious intent, if
you add a bit of tech (read algorithms), you get a lethal weapon to sway public opinion.
Since last week, several news stories have made their way into mainstream media,
brazenly fake and loosely based on viral WhatsApp forwards. A Surat businessman, who
allegedly surrendered Rs 6,000 crore. The news went viral on social platforms, only to be
debunked later. Then, there’s the case of the fake Rs 2,000 note, found in Chikmangaluru
in Karnataka, which made its way to Twitter thanks to a television journalist, only to be
outed as a color photocopy of the original.
Before anyone could sniff it was misinformation, the fake news took a life of its own.
“What makes it difficult to control is that social media eliminates the barrier to entry,
while at the same time eliminates quality control, so that untreated sewage ends up
competing with purified water,” says a New Delhi-based journalist, a foreign national
the-ken.com-Indias misinformation crisis Fake or real 1/7 387

employed at a large international news organisation. “From there on, as it appears, it
becomes about who shouts the loudest, trolls most aggressively and has the amplifier of a
big media pipe.”
And, of course, the value migrates to the aggregators and away from the news outlets, who
then join the race to the bottom because they can’t afford to back good reporting.
Anant Goenka, executive director, Indian Express
There’s a lot of confusion, and rumours do come up every now and then, and inevitably
make their way to news websites, but I still think that it’s largely a platform issue
Anant Goenka, executive director of the Indian Express Group says, it is largely a platform
issue. “I know Google is working on a trust project. Two years back, I spent some time
with Richard Gingras, who is the head of Google News. I have learnt since then that some
progress has been made. As long as we can do some kind of a verified sign on news
sources, we’re back in the credibility business, rather than the commodity content
business.”
Circulation of fake news, in the event of a big news cycle like the demonetisation
campaign, Goenka adds, is inevitable. “There’s a lot of confusion, and rumours do come
up every now and then, and inevitably make their way to news websites, but I still think
that it’s largely a platform issue.”
Earlier this week, Google and Facebook, world’s two biggest such platforms facing
criticism over how fake news on their distribution channels may have influenced the US
elections, banned fake news websites from accessing their advertising networks.
Closer home, we have the WhatsApp forward menace where, as we understand, specific
groups plant deliberate misinformation that masquerades as fact. And in some instances,
like Sinha’s case, it reaches the mainstream. And how big is that number? A Pew Research
Center survey in May revealed that a whopping 62% of Americans get their news via social
media. While the number in India may not be that high yet, it is increasing by the day,
given the ever-growing smartphone penetration which is now estimated to be between
250 to 300 million.
The threat of fake news is real.
The contagion
In India, those who fuel it are in consensus on the modus operandi: WhatsApp’s
broadcast message service and its groups feature are increasingly used by political parties
for propaganda purposes. They say WhatsApp is preferred because of its mass appeal.
100,000
The number of people a WhatsApp message can reach within 10 minutes of being sent
out, as per a social media cell member of a national party

“If there is one platform to reach the masses, it is WhatsApp,” says a New Delhi-based
social media manager with a political party. The messenger app owned by Facebook,
WhatsApp today has at least 160 million monthly active users in India, its highest global
user base. “All parties use propaganda to reach out to their volunteers, who in turn
distribute it through their groups. The power of WhatsApp is such that we can ensure a
reach of at least 100,000 people within 10 minutes of the information being sent out.”
Propaganda aside, messages often range from a rumour to a data point, or even a made-
up piece of information, often to confuse people. “For a successful message, we believe it
must have three elements – distribution, content, and psychology. If one of these three
elements don’t turn up well enough, the messaging is a failed attempt. Trust is key. You
have to realise that a majority of our people are gullible enough to believe anything we tell
them. That helps us use sentiments like emotion, pride, hurt in our messaging rather
well,” the person quoted above added.
And importantly, as someone propagating the message, you have to believe in it, rather
than believe it. “If we take the Rs 2,000 note as an example, the reason why it was
forwarded multiple times was because people believed in it while having doubts. It also
appealed to several possibilities – like the use of technology, because Narendra Modi is a
tech-savvy prime minister.”
Screengrab of Zee News editor Sudhir Chaudhary describing the Rs 2,000 note with ‘state
of the art’ features

While political parties and their social media cells are one potential source of fake news, it
need not be the case every single time. “Why just us? We often reach out to our volunteers
and sympathisers. It could be anyone [from the larger population] making a witty or a
provocative comment and it could still end up as fake information,” he added.
The Ken reached out to three WhatsApp and Facebook officials. One of them, who did not
want to be identified, said, “There is no clear view on WhatsApp, besides what Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in his post-election Facebook update.“
The motive
From seasoned journalists to corporate leaders, all tweeted the image of Rs 2,000 notes
purported to be fitted with a “chip”, some being more specific and calling it “NGC” (Nano
GPS Chip). It would make currency circulation traceable, was the logic. Multiple people
across political parties we spoke to said that the “chip” story, of course fake, originated in
WhatsApp groups operated by “overzealous supporters” of the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party.
The party, however, denies its role or that of its workers in this. “We would like to place it
on record that that any rumour mongering, or mischief on social media platforms during
the demonetisation drive has been done by political parties with vested interests, who
have a lot to hide,” a BJP spokesperson told The Ken. “We will not hesitate to name the
party concerned, and if anyone other than the Prime Minister has been using social media
to propagate messages effectively, it is the Aam Aadmi Party.”
The routine political slugfest aside, what began on WhatsApp groups quickly spread to
Twitter. Facebook news feeds were filled with the exact same information. And hours
later, several YouTube explainers had already been uploaded.
But what followed next exposed the crisis. News outlets published stories, some even
quoting anonymous high-level sources. The sheer power of (mis)information which
travelled through multiple channels landed up at the Finance Minister’s doorstep when he
was forced to clarify that it wasn’t the case. And when did shit get real? The moment an
‘influential’ editor of Zee News, broadcast a near two-minute monologue extolling the
high-level, world-class technology that was apparently fitted into the Rs 2,000 note.
Another Hindi channel, ABP News, spoke extensively about its features for nearly 10
minutes.

One of the popular WhatsApp forwards that did the rounds last week, only to be called out
a hoax
And then, there is source-level fakery, which is equally dangerous. On Sunday, news
agency ANI posted a tweet, quoting a tea stall vendor as accepting digital wallet
transactions for as little as Rs 7. While that might come across as a fantastic human story
in these times, one of the customers interviewed by the agency, turned out to be its own
employee. Soon, a backlash ensued on Twitter, and ANI on Tuesday, issued an apology.

Source: @amitsurg on Twitter
The country’s largest circulating English daily was not far behind. The Times of India
carried a story on the death of a 73-year-old man outside a Mumbai bank branch, with the
headline “Senior Dies Outside Bank, Eatery Staff Beat Patrons”. Pretty legitimate, right?
Except, the said branch in Navghar, Mulund, did not exist. The next day, the TOI
regretted the error.
Crisis or opportunity?
The Editors’ Guild of India declined to comment on the fake news phenomenon.
But Goenka is looking at the problem in the eye: “As a provider of news, we need to have
our bullshit indicator on at all times. It goes without saying. There has to be an emphasis
on accuracy over speed. Verification, even if simple, must happen.”
The kind of soul searching Western media is engaging in – whether they can be counted
as belonging to the ‘liberal media’ that has succeeded in being on the wrong side of the
Brexit referendum and US presidential election – is not visible in India yet. But Goenka
believes this is the best opportunity “you can get for high-quality journalism to come
through”.
Sniff BS early
There is a need to have our bullshit indicator on at all times, according to Goenka

In his November 12 Facebook post, Zuckerberg said: “I am confident we can find ways for
our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be
extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
Perhaps, WhatsApp forwards are not even on his radar. But Reddit has thought about
them and if you want to avoid the annoying ones, here’s a protip: Log on to Reddit and
subscribe to theunkillnetwork, a crowdsourced effort by Indian redditors to manage an
avalanche of forwards.

India’s organ transplant paradox: World no. 2, but most
are living donors
the-ken.com/story/indias-organ-transplant-paradox
January 23, 2020
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Last year, the nodal authority National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO)
decided to submit data on organ transplants from hospitals in India to the Global
Observatory on Donation and Transplantation.
Except no one expected India to pretty much top the list in organ transplantations—
second only to the US. Not private hospitals, and certainly not the Indian government.
Vasanthi Ramesh, a doctor and the director of NOTTO, had hoped that the data would get
more Indians to pledge to donate organs. And she was not disappointed. In November
2019, an organ donation drive in India led by insurer Edelweiss Tokio Life broke the
Guinness World Record for pledges in a single day. It managed 54,626 pledges, managing
over 100,000 in total over the course over the same month.
the-ken.com-Indias organ transplant paradox World no 2 but most are living donors 1/3 394
Promising as the pledges may be, India’s organ donation rate is still pretty low. Even as
pledges grew rapidly from 9,000 to over 1.5 million in the past two years, the rate is
abysmal—under 0.5 organ donors per million people. This stands in stark contrast to
figures from other countries: 30.7 in the US and 43.6 in Spain, for example. Further,
while India sees close to 150,000 brain deaths a year, only about 900 deceased donations
happened last year.
Ultimately, those in need of organs don’t get them. An estimated 500,000 Indians die
every year due to this reason.
The processes for organ transplantation in India are bleak at best, said the head of the
organ transplants department of an Indian hospital chain on condition of anonymity.
For one, the majority of organ donations in India are done by the living, as opposed to
retrieving organs from the dead. This may sound like an endless stream of kindness, but
it’s often a case of organ harvesting for commercial gain.
Gender discrimination
More Indian men receive donated organs and more Indian women tend to donate organs.
In the US, women constitute 62% of kidney donors and 53% of liver donors. In India, 74%
women donate kidneys and 60.5% donate liver in India
Most Indian states lack the resources to retrieve organs and make them available for
transplants —in which case organ pledges don’t mean much.
In a country that has earned the dubious distinction of being the kidney bazaar of the
world—dominated by living donations by the poor for money—NOTTO’s objective is to
increase the number of deceased donations. This also makes sense for hospitals—
transplants are a great revenue stream. Heart and lung donations, which can only come
from the deceased, can improve hospital earnings considerably. While a kidney transplant
could earn a hospital up to Rs 5 lakh ($7,022); with lung, heart or liver, this amount can
go up to an estimated Rs 35 lakh ($49,159).
pay it forward
500,000 people die waiting for organs in the country that

conducts the second most transplants in the world
Ruhi Kandhari, 23 Jan 2020
India is second only to the US in the number of organ transplants conducted globally
In 2019, it even set the Guinness World Record for most organ donation pledges in a
single day
But despite the buzz around organ donation in India, India has some of the lowest rates
of deceased donations—those retrieved from brain dead patients
Private hospitals and the government want to shift organ donation from living to
deceased in India, but this is easier said than done
India’s Save The Internet breaks up
the-ken.com/story/indias-save-the-internet-breaks-up
October 24, 2018
Register or Login
The resignations came in quick succession. Both, planned.
Kiran Jonnalagadda went first. Resigning from the board of trustees at Internet Freedom
Foundation (IFF), an Internet advocacy nonprofit. On 28 August. Via an email to the
trustees, sent at 23:08. Nikhil Pahwa* followed an hour later. Resigning from his position
as chairman of IFF. In an email sent to the trustees, at 00:10. 29 August.
A few weeks later, in a public statement, Pahwa said: “The organisation, which was set up
by a few volunteers from SaveTheInternet.in (which was a community initiative with over
150 volunteers and several supporting organisations), has a new Executive Director in
Apar Gupta*. This marks a change, since, so far, all IFF trustees have been volunteers,
with pre-existing commitments to their day jobs…I have not been involved in an executive
capacity with IFF for almost a year now, and have learnt of its initiatives from public
announcements, for most of 2018. Thus, my departure from the organisation will not
affect its functioning, and I sense that its intent remains intact, even if the intended
approach has differed from mine for a while.”
Pahwa’s statement was a crisp 743 words. A significantly condensed version of his 3,000-
word first draft—a long, detailed list of disagreements with IFF and its members. One that
never saw the light of day.
To the trustees of IFF, including board members, the resignations didn’t come as a
surprise.
the-ken.com-Indias Save The Internet breaks up 1/2 397

There had been murmurs. And most of them had known this for a while. Witnessed it first
hand. The chasm. The discomfort of being together in a room, on a call. Yet they tried, for
one last time. For old time’s sake. Let’s get together. All eight of us on the board.
Jonnalagadda. Pahwa. Gupta. Rachita Taneja. Raman Cheema. Aravind RS. Karthik
Balakrishnan. Rohin Dharmakumar*. Let’s all meet in Bengaluru. Bury our
disagreements, formally accept the resignations and then make Gupta’s appointment
official. Grab some lunch after that, and then go our separate ways.
Aravind, who had moved to Singapore almost 16 months back, led the conversation. With
more than a month’s notice, sometime in July, he alerted the group, I’ll be travelling to
India in August. How about all of us meet then? Anytime between 25th to 30th of the
month. Works?
Everyone started tweaking their schedule around the dates. Gupta and Cheema said
they’d be happy to fly down from New Delhi. Jonnalagadda said he could book a
conference room at WeWork in Embassy Golf Links. Taneja said she’d be in Bengaluru
and glad to catch up. After much back and forth, almost everyone agreed to meet at
around 11 AM on 29 August. A Wednesday.
The same morning, everyone woke up to the two resignations. But a date is a date, so they
showed up.
Everyone, except for Pahwa and Dharmakumar.
the-ken.com-Indias Save The Internet breaks up 2/2 398

India’s vaping fad: could it go up in smoke?
the-ken.com/story/india-vaping-fad-smoke
June 6, 2018
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It smells like a large basket of fruits gone bad. At least, to me. But among the hundreds of
nicotine-laced flavours called e-juices on the shelves of one of Delhi’s first vaping shops,
this one is the owner, Aalok Awasthi’s favourite. The smell, he says, is sweet-and-sour
melon, and so is the experience of being a vape shop owner. Located in Greater Kailash II,
South Delhi the shop sits nestled between a burger food stall and a gym equipment store.
Awasthi, once a computer engineer, used to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. But all that is in
the past. He switched to vaping three years ago. He pauses, takes a long drag, and puffs
out what he calls “a cloud”, not smoke.
Three out of four customers that walk into his store are people looking to quit smoking or
hookah, and they’re encouraged by a sign at his door—stop smoking, start vaping. The
rest, he says, are youngsters looking to buy this relatively less harmful but cool device. Or
so they think. But it’s a moral dilemma, he says.
It’s a dilemma because while vaping can wean its user of the tobacco habit, ridding one of
the cancer threat that comes out of tar and smoke inhalation with cigarettes, it’s also
addictive. More so, because it’s sold on the promise of being a healthier, cooler alternative
to smoking.
That notion though isn’t exactly accurate. But before we get to that, there are two
fundamental questions to answer. 1) What exactly is vaping? 2) How popular is it, really?
A vape is a device which allows you to inhale and exhale “the cloud”. An e-juice is used to
create the substance in the device, which, like Awasthi’s sweet-and-sour melon, comes in
different flavours. The vape itself is small, hand-held. It could look like a miniature
walkie-talkie or resemble a hookah or a cigar or even a cigarette. The most popular kind is
one that looks and feels like a plastic cigarette. The overall idea is to inhale the heated e-
juice and exhale a cloud, which looks like smoke and serves as an alternative to smoking
cigarettes.
And it’s an alternative that’s catching up fast.
the-ken.com-Indias vaping fad could it go up in smoke 1/3 399

Aalok Awasthi, the owner of vaping store in South Delhi
The market inhales

Awasthi insists that his business has grown rapidly since he opened in January 2017. His
Gurugram store, which he claims was the first vaping store in India, profited by selling
only to those who were looking to quit tobacco. Today, he has two stores, in Gurugram

and in Greater Kailash. He sells three times more devices and e-juices every month now
than when he started. Even though half a dozen other such stores have opened in Delhi,
about 20 major distributors of devices and e-juices have developed their brands.
Smoke and mirrors
As Indians start to embrace the new-and-improved cigarette-

alternative, a 31-member committee has recommended the
government to blanket ban it. And there’s merit to the
committee’s argument
Ruhi Kandhari, 6 Jun 2018
A government committee has decided to ban the sale of vaping devices across the
country because it contains nicotine, which can be lethal
The 5,000-member Association of Vapers - India is challenging the decision to ban

because vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes
But the committee says it would be hard to regulate the sale of cigarettes so banning it is
the only option
Since the market for vaping has exploded in India in last one year, would the
government be able to implement the ban?

Inshorts’ bumpy Public road to crowdsourced video
news greatness
the-ken.com/story/inshorts-bumpy-public-road-to-crowdsourced-video-news-greatness
May 18, 2021
B-roll
A user base of over 50 million and a regional language market

that’s ripe for the picking has netted Rs 300 crore in investor
money for Public. The ad-driven short video app could be parent
Inshorts’ winning horse, but rivals with more diversified revenue
streams are closing in
Bhumika Khatri, 18 May 2021
Available in 11 major languages, Public is perfectly poised to tap into the expanding
regional language market that’s forecast to grow to a mammoth 526 million by 2021
It aimed to close 2020 with to 100 million users but that hasn’t happened. The profitable
Inshorts also found itself in the red in 2020, facing a loss of Rs 25 crore
While Public is completely ad-driven, rivals Lokal and Circle aren’t. They’ve diversified
into jobs and classifieds ads, with users themselves placing these ads on the platform
As vertical community platforms catering to niche demand gain speed and investor
money, the solution to user stickiness and monetisation is a puzzle
the-ken.com-Inshorts bumpy Public road to crowdsourced video news greatness 1/1 402
Inside Facebook’s bid to become the Indian
government’s default town square
the-ken.com/story/facebook-india-town-square
July 11, 2017
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On 20 April 2017, the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Indian government’s official
communication department, held an unusual event: an official workshop titled ‘Instagram
for Better Government Communication’. Besides PIB officials, it was attended by union
ministers Venkaiah Naidu and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore. The workshop saw the two
ministers and bureaucrats learn the nuances of Facebook’s photo-sharing app, Instagram,
and its potential as an outreach tool. It was the first such initiative by Instagram in Asia,
where John Tass-Parker, its key global politics and government outreach official,
participated, among others.
While the event itself did not make headlines, it highlighted something that got Facebook
officials excited. That the government itself was looking at its products and services with a
great deal of promise, which, if fulfilled, could make Instagram a potent communication
tool, especially ahead of the general elections in 2019. According to sources, more such
workshops are being planned over the next 12 months.
“Events like these are part of a concerted attempt by Facebook to win over the
government. It demonstrates a very clear tactical shift from its Free Basics approach,”
says a New Delhi-based technology professional, who knows how the BJP’s (Bharatiya
Janata Party) IT cell operates. He doesn’t want to be named because he is not authorised
to speak to the media. “These workshops and interactions will only get more common as
we get closer to the 2019 elections. Wait and watch.”
the-ken.com-Inside Facebooks bid to become the Indian governments default town square 1/2 403
What also emboldened Facebook India officials was a reference to Prime Minister
Narendra Modi in Mark Zuckerberg’s February essay on ‘Building Global Community’.
Zuckerberg wrote, “In India, Prime Minister Modi has asked his ministers to share their
meetings and information on Facebook so they can hear direct feedback from citizens.”
The officials felt that Zuckerberg’s reference was a public acknowledgement of how far
Facebook had come in India, and how much further it could go from here.
There’s a certain urgency about Facebook’s approach in India. Its Free Basics initiative
was shot down in February 2016 by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, which
ruled against the unlimited access to the restricted internet that Facebook was offering.
Now, Facebook wants to become THE platform for government officials, both for
information dissemination and citizen engagement because it has the critical mass of
users and a range of products to offer. And, in the process, leave Twitter behind.
Meanwhile, the government has realised that while Twitter keeps a certain type of
audience engaged, Facebook is where force multiplication happens. Where its messages
could trickle down to the voters.
Therefore, over the last 12 months, Facebook has been growing its policy team in India led
by Ankhi Das, its director for public policy in India, South and Central Asia. It has also
been more proactive, funding policy research to think-tanks, industry associations,
consulting companies, in areas like privacy.
the-ken.com-Inside Facebooks bid to become the Indian governments default town square 2/2 404
Inside India’s big pharma-drug distributor team-up
the-ken.com/story/inside-indias-big-pharma-drug-distributor-team-up
April 20, 2021
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It’s not just politics that makes for strange bedfellows. Adversity would just as well—a fact
that players in India’s pharmaceutical industry have had no choice but to come to terms
with. The events of the last couple of years have culminated, in April 2021, in the quiet
acquisition of two companies—market research firm AIOCD Pharmasofttech AWACS Pvt
Ltd and business-to-business healthcare tech platform Pharmarack Technologies.
On the surface, the deal is an unlikely one. The entity that acquired these two companies,
DigiHealth Technologies, isn’t just a company that offers tech and marketing solutions for
pharmacy chains. It’s a consortium of Indian drug makers that includes majors such as
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Cadila Healthcare Ltd, Lupin Ltd and Torrent
Pharmaceuticals Ltd among others.
In addition, AWACS is a joint venture between pharma distribution company All India
Origin of Chemists and Druggists Ltd (AIOCD Ltd), and Mumbai-based market research
agency Trikaal Mediinfotech. In short, it’s a union of pharma retailers, distributors, and
pretty much everyone else that could possibly be a part of the drug distribution system in
India.
These two entities—pharma companies and retailers and distributors—have traditionally

been opposite sides of the story. The former wants a slice of the distribution pie, and
better profits, while the latter wants better margins.
In fact, the All India Organization of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD; not to be confused
with AIOCD Ltd)—an organisation of distributors—has threatened to boycott drug makers
that do not offer a combined total of 30% margins (10% for distributors and 20% for
retailers) despite the government’s orders to cap the prices of drugs. AIOCD’s members
currently comprise around 11,000 distributors who supply to about 300,000 retailers.
In 2014, the CCI even fined the AIOCD Rs 50 crore ($6.6 million) for dictating terms to
pharma companies on pricing and distribution. Over the last four years, AIOCD has filed
several court cases against e-pharmacies that offer discounts on medicines and
threatened to boycott drug makers like Cipla who were interested in working with them.
Give me your data
Drug distributors and pharma companies have been at

loggerheads with each other for years. But with new competition
and new rules on the horizon, they have no choice but to work
the-ken.com-Inside Indias big pharma-drug distributor team-up 1/2 405

together. Indian pharma’s acquisition of two data companies
AIOCD-AWACS and Pharmarack is only the first step
The quiet takeover of AIOCD Pharmasofttech AWACS and Pharmarack by big Indian
pharma companies hints at their larger plan to control drug sales data
The groundwork for the deal was laid out when second-generation leaders at pharma
companies invited consulting firm BCG to find out how they could protect their turf
But gathering data won’t be all that easy, with distributors mulling legal ways to stall the
deal. They feel insecure about sharing data
Pitted against Reliance Retail, Amazon, and e-pharmacies like PharmEasy, do the
Indian pharma companies stand a chance?
the-ken.com-Inside Indias big pharma-drug distributor team-up 2/2 406

Inside the black box of India’s crashed drone industry
the-ken.com/story/inside-the-black-box-of-indias-crashed-drone-industry
February 26, 2020
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For the founders of Quidich, the months leading up to the Indian Premier League (IPL)—
India’s big-budget domestic cricket tournament—in March 2019 were restless ones. The
company, which specialises in drone-based sports broadcasting and filmmaking, was
sweating on an exemption from the Indian government. More specifically, from the
aviation regulator—the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)—and the Ministry of
Civil Aviation (MoCA), in order to operate its drones during IPL matches.
Things were so desperate that the company actually stationed an executive in Delhi for
over two months, all to get the elusive greenlight for its drones. Why elusive? Because the
Indian government’s policy on drones—the Civil Aviation Requirements (CAR),
formulated by the DGCA in August 2018—practically rendered all commercial drone
operations in the country illegal.
It requires, among other things, operators to register their drones and seek clearance
online every time they want to fly. The key consideration was security, and
understandably so, given the military and surveillance potential drones hold.
The plan sounded great on paper. Map the country into three zones:
Red—No-fly zones
Green—Flying zones
Amber—Zones requiring special permissions
And regulate drone flying accordingly. The rules, derived under the Aircraft Act of 1943,
were enforced by December 2018. Drones also needed another feature—essentially, a kill
switch—which would allow for the government’s vision of ‘no permission, no takeoff’
(NPNT).
While the CAR didn’t lack in terms of vision, execution was a whole other problem. The
digital portal required for automatic approvals—an online platform called DigitalSky—is
still not ready. Neither have the maps been properly demarcated. While a beta version
was launched, it was pointless in the absence of a zone map.
The beta version was supposed to be an interim measure to provide the digital
permission, said an executive working closely with the Drone Federation of India (DFI).
Industry executives and drone companies The Ken spoke to have been told by officials
that DigitalSky will only be operational in another six to 12 months.
the-ken.com-Inside the black box of Indias crashed drone industry 1/3 407
In the absence of this digital infrastructure, drone operators were hamstrung—flouting
these rules could lead to punishment as severe as imprisonment. While India has an
estimated 40,000-60,000 drones, according to industry sources, the only way to continue
in business is what Quidich did—lobby regulators incessantly.
In the end, Quidich did get the exemptions it needed to operate during the IPL. However,
according to an industry executive and a government official aware of the matter, this was
an arduous process. It involved phone calls to everyone, from the Board of Cricket Control
in India (BCCI) to the Prime Minister’s Office, and the aviation ministry.
The system wasn’t always this broken. In fact, prior to CAR, operators could simply seek
permissions offline.
On a wing and a prayer
Heavy on vision, light on execution, an inside look at India’s pie-

in-the-sky dreams of being a drone hub
Pratap Vikram Singh, 26 Feb 2020
The 2018 regulations that govern drone flying envisioned a one-stop digital shop for
flight approvals
However, the government failed to set up the required platform in time to facilitate
drone registration, flying permission and tracking
The regulation rendered almost all drone flying in India illegal. Chinese drone major DJI
has decided to not comply with the rules
Having missed the hardware bus, India can still become a hub—in drone applications
and analytics
Inside the building and breaking of CoWIN
the-ken.com/story/building-and-breaking-of-cowin
January 22, 2021
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19 January, the third day of India’s massive inoculation campaign for Covid-19, began on
a confused note in the capital city of Delhi. At the privately-run Max Hospital in Saket, a
suburb in South Delhi, two doctors received text messages informing them that their
vaccinations had been delayed. Another doctor at the same hospital, who had already
received the first dose of the vaccine, got an SMS urging him to turn up for a jab on 21
January.
That wasn’t the only part of the process that had seemingly hit a snag. CoWIN, the
technology platform meant to help track Covid vaccinations, was glitching repeatedly.
“My details were supposed to be logged through CoWIN. But officials onsite told me that
there were constant ‘Log In’ errors with the software,” says one of the doctors. Instead,
details of his vaccination were noted down manually in a register. He had been given a
shot of Serum Institute’s Covishield.
Created by Mumbai-based IT firm Trigyn Technologies, CoWIN isn’t available to the

general public yet. It’s supposed to record beneficiary data and track whether those
eligible for the vaccine have got their jab on time. It’s the government’s shield against
duplication or misuse during this ambitious and once-in-a-century vaccination process.
Every candidate gets a confirmation SMS from the app—saying the first dose has been
administered successfully—once their details are entered into it. The doctor from Max
Hospital is yet to receive his, even twenty four hours after his vaccination.
Conflicting text messages to beneficiaries, manual uploading of names at the vaccine

centers, and an app that crashes repeatedly have all slowed down a vaccination drive
meant to cover 300 million people. The intended recipients include healthcare and
frontline workers as well as senior citizens and those with comorbidities. In fact, in the
western state of Maharashtra, the whole drive came to a standstill for two days.
“Everything is going through a rush. There is no point in doing dry runs [for vaccination]
if the entire [CoWIN] system crashes when you launch it across the country,” a senior
epidemiologist from New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences tells The Ken.
“The Covid vaccination approval, the roll out of the drive, and software issues have not
been taken care of,” says the epidemiologist candidly. They did not want to be named as
they aren’t authorised to speak with the media.
the-ken.com-Inside the building and breaking of CoWIN 1/3 410

The platform’s struggles may affect a lot more than India’s vaccination efforts. Even as
India has started to ship millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines to neighbouring
countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal, the Prime Minister’s Office was keen to go one
better. It wanted to also share the CoWIN system to help countries manage vaccinations.
CoWIN’s glitches are only part of its problems.
prickly matters
India needs a plan to inoculate its 1.3 billion citizens against

Covid-19. But not only is the app at the centre of it all—CoWIN—
glitchy, unpredictable, it is also sparking serious privacy
concerns
The glitches in CoWIN’s software have led to confusion on the ground, with many
vaccination centres pivoting to manual registration
The platform had only three dry runs before being rolled out, and that too, in only
limited areas in the country
But CoWIN’s struggles go beyond the operational; there has been a move to link Aadhaar
to CoWIN

There are concerns that Aadhaar data could be used as a backdoor to create unique
health IDs, without beneficiaries’ informed consent

Inside the final splutter of startup conferences
the-ken.com/story/inside-final-splutter-startup-conferences
December 23, 2016
Hey there
Manu Joseph, 23 Dec 2016
There is a kind of gloom that Indian engineers do not perceive, as though it is the nuance
of a girl. The gloom is in plain sight, like a Monday, it is in the ugliness of serious objects,
in the failed playfulness of office spaces, in the way water bottles are arranged at
conferences, in the dullness of corporate purpose. Indian engineers are not infected by it
probably because they are vaccinated in their youth by strong doses of despair, a college
life spent in ugly industrial towns and a long numbing preparation for the grim business
of life.
The fume of mild sorrow, perhaps perceivable only to humanities graduates, is in the
ballroom of the bleak business hotel on the outer edge of Bengaluru, where “Unpluggd”
that has been promoted as “India’s Biggest Start-up Conference” is underway. The fact is
that the conference is evidently low key. Most of the 400 people in the room are software
product managers. Among them there are six women.
The speaker on the stage is Jitendra Gupta, co-founder of the payment gateway, Citrus
Pay. There is much interest in him because Modi’s demonetisation of large notes has got
everybody here talking about how “the future is in fintech”. It is a condition of engineers
to follow the herd and while doing that to talk about ‘thinking out of the box’.
Gupta is saying something that is a ritual in such conferences. How he chose to quit his
very lucrative corporate job, how his wife was shocked, and how they had “EMIs”, and
how, despite all this, he took the courageous plunge into the risky world of
entrepreneurship. It is exactly the kind of story the audience of a start-up festival loves to
the-ken.com-Inside the final splutter of startup conferences 1/8 413

hear even though they have heard it many times, and they may have even observed a
pattern: the seeming risk-takers are almost always from an economic class that has
considerable social equity and layers of safety-nets.
An unspoken truth of digital entrepreneurship is that it is, like the pursuits of high art,
an affirmation of privilege couched as adorable eccentricity. The lower middle-class that
tries to ape their heroes would be taking the plunge without the deep social contacts that
the pioneers chose not to advertise.
Gupta says that just 48 hours after he sought funding from Sequoia Capital, the global
venture capital firm chose to invest in Citrus Pay. The audience erupts in applause. It
would be the only time over the next two days when the audience would deliver a mid-
speech ovation.
Many in the audience appear to be from modest backgrounds and most of them are here
because they hope to become entrepreneurs. It would be useful for them to hear an angry
Marxist analysis of how the beneficiaries of economic inequality are more likely to beat
them to the funds held by venture capitalists, who are usually from the same vintage as
the founders. But then the undercurrent of such a conference is always valiance.
Kranti M, from Furlenco, a start-up that encourages Indians to rent out furniture, is
among the few competent speakers here. At some point he brings in the inevitable Henry
Ford quote, which Ford most probably never uttered. “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.” The statement is popular in conferences of
this nature because it sets up the celebration of the ‘inner voice’ and the defamation of
market research. The fact is that entrepreneurs might find the ‘inner voice’ charming but
most of them would be lost without research. That is probably because most people do
not have the gift of the ‘inner voice’.
Business philosophers often make it out to be a matter of choice, that entrepreneurs

choose between voice and market survey, but in the real world, people with strong
intuitions cannot bear to follow consumer research, and people who do not hear voices
have no choice but to read data. In every sphere of human activity, there is the Steve
Jobs way and the Samsung way. It appears to be a fundamental binary division of the
world.
Kranti is a bit confused about where he belongs. He understands the sexiness of intuition
but he probably trusts data more. He invokes again the quote that Ford probably never
uttered and points out that consumers who wanted a “faster horse” were still conveying a
valuable insight – they wanted a faster vehicle. Thus, consumer feedback is always
useful. Or something like that.
Many speakers at the conference pose questions to the audience that often require them
to raise their hands. This is a consequence of the tendency of the speakers to talk down
to their audience, as though they have realised that they are indeed speaking to the
lower- and middle-management rungs.

An intriguing property of the conference is how much is said about breaking the mould,
yet how conformist almost everything is – from sugar-mixed coffee to the most obvious
symbol of the norm, the extensive use of Powerpoint presentations.
The artistic contempt for corporate slideshows has reasonable basis in common sense. In
such presentations, one sees, usually on a bizarre design templates, statements such as,
‘Borders are blurring’ and ‘Be a platform or be on a platform’. These sentences would
appear on two identical giant screens. Then the speaker would proceed to repeat the
same words as though his audience is not literate. Most speakers do not have any
insightful images to justify the use slideshows. It is as though they feel they would not be
taken seriously if they do present a slideshow.
A more complex norm is the compulsion of the speakers and their audience to be the
slaves of majoritarian views. That, today, inevitably means, they feel they must be
involved in “fintech” to sound relevant even to themselves. No surprise then that Guru
Bhat of Paypal enjoys considerable adulation here.
He says that he “likes” one-time-passwords. What is there to like in a mere number that
usually comes to us as a text message when we want to make an online transaction? He
explains the idea of “friction” in online transactions. Indian regulation that requires the
use of OTPs is an example of friction. He says Indians like this sort of friction because it
assures them that their money is safe. But, he feels, the future is in frictionless transfers,
a world where safety need not create “frictions”.
His talk attempts to perform the most popular thing a big fish is expected to do – predict
trends. His audience loves it. They are the kind of people who would ask before picking
up a book, ‘What’s the takeaway’ (which rules out all of literature)? Bhat is dealing in
take-aways.
He says, among other predictions, blockbuster apps would create unusual secondary
businesses. He gives the example of an Uber driver who is making a good living by
making his taxi double as a jewelry showroom for Uber customers. Actually, he has a
chain of such showrooms in a little fleet of Uber taxis. The audience admires the taxi-
driver. They think he is smart.
Towards the end of the talk, Bhat asks an odd question. “How many trends did I
predict”? Incredibly, some hands go up. One man says, “13”. Incredibly, that is the right
answer. Bhat congratulates the man. Another man in the audience had shouted, “eight”.
Bhat sends a mild rebuke and asks him to pay closer attention in the future.
What the hell is this place?
Bhat reminds his audience about the perils of predictions so that he is not remembered
as a fool if some of his thirteen predictions turn out to be way off. Curiously, he too
invokes Henry Ford and mentions that an advisor of Ford had predicted that horses will
prevail over cars. Bhat also points out that Martin Cooper, inventor of the mobile phone,
had said, “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.”

The language of the speakers and the questions of the audience and the chatter in the
corridors during the coffee and lunch breaks contains technical sophistication and
literary austerity. There is much that they know, naturally, about how the internet works
today, but somehow they are simpletons too. No single moment can fully explain this
duality, but one comes close. A speaker, while addressing the conflict between design
and engineering, says in the way of clarifying that he does respect engineers, “Some of
my best friends are coders”.
He does not realise that a whole army of artists have long turned the template of ‘Some
of my best friends are…’ into a global confession and a global joke. When you say that a
particular community is among your “best friends” you expose your cultural contempt
for them. ‘Some of my best friends are Muslims’; ‘Some of my best friends are Dalits’.
Among the finest tweets after the election of Trump was, ‘Some of my best friends are
whites’. But the speaker on stage seems to be unaware of the obsolescence of the polite
lie that begins with ‘some of my best friends are…’
A few hours later, in a portion of the venue, sixty people gather for the ‘networking
dinner’. They have overpaid for the food because they hope that they would find
influential people in the room. But they only meet others who have similar hopes. A
dinner that is advertised as ‘networking dinner’ is not unusual in the startup system and
it is not recognized as a daft idea, which it is.
Not long ago, ‘networking’ was considered the ruse of smooth charlatans. Almost
everybody indulged in it because almost everybody is a smooth charlatan, but then it was
foolish to declare the act. There are excellent reasons why it is not wise to announce a
networking event as such.
For networking to be useful it has to be a feudal system. There are givers and seekers,
benefactors and potential beneficiaries, the elite and the climbers. The seekers would go
anywhere they can meet the givers but the benefactors need good reasons to be in the
same room as those who want them. Networking is best done when it is not meant to be
so, when it is called by another name.

Networking between equals is called drinking. That is what is going on here in this
‘networking dinner’ where there are only seekers, and no funders. But the ratio of
women to men in this room is high compared to the lecture sessions. There are three full
women to about fifty men. Good things do happen.
One of the women is a Tamil girl with spaghetti-like hair and knee-length skirt who may
say to writers who describe her this way, “Would you describe the clothes of a man, you
jerk?” She works in “Fintech” but she wishes “to start her own stuff”.
“In Fintech?”
“Maybe but I like food.”
“So?”
“I really like food. And I like tech. I want to start something that brings the two
together.”
What is it about young people that they think saving the world is essentially about
delivering second-rate food to lazy gluttons?
“My idea is,” she says, “You know, there are a lot of bachelors in Chennai. For some
reasons, they don’t go to restaurants.”
“Is it because they live with their moms?”
“No, no. But I don’t know why they don’t go to restaurants. Maybe they are busy. So I
plan to create an app that brings them food from restaurants.”
“This idea sounds a bit familiar.”
A shadow of irritation sweeps across her face. “There is no such app in Chennai,” she
says.
“What motivates you the most?”
“Food.”
She walks around the room initiating conversations. The men are happy to talk to her.
She has a serious face that smiles very cautiously, and her conversations do not stray too
far from work. But then something happens to her. She spots a girl a few metres away.
They are strangers, which is evident in the moment when their eyes meet. Then they let
out giggles because they are happy to find each other in this forest of men.
An agile, short middle-class man is flitting across the room with his silent friend who
looks stunned for some reason. Not many in the room know who he is. If they did they
may have gathered around him. He is a giver. Ramesh Patel is a Gujarati
diamond polisher from suburban Mumbai. He is scouting for investments in a tech start-
up.

“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Something good. Nothing silly.” He throws a look at his friend who is
standing beside him.
The friend, who, too, is Gujarati, is intoxicated by the idea of connecting farmers directly
with consumers. Patel has been trying to dissuade him. “It won’t work.” The friend looks
like a man who feels he is on to something precisely because a diamond merchant has
been telling him, “It won’t work.”
Patel’s son, who is in his early twenties, appears. The son runs a tech start-up. Why is he
not in the diamond business? The son laughs and he gives an answer he has delivered
many times.
“The richest 20-year-old is in tech. The richest 30-year-old is in tech. The richest 40-
year-old is in tech.” And he goes on like this nicely along the decimal system.
Somewhere in the room an earnest Tamilian is flogging an app. “Four out of 100
engineering students in India is worth hiring. The rest are useless. Why?”
“Why?”
“They are smart but they don’t understand the medium of instruction, which is English.
We translate the lectures into five Indian languages.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“It’s a good idea.”
Another Tamilian, whose website imparts construction related advice says, “We are
looking, sir, for investments, sir”. In the history of capitalism, it is unlikely that anyone
has got a nickel in investments after saying that. There are also a bunch of cheerful
young men whose big idea is to take over the subscription market in India. If anything
can be subscribed they would do it for the vendors.
“Newspapers?”
“Of course.”
“The guys who deliver the newspapers, they won’t like you.”
“No, no. We collect the subscriptions for them. They are tired of going door-to-door
collecting money. They take days to collect the money. They are happy to let us push
people to pay us online.”
“They don’t want cash?”
“They don’t care as long as they are getting their money.”

The next day, finally, there is complexity. The star speaker is Lalitesh Katragadda a
former Google engineer who was among the creators of the company’s transformative
maps project and was also involved in launching Google India. He is now involved in an
idea that attempts to map the lives of average Indians, over a billion of them. A machine-
learning expert, he has an artistic complication within him, a perceptible bitterness. He
does not mean to but his talk is a reprimand. He frames talent, hence genius, as a
mathematical probability. One in a certain number would be truly gifted. Hence, it is
more likely that revolutionary ingenious Indians would emerge from the over one billion
unconnected poor than the minuscule social and economic elite.
Very little is known about the unconnected Indians, and very little is made for them
while they have a whole treasure of problems that need to be solved. Katragadda’s
mission is to convert some aspects of every Indian’s life into digital records. That data,
he says, would be provided by them. No other person or organisation has the
information that they contain. What he is attempting is almost an anthropological survey
of India by consenting Indians.
“Poverty is an information problem,” he says. The poor are poor because they do not
have the information that can help them cease to be poor. He wishes to change that.
It is not rare for a millionaire engineer to seek fulfillment in altruism, but it is rare for
him to succeed or at least be as useful as he wishes. Software altruism usually does far
less for the poor than the march of self-interest. Transliteration, cheap computer, free
phone calls, online education – these were some of the lofty goals altruism attempted,
failed and let capitalism quietly accomplish. But there are formidable exceptions. The
Unique Identification programme and its Aadhar, for instance. Urban socialists try to
defame the project as they do any social venture pioneered by a billionaire, but the effort
to identify every Indian through biometrics would continue to transform the lives of
hundreds of millions. Katragadda’s database on all consenting Indians is an idea on the
scale of the Aadhar project.
After the talk, as he walks down the corridor outside the hall he is quickly mobbed by
many aspiring entrepreneurs. He appears to be accustomed to that. He leans on a wall
and chats. Listens, too. A boy pitches an idea. “Send me an email,” Katragadda says, and
he spits out an easy id.
Katragadda says that the Indian start-up story “is over”. It was killed by dullness, he
says. “Nothing much is happening, nothing much can happen. What can happen?”
He says that as long as all that Indians do is to imitate the Americans they would be up to
no good. Also, he fears, the Indian government wishes to have too much control over the
tech industry. “That’s suffocating.” That goes against the instinct of data. “Information,”
he says, “always tries to reach perfection”.
“What do you mean by ‘perfection'”
He says that the purpose of information is to reveal itself fully to a human. It is hard for
an authority to come in the way of this purpose.

He feels people have not fully realised how powerful technology is going to become. He
implies that many things we know would come to an end. Tech giants themselves would
struggle. “Google is one click away from obsolescence,” he says about his former
employer. A worthy challenger can finish them off. But one can sense a hint of bitterness
in that analysis. He is not very fond of Google anymore.
All around him, on the sidelines of the conference, people are meeting people and
describing their companies or ideas. There are no investors about. One bearded man is
trying to flog a school handbook that he has authored, it is not clear why.
What Katragadda knows about the immediate future of the world is that most people in
the conference venue would become superfluous very soon. Most professions would
become irrelevant, most coders, too, would be rendered jobless. In the immediate future,
only the very smart would thrive. The rest would not be required.
It is astonishing that during the conference, over two days, no one uttered the word
‘disruption’. It is as though even men who do not read extensively have figured out that
the word is not as glorious as some people have made it out to be.
AUTHOR
Manu Joseph
Manu Joseph is a journalist and novelist. He is the former editor of Open magazine and
the author of two novels — The Illicit Happiness of Other People and Serious Men.
View Full Profile

Inside the generics price-fixing saga in the US
the-ken.com/story/generics-price-fixing-us
December 21, 2017
Register or Login
In the spring of 2013, two businessmen from an American subsidiary of an Indian
generics manufacturer travelled to Pune to visit their parent company, Emcure
Pharmaceuticals. They met Satish Mehta, Emcure’s billionaire chief executive, to discuss
the upcoming launch of a drug called Doxy DR.
Doxy DR (doxycycline hyclate delayed-release) is a simple molecule—a delayed-release

antibiotic often prescribed for severe acne. The businessmen from New Jersey-based
Heritage Pharmaceuticals wanted to manufacture this profitable drug.
The catch: The market was entirely cornered by Heritage’s competitor, Mylan N.V., so its
entry had to be carefully orchestrated. Jason Malek, the then vice-president of
commercial operations at Heritage, and Jeffrey Glazer, the then CEO, allegedly requested
Mehta to open a channel of communication with Rajiv Malik, president of Mylan.
Within weeks, Mylan and Heritage employees allegedly began exchanging phone calls,
text messages and emails discussing Doxy DR in what may amount to textbook anti-
competitive behaviour. These allegations were made in court filings last month in a
landmark antitrust lawsuit filed by 46 US states against generics manufacturers. By
summertime, Mylan and Heritage had neatly divvied up the market without any price
erosion.
The detailed complaint allows, for the first time, a reconstruction of alleged price-fixing
among generics players in America. It implicates at least eight Indian players, including
Sun Pharma, Aurobindo, Dr Reddy’s and Glenmark, at a time when Indian companies are
booking declining profits in a toughened US marketplace. Furthermore, the allegations
mirror an ongoing investigation in India where regulators are investigating Emcure and
the-ken.com-Inside the generics price-fixing saga in the US 1/2 421

three other companies over the alleged price-fixing of diabetes drug Vildagliptin. On 13
December, the Competition Commission of India (CCI)—a fair play regulator—sent
notices to the four companies.
“The allegations of our complaint are shocking, and the depth and breadth of the
conspiracies alleged are mind-blowing,” said George Jepsen, attorney general of
Connecticut, who is leading the multistate investigation, in an October press release. The
complaint alleges that generics price rigging was an “overarching industry code of
conduct.”
Between 2013 and 2015, generics manufacturers sliced and diced the market for at least
15 drugs and fixed prices. The agreements were kept off the books, inked at industry
dinners, girls’ nights out and working lunches. Heritage was the ringleader, it states. In
2014 alone, the industry made at least $500 million on drugs that had doubled in price,
the complaint alleges.
“This agreement between Heritage, Aurobindo, Citron, Glenmark and Sandoz was part of
an overarching conspiracy of the corporate defendants named in the complaint to
unreasonably restrain trade in the generic pharmaceutical industry.”
Court filings
The states’ civil lawsuit hints at what is coming in a separate, wide-ranging federal
criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that has more than 30
plaintiffs.
the-ken.com-Inside the generics price-fixing saga in the US 2/2 422

Inside the implosion of AskMe
the-ken.com/story/inside-the-implosion-of-askme
September 15, 2016
It was early afternoon on Friday, 12 August. Sandeep Vats and Prakash R Mishra had just
entered AskMe’s corporate office in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. But they were not welcome.
Right at the door they were told off; by employees of the company. “Who are you?” “What
are you doing here?”
Only a few hours ago, the two had concluded an extraordinary general meeting of AskMe’s
board at the company’s registered office in Barakhamba Road in New Delhi. The meeting
had not gone well. Sanjiv Gupta, the chairman and managing director of AskMe was in
the room and he was not happy. He wanted answers: “What’s going to happen now?”
“What have you decided on our offer to buy the company from you?” “Why are you in
such a hurry to close the company down?” “There will be consequences.” Gupta’s offer
was on the table. This:
the-ken.com-Inside the implosion of AskMe 1/13 423

An expression of interest...
But Vats and Mishra were non-committal. Things had come to a head and a management
buyout (MBO) was not even under discussion. They were here to take stock of the
company’s operations and pull the plug.
It’s Over
Only a month back, Astro Entertainment Networks Ltd (AENL) had appointed both of
them as directors on the Board of Getit Infoservices Private Limited, otherwise known as
AskMe. Their appointment had been sudden. As sudden as the resignation of the earlier
directors — Mohamaed Khader Bin Merican, Hishan Zainal Mokhtar and Ashok Rajgopal
— all of whom resigned in June, citing voluntary, personal reasons. The mandate for the

new directors was clear — fire everyone, reach a settlement and shut shop. But now, just a
few weeks into the job, they were getting a taste of how difficult the task would prove to
be.
At Noida, the employees gheraoed them at the reception. They had questions: “Who are
you?” “Do you have an appointment with anyone?” “What are you doing here?” Vats and
Mishra explained that they were there just to take a look at the office. The crowd wasn’t
satisfied. “Get out,” said one. “Don’t let them enter,” said another. After about 20 minutes
of pestering and explaining, Vats and Mishra left. Humiliated.
This was the final throw of the dice in the long-winded and fairly public tussle over the
fate of AskMe. A few days later, on 17 August, the senior management team put in their
papers. Their resignation brought closure to months of uncertainty and negotiation to
somehow wrest control of the company from Astro.
The full story of AskMe’s downfall has not been told. This is that story.
The story of how AskMe imploded and in a way unravelled in just a few months — from
being hailed as the next unicorn by the business press to obsolescence. To piece this story
together, The Ken reached out to all parties concerned. Astro, the major shareholder of
Getit and the management team at AskMe. Former and current employees of the
company had a lot to share in private but no one wanted to go on record.
In an emailed response to a detailed set of questions, an Astro Overseas Limited (AOL)

spokesperson said:
“AENL made sustained and long term investments in Getit totalling nearly $300 million
to date to keep the business afloat during often volatile market conditions.
Unfortunately, Getit has not been able to meet its agreed key performance indicators
(KPIs) to ensure it’s sustainable, despite these huge investments by AENL. AOL would
like to reiterate that the e-commerce market in India is witnessing difficult times.
Despite best efforts of Board and management, AskMe, has been unable to meet its plans
due to lack of scale, among other factors. An independent review by advisors has
concluded that there is little prospect for turnaround and the business is insolvent. AENL
intends to appoint a forensic auditor to review Getit’s books and will take appropriate
steps based on the results of that audit.
“Please also note that Astro Overseas Limited (AOL) is a significant long-term investor
in India and has invested in a number of different businesses over the past 10 years.
Generally, these businesses are performing to expectation. The company focuses on
investments within the Media & Entertainment space across five categories: Platform
and Distribution, Content, IP & Production, E-commerce and Digital Media, with
businesses located across the globe with significant presence in Asia, Middle East, the
United Kingdom and US. AOL has no current plans to exit India.”
The Ken sent a detailed questionnaire to Sanjiv Gupta and an AskMe spokesperson on
September 11, and followed it up with multiple phone calls and messages. But we did not
get any response as of the time this story was published.

Every good story deserves a takeaway — a lesson learnt from the successes and failures of
the players. While AskMe as an entity didn’t end with a meaningful resolution, AskMe as a
story gives us several meaningful takeaways.
The first and biggest lesson is how quickly a seemingly-large startup, one that is almost
too big to fail, can unravel completely. While obvious gaps in business models and value
propositions can be covered up by the gild plating of funding, this coat of armour is skin-
deep — more akin to a patina that a short shower can wash away to leave you woefully
exposed.
AskMe came up short. Both, on a clear strategy to build an e-commerce business and the
amount of money it would need to fend off competition from the likes of Flipkart and
Snapdeal, to start with. And later, when, Amazon, Shopclues and other newer players
joined the party.
When this happens, it is tempting to lay the blame on the investors, who tempt honest
entrepreneurs to make Faustian bargains. However, as the sad demise of AskMe will
prove, it is equally possible that acts of brinkmanship by the executives in charge can lead
companies to ruin just as surely. It is easy to forget that the investor-executive
relationship is a jugalbandi — a musical duel where each singer matches step with the
other and builds up to a rapturous crescendo. This relationship needs to be built and
nurtured on trust and mutual respect, irrespective of the percentage ownership of each
individual party.

AskMe employees protesting
So, what really happened?

It will be fair to say that you should treat the existing, popular narrative with skepticism –
the narrative that AskMe imploded one fine day when Astro suddenly decided to turn off
the tap. Especially, when it said no to the management buyout offer. No, that’s not how it
played out. AskMe had it coming for a while and its slide started way early. It started
when nobody quite knew what to do with the company and almost everyone was shooting
in the dark, hoping that something will stick. Of course, we will get to that in a while. But
first, let a few numbers put the murky turn of events into context.
$300 million – That’s the total amount Astro invested in Getit, over a period of six
years. Who is Astro? It is the investment arm of Malaysian Billionaire T Ananda
Krishnan’s Astro Holdings. According to Forbes magazine, Krishnan is the second richest
man in Malaysia, with a networth of $7.7 billion.
98.5% – As of date, that’s AENL’s stake in Getit.
0 – That’s the return AENL has seen from its investment.

Rs. 1 – $5 million – Depending on who you are speaking to, that’s the amount Sanjiv
Gupta offered to buy the company from Astro. A subject he first broached in the last week
of May. That and minus Rs. 90 crore of liabilities, dues to vendors and salary of
employees. (You may consider this as management buyout)
0.06% – As of date, that’s Sanjiv Gupta’s stake in Getit.
As expected, Astro balked at the management buyout offer. A showdown ensued. And the
end result?
4,000 – the total number of people out of job.
3,600 – the total number of sellers affected. About 60 sellers have outstanding dues of
more than Rs 10 lakh each
Now, back to the story.
“You have one year to make this work”

Getit Infoservices wasn’t born to disrupt how people bought goods and services online.
Founded 30 years ago, Getit meant to list sellers of goods and services in the form of a
directory. First on paper, like Yellow Pages and then when print became less lucrative, it
went online in 2010. During those days, the sheer volume of sellers became Getit’s calling
card to trumpet digital transformation. The idea? We have the biggest directory of small
and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) in the country; let’s sell them digital services and
bring them online. Unleash their full potential.
Astro was sold on the dream — building a digital, SME led powerhouse in India. Astro was
so sold that Getit even launched a listings portal in Malaysia. It was called FINDIT. (The
website is now dead.) In 2010, Astro invested close to Rs 100 crore in Getit. The first
tranche of its many rounds of investment. In the next three years, Getit tried every
possible idea in the playbook. Let’s make people’s websites. Let’s make people’s Facebook
pages. Let’s sell them Google ads. Let’s sell them Facebook ads. Doesn’t work? Okay, let’s
sell them Microsoft CRM suite. Let’s sell them an inventory solution. Well, nothing stuck.
Either it didn’t stick or there were no margins.
“When you move from print to digital, the yield per user drops drastically,” said a former
Getit official, who requested not to be named because he didn’t want to be publicly
identified as speaking about his former employer. “There is very little money there unless
you have a niche like JustDial. Because you have a largely free and premium listings
business but the costs are high — 40 branch offices and 4,000 strong sales force.”
Sometime in 2013, when e-commerce was truly taking off in India, Getit too decided to go
big. In March, it acquired two businesses from the Network 18 group — Infomedia Yellow
Pages and AskMe. Soon after, Getit leveraged the AskMe brand and started a marketplace
called Askmebazaar. What was the idea? We are an SME listings company; can we bring

every shopkeeper online? From making his catalogue, fixing his pricing, managing his
inventory in his godown, delivering it, helping him understand that the money will come
only after the customer pays.
“While everyone was moving from warehouse to marketplace, we started at the bad and
deep end of the pool,” said a second former official of AskMe, requesting not to be
identified. “Soon, we realised that it is not possible to train the sellers. They have no
accountability. They will say no, they have no inventory, they can’t pack, they don’t have
the wherewithal to wait because they have very short credit cycles and if something breaks
or damages, they expect you to bear the cost.”
Simply put, it was a squeeze. A bad one. But the top management took solace in the one
true but much-abused metric of e-commerce. At least, there’s gross merchandise value
(GMV) to show for.
Even as all this was happening, AskMe started another business division called Next Day
Delivery (NDD). In mid-2013, it was an iteration of the ‘let’s do something with our SME
sellers’ idea. The rationale: A merchant wants to go online because his customers are
online. But, he only wants to cater to HIS customers, in let’s say, 2km radius. So, all
AskMe had to do was list the merchants and do local pickup and local delivery. Simple.
The merchant was happy because he got his money back on the third day. Plus, AskMe
was just a layer to facilitate the transaction and make a little something in the process.
What could go wrong?
Well, the customer didn’t give a damn.
All that any customer cares about is: Where can I get this at the lowest price possible and
can I get this soonest? None of the SME sellers were willing to offer any discount. AskMe
didn’t have any money for discounts either. So, back to square one — squeeze. But AskMe
persisted with the idea. And not just persisted, it went big. The company grew its NDD
business to 53 cities in India. In the first year, it passed on orders to merchants and asked
them to deliver. Merchants struggled. In 2014, AskMe started working closely with
merchants in terms of listing and delivery but then gave up on the idea altogether.
It tinkered with the model again. Forget merchants, let’s just work with distributors of
branded goods above Rs. 1,000 — televisions, refrigerators, washing machines,
generators, coolers, fans, gold coins — anything that doesn’t need an explanation. “We set
up that infrastructure in 53 cities,” said the second official quoted earlier. “Then we said,
we are confusing ourselves with too many cities, let’s just do nine cities. In value, GMV
terms we were at par with the national marketplace. But number of transactions was
super low. National marketplace —3 lakh transactions a month. NDD, 3,000 transactions
a month. There average sales price (ASP) was Rs 800, here the ASP was Rs 13,000.
Unfortunately, we had no money for this business because we were chasing GMV.”
It was also the year when AskMe started getting some visibility. Thanks to television
commercials featuring Bollywood stars such as Kangana Ranaut, Ranbir Kapoor and
Farhan Akhtar. It was Sanjiv Gupta’s brainchild to rope them in. A strategy he had learnt

and honed from his two decades of working at Coke and Hindustan Unilever. “The idea is
that you need credibility with small sellers and buyers,” said a third former AskMe
official, who requested not to be named. “So it was Sanjiv’s idea to get the celebrities. And
it worked. People started talking about us.”
Despite all the noise, business wasn’t doing that well. As of 31 March 2014, Getit recorded
revenue from operations of Rs. 42 crore, compared to Rs. 25 crore as on 31 March 2013.
The company’s loss though jumped significantly, from Rs. 99 crore in March 2013 to Rs.
180 crore as of March 2014. Where was the company burning cash? Adding new people,
and promotional expenses. Worse, despite the high burn rate, AskMe wasn’t anywhere
close to becoming a dominant e-commerce player in the Indian market.
Sometime in January 2015, Astro reached out to Gupta with a clear message: “This is our
last year. You have one more year to make this work.”
Astro’s rationale was simple. We’ve waited four years but now we are running out of
patience. We will fund this for one more year but if it still doesn’t work, then shut shop. Of
course, if you can, bring in another investor. That’s when Sanjiv Gupta started actively
seeking out investors. Little did he know how hard it would be.
Critical error!
“Do I look like a fool?”

Most of the meetings with potential investors were unfruitful. Why? Well, think about it
like this — A conversation between someone representing Astro and a potential investor:
Astro: Yeah, so we are looking for an investor.
Potential investor: Great. Are you willing to dilute 100%?
No.
So, how much will you give?
20-30%
Really, then who will have the balance?
Obviously, me.
Okay. So, let’s understand this. You will have 70% and you are the principal investor. I get
30% and I am in minority. You have boatloads of money, $1 billion in investments and

what not but you don’t want to fund AskMe anymore. So, I have just two questions for
you: A) Do I look like a fool? B). What the hell do you need me for?
BRB…
Now, play out this conversation again and again. That’s exactly what happened with
Sanjiv, every time he approached a potential investor. “Astro wasn’t pitching the business
to anyone. It was Sanjiv slogging his butt off,” said the second former AskMe official
quoted above. “A large private player which owns the company, nobody wants to become
a minority investor there. Everybody was like, if Astro is not putting in any more money
means there is trouble.”
Even as all this was happening, AskMe kept growing. Acquiring small companies and
adding a whole host of new businesses. The same mindset — let’s do everything, and see if
something sticks. That’s how it ventured into grocery, selling furniture online and
payments. “I’ve never quite understood what they were trying to do,” says a fourth former
AskMe official, who requested not to be named. “When I came in, I found that 90% of
AskMe’s traffic was referral traffic. It is not a good sign. Hardly anyone was coming
directly to AskMe to shop.” Of course, nothing clicked while AskMe’s burn rate continued
to be high.
As of 31 March 2015, Getit’s revenue from operations was just Rs. 43 crore, up by a paltry
Rs. 1 crore, over 2014. The company’s loss, however, had more than doubled to Rs. 300
crore as of 31 March 2015, compared to Rs. 180 crore in March 2014. During this period,
AskMe spent about Rs. 68 crore in advertising and promotional expenses, up more than
four times.
Then again, in the months of October and November, the festive season in India, the
company was burning close to $10 million every month. All of this, when the top
management knew that the party wasn’t going to last for long. Events reached a head,
sometime in January 2016, when Astro told the top management that it had had enough.
The team had failed to raise any money. It had failed to even be reasonably profitable. It
didn’t look like AskMe would make money anytime soon. So, let’s pack up. It is time to go
home.
Except Sanjiv persisted and convinced his Board to hang on. Just for a few months more.
They agreed but with a deadline — 31 July would be the last day.
“All hell broke loose when the salary got delayed by four days”
In February, the mood inside AskMe was glum. Despite the overt display of optimism to
the press. First, AskMe laid off more than 600 people in just one month. Second, the
company stopped spending, on anything, other than salaries. There was no money in the
bank and Astro had made it amply clear that it will only wire money for the salaries, and
nothing more. As work slowed down and morale dropped, the entire organisation kept
hoping for a miracle. Sometime in the last week of May, Sanjiv flew to Malaysia. To meet
Augustus Ralph Marshall, the non-executive deputy chairman of Astro Malaysia
Holdings. He had a simple offer. ‘How about I buy you out?’

His logic: Anyway, you’ve decided to shut shop. Take care of the pending liabilities and
salaries and allow me to buy you out. At a mutually agreeable valuation. I have a whole
host of investors lined up, who are willing to invest in Getit, post the buyout.
The Ken could not independently establish what transpired in the meeting. There are
conflicting stories. One, Astro didn’t take kindly to Sanjiv’s offer. Two, Astro said okay,
come back with a firm plan and we will consider. What’s amply clear though, is what
happened the moment Sanjiv got back to India.
Usually, Astro credits money by the fourth of every month and employee salaries are paid
by the seventh. In June, there was no money in the bank on the fourth. Astro had missed
the tranche. Sanjiv was livid. When employees didn’t get any salary on the seventh and
started questioning, the top management asked them to write to Astro officials directly.
Emails. On Facebook. Twitter. Motto: complain and embarrass them. Teach them a good
lesson. (The tranche finally came in on the eighth of the month and was credited to
employees by the eleventh.)
In hindsight, several former AskMe officials believe it wasn’t the best strategy but then
they had to resign to the fact, that that’s Sanjiv. “If somebody arm twists him, he likes to
arm twist them back,” said one.
But not always to the best outcome. The fallout of the public backlash was swift. All Astro
representatives on the Board quit, starting the first week of June. The management team
at AskMe stepped up the tempo. It started issuing statements in the media. Like this one:
“Astro which owns 99% of Askme through various shell companies is trying to flee the
country without paying employees and vendors and statutory authorities in Askme and
other companies. They are already chargesheeted for fraud and arm twisting by CBI and
ED in the 2G case. They have been harassing and intimidating and threatening top
employees to aid in their illegal acts which they have resisted and resigned.
Employees have given an MBO offer to save the company and various new options which
Astro is trying to block and place totally unreasonable demands from the management
and their new backers. We request Indian authorities to ask Astro to pay their dues as per
written commitments and let the MBO happen for the future of the company”
And then early in August, AskMe asked all its vendors to write directly to Astro for money.

Hello Astro...
And the email continues, with a list of email IDs and numbers of the top officials at Astro;
most of them in Malaysia. Needless to say, the issue is a mess.

We don't need no Astro slavery
Soupcon of legal threat and emotional drama

Earlier this month, Sanjiv filed a case against the Board of Getit Infoservices at the
Company Law Tribunal in New Delhi, seeking a stay on the appointment of the two new
directors, Vats and Mishra. The Ken has a copy of the court order, where the tribunal
refused the petition. To quote from it:
“…we are unable to accept the same because the petitioner herein has only 0.06%
shareholding and the shareholders having 99% shareholding in the company cannot be
allowed to overawe at the instance of the petitioner. Moreover, the day to day affairs of
the company cannot be brought to a standstill…”
When The Ken reached out to Sanjiv’s lawyer Vipul Ganda, he said, “Sanjiv Gupta was
forced to resign and we appealed it. The Company Law Tribunal refused the appeal. Now
the board has two Astro nominees. Yes, it is not the best scenario. The dispensation of
salary should be of prime importance. There are several blue-collared workers who need
their pay to run their households.” The court has fixed a date of 17 October for the next
hearing on the case.

During its reporting, The Ken was made privy to one potential reason why AskMe, despite
its woeful past and grim future, might still hold a lot of value to potential acquirers. A
senior source within the company said AskMe had service tax credits amounting to over
Rs. 1,500 crore. If true, this would mean any acquirer could use those to offset its own
future service tax payments.
However, The Ken was unable to independently verify this claim based on our scrutiny of
AskMe’s publicly available financial filings, which last represented the year ending March
2015.
As things stand today, the mood inside AskMe is glum but foolishly hopeful. While almost
all in the top management have resigned and almost no one is reachable, those lower
down the pecking order are holding on to their jobs. Some hope that the company can be
started again, others believe that if they give up and leave they won’t get paid.
One employee said that she had a few medical expenses coming up for which she needed
to be officially on AskMe’s rolls. “I am not sure if the premiums have been paid. If they
haven’t, these expenses will be prohibitive. I can’t quit until I am done with my
procedure,” she said. She refused to come on record as she didn’t want to invite trouble.
“I still believe the company could run again. Even the tribunal ordered that the company
function as normal but the emails sent by management asked us to ‘work from home’.
Even if I refused to follow the email, the offices are locked,” said another, one of the few
remaining management-level executives. He, too, refused to speak on record.
And then there are some employees who are leaning towards pressuring Astro by emailing
suicide threats. Yes. This mess is far from over.

Inspection out, accreditation in for India’s technical
institutes
the-ken.com/story/inspection-out-accreditation-in-for-indias-technical-institutes
June 3, 2020
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For India’s engineering colleges, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is
a lot like the Eye of Sauron—an all-seeing, all-powerful eye in the sky. It is the statutory
body governing India’s technical institutes; nothing happens in the country’s technical
education space without the AICTE’s monitoring and approval.
On the face of it, this is great. The AICTE oversees institutions like management schools,
as well as engineering and pharmacy colleges. Of course, these need careful monitoring.
Until one realises just how pedantic the AICTE can be.
From starting a college to adding a course to moving to a co-education system or simply

admitting more students, you need the AICTE’s green light for everything. And this
requires a team from the body to physically visit and manually inspect institutes.
In better times, these visits could take up to a month from the date a college applies for
approval. Actual approval takes even longer. But in the midst of a pandemic that has
crippled travel and made physical verification a nightmare, the AICTE finally blinked.
In May, it decided to do away with physical inspections altogether. Instead, approval

would largely rely on self-disclosure by institutes, with an online inspection replacing
physical scrutiny. Anil D Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the AICTE, hailed the move as a
milestone. This would speed up the approval process and help avoid complaints of
corrupt inspection teams that have troubled the physical inspection process, he claimed.
Institutes, too, welcomed the move. Akshay Munjal, director of Gurugram-based BML
Munjal University, termed the AICTE’s previous approach as “outdated”.
The AICTE isn’t just abdicating its role as gatekeeper, though. Even before it decided to
step back from physical verifications, it was grooming its replacement—accreditation. In
September 2019, it decreed that it would not extend its approval for technical institutes
that do not have all their courses certified by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA)
by 2022.
Unlike the AICTE, which is more focussed on quantitative measures like availability of
infrastructure, faculty, and financials, the NBA’s focus is qualitative, accrediting
individual programmes instead. The shift from AICTE to NBA is something India’s higher
education space has needed for years, plagued, as it is, by a lack of quality rather than
quantity. India has no dearth of technical institutes.
the-ken.com-Inspection out accreditation in for Indias technical institutes 1/2 436

In fact, the AICTE has previously enforced a freeze on approvals for new engineering and
pharmacy colleges because there were more seats than students.
accredit 'em all
Physical verification is passé for AICTE. Instead, it's hoping

accreditation will control the quality of the 10,000-plus institutes
it oversees
Shreedhar Manek, 3 Jun 2020
The AICTE is doing away with physical inspection for approval of technical institutions,
instead putting emphasis on accreditation
This highlights a shift from quantitative to qualitative assessment—in line with global
standards—but Indian colleges are unfamiliar with the accreditation process
While over 10,000 institutes are AICTE-approved, the NBA, which accredits technical
courses, has only accredited 2,075 courses
As AICTE looks to enforce accreditation-compliance by 2022, it has tapped some IITs

to create a parallel accreditation body as well
the-ken.com-Inspection out accreditation in for Indias technical institutes 2/2 437

Introducing Aishwarya
the-ken.com/blog/introducing-aishwarya
February 24, 2021
When we write stories at The Ken, there’s always one person we keep in mind. You, the
reader.
But not all stories at The Ken are limited to being read, are they? Our stories are also
listened to (via our podcast) and observed and studied via our diverse infographics and
visuals.
So, how do we cater to you, also the observer?
The answer is focussed, visual storytelling through our design team at The Ken. The team,
which started as a one-woman-show in 2018, has grown to three members this week.
All thanks to Aishwarya Viswanathan, who joins us as a visual designer.
the-ken.com-Introducing Aishwarya 1/2 438

Aishwarya, who holds a masters degree in Aesthetics and Visual Cultures from the Srishti
Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru, studied painting in undergrad to
pursue “something creative.” As a student, that passion—which included a love for the
theory of art—led to appreciation for research, Aishwarya recalls. After completing her
degree, she spent two years working on research fellowships and, in her own words,
“battling academic imposter syndrome.”
What’s apparent is that Aishwarya deeply appreciates both art and data. And she aims to
blend them to tell compelling visual stories at The Ken.
Outside of work and art, Aishwarya says she is deeply interested in the social and political
implications of digital technology and emerging visual cultures. When not peering into
books, you can find her working out or going down the YouTube rabbit hole.
Aishwarya can be reached for visual story ideas, congratulations and appreciation posts
via first name at the-ken.com.
Lead image credit: cottonbro/Pexels
Aishwarya Viswanathan
Visual Designer
the-ken.com-Introducing Aishwarya 2/2 439

Introducing Quikr week
the-ken.com/story/introducing-quikr-week
January 16, 2017
This is part of our Quikr Week Series. See All Articles
“Quikr, Quikr on the wall, are you the fairest unicorn of them all”?
If the startup ecosystem were to be seen as a caste system (and some would say that it
often is), the very apex of this pyramid would be populated by an exalted set of companies
known as ‘unicorns’—companies that have been valued at over a billion dollars.
While there have been reams of newsprint expended discussing the various aspects of
Indian unicorns like Flipkart, Ola and Paytm, there is one among this rarified set that has
largely escaped scrutiny.
Say hello to Quikr.
Founded by Pranay Chulet and Jiby Thomas in 2008, Quikr is an Indian classifieds
advertising platform that is said to be valued at $1.3 billion.
A Craigslist for India

According to Chulet, the original inspiration for Quikr came from Craigslist, the leading
classifieds listings portals in the US. “Before I started Quikr, I was working in the internet
sector in the US. Quikr is modelled on Craigslist. Sitting in India, I could rent out my
apartment in New York. It made complete sense to have something like this in India.”
Prima facie, it did make ‘complete sense’.
After all, we are talking about a market of over a billion people collectively who hitherto
had to rely on expensive newspaper classified advertisements to sell their personal effects,
buy second-hand goods and find jobs or a life partner. Beyond individuals, there were
the-ken.com-Introducing Quikr week 1/4 440

hundreds of thousands of small enterprises that faced similar problems marketing their
wares and connecting with consumers.
There were already the likes of Justdial that were making slow but steady progress
weaning Indians away from newspaper classifieds. But these were either offline (relying
on the printed ‘yellow pages’ types of media) or dependent on phone calls. In short, the
market was still fragmented and unorganised.
What if Quikr could emulate Craigslist and create an internet-powered platform that
could provide Indians with a single portal for their buying and selling needs? Surely that
was a large market opportunity, and one that is worth backing.
And back investors did.
Hitherto, Quikr has raised nearly $350 million in funding from a clutch of investors
including Tiger Global Management, Warburg Pincus, Norwest Venture Partners and AB
Kinnevik. Curiously, this list of investors also includes Bennett Coleman & Co (The Times
Group), India’s leading media conglomerate, which has invested Rs 130 crore in the
company. This can be interpreted either as a bet on the future of local search commerce in
general or as a hedge against declining newspaper classified revenues.
So what has Quikr managed to achieve with this funding?
Premortem of a unicorn
According to a recent report by Kinnevik, one of Quikr’s investors, “Quikr is used by over
30 million unique users a month and the platform generated 9.1 million responses in
September 2016. Quikr is present in 1,000 cities in India. It employs around 1,500
employees.”
While these numbers do sound impressive, the proof of the pudding lies elsewhere.

Craigslist, Quikr’s ‘inspiration’, is quite simply the ‘most profitable classified site in the
world’, projected to do almost $700 million in revenue in 2016—up a staggering 75% over
its estimated 2015 revenue according to a report by the AIM Group. What’s more, the
company has grown to this scale and at this pace while being profitable throughout its life
with net profit estimated to have crossed $100 million.
On the other hand, the numbers for Quikr don’t make for stellar reading. As our recent
#ByTheNumbers post on Quikr showed. For the financial year ending March 2016,
operational revenue touched a mere $6 million—not even 1% of Craigslist—while losses
were at a steep $78 million.
While the comparison with Craigslist itself might be odious, these numbers are important
for two reasons.
Firstly, ‘the X for India’ model, where X is an iconic US startup, sounds good on paper but
if you dig deeper, it often reveals an ugly core beyond the beautiful facade. For instance,
trying to emulate Craigslist is far tougher than it seems because Craigslist is not merely a
platform or a business, it is a community—an ecosystem in itself populated by founders
and denizens with a missionary zeal. You can copy the product but you can’t copy the soul.
Secondly, India is a unique beast and not comparable to the US in many aspects. Given
that the two markets are so different in terms of the imperatives and expectations of its
denizens, it is, at times, impossible to replicate business models from one geo to another.
For instance, out of Quikr’s $6 million operational revenue, a majority—$3.5 million—was
generated through advertising publicity. How much does Craigslist make from
advertisements? Zero. Furthermore, to generate $3.5 million in advertising revenue,
Quikr had to spend $58 million in promotional advertising for itself. So basically to earn
one dollar in advertising revenue, the company had to spend more than sixteen dollars
itself. How much does Craigslist spend on advertising? Zero.
Given these numbers, Quikr’s apparent valuation of $1.3 billion seems unduly optimistic
at best and egregious at worst. Justdial, a public listed Indian classifieds company, and a
putative competitor of Quikr, for instance, had a top-line of $100 million for FY 15-16 and
a bottom-line of $22 million. Yet its current market cap is not even $400 million—less
than a third of Quikr’s own lofty valuation, despite being much bigger and more
profitable.
So is it ‘game over’ for Quikr?
Not quite.
While the past numbers for Quikr might not make for pleasant reading, it would be
uncharitable to write the company off just yet.
For one thing, Quikr still has significant ballast in its tank, both in terms of funding
already received as well as in the form of investors who are likely to continue to back
Quikr for the foreseeable future. It also has significant brand value and user traffic.

The company is attempting to move beyond just listings and become a single-window
portal for services and used goods by facilitating payments and logistics—a one-stop shop
that will allow Quikr to monetise its traffic more deeply and move beyond depending on
advertisements as a revenue channel. But this move is not unique—competitors such as
Justdial are also attempting to do likewise.
More crucially, Quikr is trying to change the game of online classifieds in India. After
probably realising that a horizontal strategy a la Craigslist is not going to work here, the
company has recently switched to a vertical focus.
Quikr has reorganised itself along four key business segments beyond consumer-to-
consumer transactions. These verticals are real estate, automobiles, jobs and services. The
company has leveraged its funding war chest to opportunistically and strategically make
acquisitions in these sectors to get a leg up. Some acquisitions are bolt-on while others
will serve as an anchor beachhead that it can use as a base to grow aggressively on.
Will these moves work?
Will Quikr be able to fend off the well-funded competitors in each of these verticals and
establish itself as a leader across domains?
Will Quikr establish a new template for online classifieds in India, and in the process
justify the faith of its investors?
To know the answers to these questions, join us for ‘Quikr Week’—a full week of stories
dedicated to this single company. For the rest of this week, The Ken will bring you four
stories, each covering a single key vertical that Quikr is playing in. We will dive deep into
these verticals and attempt to piece together a single coherent narrative that will hopefully
help you make sense of Quikr and its prospects.

Investor-founder feud takes the wind out of
TravelTriangle’s sails
the-ken.com/story/traveltriangle-investors-versus-founders
June 18, 2020
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On 5 May 2020, employees of holiday marketplace TravelTriangle received a bolt from
the blue. An email from chief operating officer (COO) Sanjeev Misra informed them that
co-founder Sankalp Agarwal was no longer chief executive officer (CEO). Another co-
founder—chief technology officer (CTO) Prabhat Gupta—was also relieved of his duties by
the board of directors. Misra would take charge as interim CEO.
In a LinkedIn post nearly a month later, Gupta wrote that things ended “on a bitter note”.
Agarwal has maintained a studied silence. He did not respond to any of The Ken’s calls or
messages.
This was only the latest twist for IIT alumni Agarwal and Gupta, who founded the
company in 2011 along with Sanchit Garg, another IIT graduate. The premise of
TravelTriangle is simple—it aggregates the largely-offline holiday packages industry,
while allowing vacationers to customise these otherwise rigid offerings. Garg has not
actively been involved in running the company since August 2018.
Take two
Co-founder Sanchit Garg left the company in August 2018 for personal reasons and now
runs his own startup in the US—Inner Fit, which focuses on emotional intelligence
Several travel industry executives The Ken spoke to said that TravelTriangle is a leader in
the online holiday packages segment. It works with more than 1,000 agents, and claims to
have over eight million monthly users and $100 million in GMV for 2019. Its revenue for
the year ended March 2019 stood at Rs 34.8 crore ($4.5 million), a 54.6% rise from the
previous year. Despite this, its losses widened. TravelTriangle saw a Rs 48.7 crore
($6.3million) loss for the year ended March 2019, a 21.7% increase from the previous
year.
Along the way, it raised over $47 million, across several rounds, from marquee investors
such as SAIF Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), and The Fundamentum
Partnership, among others.
This funding, though, is what has led to the imbroglio the company currently finds itself
in. A standoff between a clutch of powerful investors and founders who diluted
themselves to the point of vulnerability. In October 2019, Travel Triangle raised a $13
million series D round, with the investors’ stake in the company going up from 66.6% to
69%.
the-ken.com-Investor-founder feud takes the wind out of TravelTriangles sails 1/2 444
Mere months later, in December 2019, the company’s investor directors—from SAIF
Partners, BVP, and Fundamentum (together, these three funds hold a 53.2% stake in
TravelTriangle)—sought to convene a board meeting.
On the rocks
TravelTriangle CEO Sankalp Agarwal has been fired twice and

reinstated twice in the last six months as the company's
investors try to force him out. Meanwhile, TravelTriangle has fired
over 80% of its staff
Vandana, 18 Jun 2020
The investors weren’t happy with the founders’ fundraising and the company’s Rs 5
crore per month cash burn
The founders alleged that investors tried to secretly sell the company to MakeMyTrip
The pandemic brought everything to a head, forcing layoffs by the hundreds
Now, even as TravelTriangle tries to course-correct, the CEO and the investors are
locked in a pitched battle
the-ken.com-Investor-founder feud takes the wind out of TravelTriangles sails 2/2 445
IPRS, copyrights, and a $181-million music industry out
of tune
the-ken.com/story/iprs-copyrights-and-a-181-million-music-industry-out-of-tune
December 1, 2020
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Covid has very nearly wiped out the live performance business. Concerts, stand up
shows, plays—anything that had the potential to turn into a super spreader event—
became a giant no-no. So you can imagine the uproar when, on top of lost business,
musicians and organisers were asked in July to pay a licence fee of Rs 20,000 ($270) for
live streaming performances.
Tickets for online shows were already a tough sell, despite being priced one-fourth the
usual cost of an on-ground event. Paying tariffs was out of the question; the order was
withdrawn .
The organisation levying the fee was the Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS),
founded in 1969. The fee was meant for live performances that were free and ad-
supported, and ticketed but non-sponsored. For events involving sponsors, the fee rose
to Rs 60,000 ($800) and for events spanning more than two hours, it could go up to as
much as Rs 1 lakh ($1,350).
If you were a singer, lyricist, composer, music label or an event organiser registered with
the IPRS, you had to pay. “For online events, we have now had consultations with
various industry bodies ( EEMA and others) and will release the new tariff soon. They
will be lower and follow global norms,” Rakesh Nigam, chief executive officer of IPRS,
tells The Ken over the phone.
the-ken.com-IPRS copyrights and a 181-million music industry out of tune 1/3 446
The IPRS is both responsible for collecting and distributing royalties and licences on
behalf of its members and issuing licences to anyone wishing to perform music from its
database. It currently has over 10 million songs. For the year ended March 2020, it
collected nearly Rs 170 crore ($23 million) in royalties .
At present, the IPRS—which was re-registered as a copyrights society in 2017—has

around 6,000 members under its wing, says Nigam. Lyricists and composers, numbering
around 4,000, comprise a major chunk of its members.
The society also ends up having to act as a referee sometimes, mediating between the
artistes and music labels. In November 2019, for instance, the Mumbai Police registered
an FIR—based on IPRS’ complaint —against one of Hindi cinema’s biggest production
houses, Yashraj Films (parent company of Yashraj Music) and others.
AR Rahman
Artistes
audio streaming
Believe India
Bollywood
Copyright Law
Copyright Law 2012 Amendment
Copyrights
Film Music
Gaana
Independent artistes
Indian Performing Right Society
IPRS
JioSaavn
Kayne West
Lyricists
Music
Music Composers
music labels
Rights
royalties
SaReGaMa
songs
Spotify
Streaming
T-Series
Taylor Swift
Universal Music
AUTHOR
Shruti Venkatesh
Based in Mumbai, Shruti covers ecommerce and internet for The Ken. In her previous
stints with Forbes India and Outlook Business, she has also covered beats like FMCG,
retail, stock market and advertising. When not chasing stories, she loves spending her
time binge-watching, shopping and taking a leisurely stroll along the sea-facing
promenade at Marine Drive.
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IRCTC, Payments companies and OTAs : Five
takeaways
the-ken.com/blog/irctc-payments-banks-and-otas-five-takeaways
June 7, 2019
India’s largest e-commerce company isn’t Flipkart, Amazon or MakeMyTrip. It’s Indian
Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a partner to the Indian Railways
which handles its online ticketing operations.
A few months back, we wrote a story about how the e-commerce market in India is much
smaller than what people think. Of the 500+ million people who have an internet
connection in India, only 50 million shop online.
However, train tickets are a different story. Today, 66% of it is booked online. And IRCTC
sells 284 million tickets a year.
This makes IRCTC a lucrative partner for anybody who wants to gain access to newer
consumers. For payment companies, OTAs and everyone else, if these millions of users
are the destination, IRCTC is the bridge to help them get there.
For a long time, IRCTC was viewed as a gentle, pliant giant. Not anymore. Our story is
about the relationship between IRCTC and its partners, and the delicate love-hate
relationship they have. At one level, they need each other. At another, each is wary of the
other. One has all the users. The other all the convenience. How will it pan out?
Arundhati’s story is nearly 3000 words long, has some amazing infographics, and is based
on multiple interviews with executives in payment companies, OTAs and officials at
IRCTC itself. It’s behind a paywall, so you’ll need to subscribe to read it.
Here are the top five takeaways from the story.
IRCTC didn’t really need the OTAs.
the-ken.com-IRCTC Payments companies and OTAs Five takeaways 1/3 449

“We don’t need them as much as they need us,” said a senior IRCTC executive rather
bluntly, over the phone, talking about the OTAs and the payment apps. It’s a reality that’s
agreed on both sides.
Right now, OTAs such as MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, ixigo, GoIbibo, RailYatri and payment
apps such as Paytm*, PhonePe, and most recently, Google Pay (and soon, Amazon Pay)
allow their users to make train bookings.
All put together, for the year ending March 2018, they accounted for around 10% of the
tickets sold. More importantly, back in 2016, this share was less than 1%. In comparison,
over 75% of all online booking transactions take place on IRCTC’s own website and app.
But that changed.
Demonetisation was the straw that broke IRCTC’s back

In 2016—after demonetisation, when the government banned 86% of India’s currency—
the government, in its enthusiasm to promote digital transactions, also ruled that IRCTC
could no longer levy a service charge from users. This diktat burnt a Rs 500-crore ($72.1
million) hole in IRCTC’s pocket and left it desperately in search of other revenue streams.
This not just eliminated around 14% of IRCTC’s revenue. It halved the growth rate in
profits as well. As a result, IRCTC was forced to improvise, search for new revenue
streams, and squeeze its current partners more.
IRCTC then changed the pricing from fixed…to variable

Up till 2018, if companies wanted to have train bookings as a category in their app
alongside recharges, movie tickets etc, they had to pay a one-time fee of about Rs 20 lakh
($28,887) and an annual maintenance fee of Rs 10 lakh.
That changed in 2018. IRCTC introduced variable pricing and made companies pay a
commission on every ticket sold. For a company selling 5,000 tickets a day, this increases
the annual cost by 24x on a per ticket basis, besides the one-time fee. If companies sold
more tickets, they had to pay more, increasing their costs.
OTAs had to adjust to IRCTC’s onerous terms

Since about 800,000 train tickets are booked online daily, OTAs are forced to agree to
IRCTC’s terms. Here are some of them:
1. If a company wishes to offer cashback to users, they need to pay Rs 15 per ticket sale
to IRCTC.
2. If a company wishes to cross-sell, this goes up to Rs. 25 per ticket sale.
3. If payment companies want to be shown under wallets, they need to pay a fee of Rs
20 lakh.
4. If they want to be shown under UPI, they need to pay another Rs 50 lakh.
At last count, there are about 65 partners integrated on IRCTC’s payment page.

OTAs are losing money hand over fist
The reasons aren’t necessarily due to the terms of the contract. There are product reasons
as well.
For instance, IRCTC forces users to login to make a purchase. This leads to nearly a third
of transactions to fail. Failed transactions mean support costs go up. And that cuts profit
margins.
“Compared to other partners, it is at least more than 2x of other categories,” said a

payment app executive.
Despite this, the love-hate relationship continues. For now.
You can read our story here.

Is the angel tax cure worse than the disease?
the-ken.com/story/is-the-angel-tax-cure-worse-than-the-disease
February 21, 2019
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Are you a founder of or an investor in an Indian startup?
If so, have you heard of the “Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade”?
If not, you better familiarise yourself with it.
Why so?
Quite simply, your continued existence as a startup is no longer dependent on how good
your product is or how big your market is. Instead, it depends on whether the Department
for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, or DPIIT for short, deigns to allow it.
Known earlier as the DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), the DPIIT is
a governmental body housed under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry with a
mandate to “look into all matters related to promotion of internal trade, including retail
trade, welfare of traders and their employees, facilitating ease of doing business and…
startups”.
If the word “startups” seems like an afterthought in this list, it is probably not a
coincidence. The fact of the matter is that despite all the recent lip service that
government officials deliver about startups, history will tell you that the success of Indian
startups has little to do with the government. If anything, one could actually say that
Indian startups succeeded despite the government rather than because of it. Take Flipkart
for instance—the company had to shift domicile to Singapore at an enormous cost to
comply with the government’s FDI regulations. Or take Ola’s battles with governmental
bodies over ride-sharing laws.
the-ken.com-Is the angel tax cure worse than the disease 1/2 452
India’s IT industry created global powerhouses like Infosys, TCS and Wipro only because
Indian governments did not interfere with them when they were startups.
While the relationship between Indian startups and the government has historically been
largely passive, it was nevertheless one about which neither party had any problems. The
government was okay with letting startups do their own thing as long as there were no
bad optics that it had to overcome for sacred cows such as “protecting the small trader”.
For their part, Indian startups were okay working around these regulations as and when
they encountered them, accepting them as part and parcel of the cost of doing business in
India.
But all that changed in 2012, when a seemingly obscure tax code called Section 56(2)(viib)
was introduced. The intent of this provision was to curb tax fraud involving financial
transactions wherein shares of a company were purchased at premiums that exceeded
their deemed fair market value and the corpus subsequently utilised for surreptitious
purposes and tax avoidance.
This clause subsequently gained infamy as the “angel tax” when startups were targeted by
the tax department. Startups were asked to treat share premiums deemed in excess of
their fair market value as “income from other sources” and taxable at 30% on par with
corporate taxes.
the-ken.com-Is the angel tax cure worse than the disease 2/2 453
Isro’s heaviest rocket is ready but is it enough for the
load that lies ahead?
the-ken.com/story/isro-heaviest-rocket
June 5, 2017
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At the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, India’s sole spaceport in Sriharikota, a hulking metal
form looms over the Second Launch Pad. Isro’s newest rocket, the Geosynchronous
Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark III, is ready to take to the skies this evening.
Isro officials will be keeping their fingers crossed. The performance of the rocket’s
cryogenic stage, running on liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, will be of particular
concern. Very much on their minds will be the memory of what happened when the Mark
III’s older sibling, the GSLV, flew with the first domestically made cryogenic stage in
2010. The cryogenic stage malfunctioned, and the flight ended in failure.
The Mark III uses a very different cryogenic stage than the one on the GSLV, simpler in
design and two and a half times more powerful than the latter. So far, this stage and its
engine have only been tested on the ground.
A giant leap
A successful flight will be a momentous step forward for the space agency. For one thing,
it will now be able to launch communication satellites that were being launched abroad at
a considerable cost
In an experimental mission in December 2014, the performance of Mark III’s other stages
—a large liquid propellant core stage flanked by two huge solid boosters that are among
the largest in the world—were tested in flight. On that occasion, a dummy cryogenic stage
was used.
the-ken.com-Isros heaviest rocket is ready but is it enough for the load that lies ahead 1/3 454
Today will see the rocket’s first developmental flight, with all its stages operational.
Onboard is a 3.1-tonne communication satellite, GSAT-19, the heaviest the space agency
has attempted to launch from within the country.
A successful flight will be a momentous step forward for the space agency. For one thing,
it will now be able to launch communication satellites that were being launched abroad at
a considerable cost. In the longer term, the Mark III opens the door for a transition to
much more powerful rockets that Isro intends to build. These rockets can carry heavier
spacecraft and will allow India to contemplate challenging missions in space exploration
and human spaceflight. But looking at the evolving space requirements, the Mark III may
soon require a major markup.
The step up
Even after the GSLV first flew in 2001, initially with a Russian cryogenic stage and then
with an Indian-made equivalent, a dozen of Isro’s communication and meteorological
(met) satellites have been launched on Europe’s Ariane rockets. These satellites need to
ultimately reach a specific orbit about 36,000km above the equator, the geostationary
orbit.
Just eight such satellites have thus far successfully gone on the GSLV.
The reason is simple. As the graph indicates, the GSLV’s heft has been inadequate for
several of the satellites Isro needed to send to space.
Bellatrix Aerospace
Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle
GSLV
GSLV Mark III
heaviest rocket
Isro
Mark III
It’s Operation Diplomacy for India as Covid vaccine
preparedness hots up
the-ken.com/story/operation-diplomacy-india-covid-vaccine-preparedness
June 12, 2020
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Not since the first successful polio vaccine in 1955 has the world awaited a vaccine with so
much hope as it is doing for Covid-19. The virus, Sars-Cov2, and the candidate vaccines
are charging ahead at a speed that’s unparalleled.
As of 11 June, more than 7.25 million people were infected by the virus globally. And as
per the World Health Organization’s (WHO) updated list of potential vaccines, there are
10 candidates in clinical development, 123 in preclinical evaluation.
The race for a vaccine is intensifying; countries are betting not just financial but immense
political capital on an antidote to the virus. Even with a low number of tests at 3,797 per
million, India ranks fourth in the number of cases globally. It may end up with the most
severe economic and public health burdens before the pandemic peters out. However,
there’s one front where India can do better than many countries—vaccines.
India has a chance to leverage its local private vaccine manufacturing experience and its
public immunisation infrastructure to plan for Covid vaccines, whenever they are ready
for use. So far, five experimental vaccines from China, four from the United States, and
one from the UK are under clinical testing. Most infectious disease experts believe it could
take anywhere between 12-18 months before a vaccine enters the market.
Yet some groups are racing to produce a first batch by late 2020 or early 2021. US
President Donald Trump has named his accelerated vaccine program “Operation Warp
Speed” for a reason. For both China and the US, an effective Covid vaccine is about
political bragging rights as much as it is about a quicker path to economic recovery.
Incidentally, Indian vaccine manufacturers are placed squarely in the middle of this
political crossfire. They support 70% of the supply chain of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance,
which vaccinates 49% of children globally.
“India is reasonably well-placed [to supply]. Whichever vaccine is approved, it will have to
go through Indian manufacturers,” says a senior executive of an Indian vaccine company
who doesn’t want his company to be identified in any way. “People generally still don’t
trust Chinese vaccines due to quality issues in the past… We are talking a few billion doses
for Covid; no one company can make that. UK drug company AstraZeneca has committed
one billion doses [through 2021], but it doesn’t say it has made one billion doses in the
past.” Even at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), another vaccine giant in the race, all its vaccine
capacity put together would make only one billion doses, he says.
the-ken.com-Its Operation Diplomacy for India as Covid vaccine preparedness hots up 1/2 457
The Waiting Game
Aid agencies like Gavi and WHO have launched pre-booking for
the Covid vaccine. As heads of states continue to bet political
capital on the first few vaccines, India must gear up for inter- and
intra-country politicking and planning
Seema Singh, 12 Jun 2020
A Covid vaccine may come in six months or 18. But whenever the first batch arrives,
India must get a portion of that
It will depend not on how much money India has, but on India’s diplomacy and
negotiations inside multilateral agencies
India has voices within WHO, GAVI, Cepi. Indian manufacturers will inevitably be called
for adding global capacity
Will India pull multiple levers at its command to mount a great vaccine response? At
least meetings have begun in Delhi
the-ken.com-Its Operation Diplomacy for India as Covid vaccine preparedness hots up 2/2 458
Journey to the centre of EaseMyTrip
the-ken.com/story/journey-to-the-centre-of-easemytrip
January 25, 2019
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There’s MakeMyTrip, the big daddy of India’s travel space. Founded nearly two decades
ago, it’s the destination for hundreds of millions in venture funding, listed on the
NASDAQ, and bringing in over $600 million in revenue annually.
And then there’s EaseMyTrip, in many ways a study in contrasts. Formally registered in
2008 by two brothers, Nishant Pitti and Rikant Pitti, it declared annual revenues of over
Rs 1900 crore ($267.5 million) in March 2017 without a Rupee in venture funding. The
brothers were just 23 and 21, respectively, when they started out in 2008.
On January 16, India’s largest business newspaper, The Economic Times* reported, citing
“people briefed on the matter”, that EaseMyTrip was planning to raise Rs 1,500 crore
($211 million) through an IPO, valuing the young company at between Rs 6,000-7,500
crore ($845 million-$1.05 billion). If successful, EaseMyTrip would be the first company
in India’s booming online travel sector to list domestically, said the article. Even though
EaseMyTrip’s revenues were just about a quarter of MakeMyTrip’s, the article pointed
out, it was profitable.
It was a remarkable story of growth, judging from the company’s past growth.
the-ken.com-Journey to the centre of EaseMyTrip 1/4 459

But just a few days later, EaseMyTrip filed its annual financials for the year that ended
March 2018. Its revenue dropped over 93% over the preceding year, and profits, 21%.

But that wasn’t all. Along with its financial results for the year that ended March 2018, it
also restated the previous year’s revenue. Which now dropped from Rs 1,904 crore ($268
million) to Rs 71 crore ($10 million).

Based on its revised revenue numbers, EaseMyTrip isn’t 25% of MakeMyTrip’s size by
revenue, as The Economic Times article pointed out, but between 2-3%. For FY17,
MakeMyTrip reported revenues of $447.61 million.
If the Pitti brothers were worried, they probably didn’t show it. Because they would have
been preparing for the 25 January launch of the big-budget period epic, “Manikarnika”, a
movie based on the life of one of the leaders of the Indian rebellion of 1857, Rani
Lakshmibai.
Which was co-produced by EaseMyTrip.
Don’t be surprised. This wasn’t the first movie produced by the company, but the seventh.
A contrarian travel conundrum

India’s travel space is intensely competitive, forcing even savvy and well-funded
companies like Ibibo and MakeMyTrip to call a truce and merge in 2016, rather than keep
bleeding and fighting.
How then did a young company like EaseMyTrip, with no domain experience in travel, no
funding, and no significant marketing spends end up here?

Juices for PMS, patches for cramps: Period care gets
padded up
the-ken.com/story/period-care
May 25, 2019
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There are 336 million menstruating women in India, and 36% use disposable sanitary
napkins, according to Menstrual Hygiene Alliance of India (MHAI). That’s 121 million
women.
It’s no surprise then that the menstrual products market is growing. And fast.
Valued at $340 million by market research provider Euromonitor in 2017, the sanitary
products market in India is predicted to grow to $522 million by next year. It is
dominated by international FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies such as
Procter & Gamble’s Whisper and Johnson & Johnson’s Stayfree, which, according to
Euromonitor, have a retail market share of 50.4% and 24%, respectively. Their products
are priced low to ensure maximum reach, especially in a country like India.
But not everyone is price-sensitive. Those who can afford it tend to seek quality
alternatives. As in any industry.
So, despite the FMCG dominance in sanitary products, there’s been a flurry of menstrual
products focused on health and comfort. From pain-relief patches to PMS-friendly juices
to anti-rash creams to ‘naturally’ made pads, the Indian sanitary products market has, in
the past few years, grown to accommodate more than just a basic need. Much like
skincare, haircare, or even dental care, period care is a growing option available online.
And it’s catering to women who’d be happy to spend that extra buck for a comfortable
period.
the-ken.com-Juices for PMS patches for cramps Period care gets padded up 1/2 463
“It is a convenience-conscious market. There is a large audience that is not happy with
their brands. They want value for money, but they want better products,” says Deep Bajaj,
founder of Sirona, a Delhi-based online hygiene products company which offers tampons,
cups and other products.
“It’s how [cab aggregator] Uber bettered the market from [competition] Meru. Now, even
if it costs a little more, you are willing to take an Uber for the convenience,” he adds.
This shift is particularly interesting in the sanitary products space for it’s one marred with
societal shame. Even today, sanitary pads are often wrapped in their trademark black
plastic bags—to be used but not seen. Over the past few years though, India has seen its
cultural mainstream, Bollywood, take on the subject with films like Pad Man and Phullu.
Just a few months ago, the documentary Period. End of Sentence., which spoke about
India’s menstrual taboos, won an Academy Award.
"It’s time we stopped whispering about periods"
Gauri Singhal, Founder, Floh
“About three decades ago, Whisper was the first brand to show a sanitary pad and
mention the word ‘periods’, in our advertising.
the-ken.com-Juices for PMS patches for cramps Period care gets padded up 2/2 464
Karnataka’s “WhatsApp-first” assembly elections
the-ken.com/story/karnataka-whatsapp
April 25, 2018
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It’s 8 PM in Malleswaram, the local home to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP)
headquarters in Bengaluru. At a popular coffee shop, barely 100 metres from the
headquarters, battle-ready strategists, both in-house and external, sit with their laptops
open, racking up the numbers on Excel. They get up, wander around the shop. Make
frantic calls. Take smoke breaks every 30 minutes.
The setting isn’t so different from the coffee shops in Koramangala or Indiranagar, where
some of Bengaluru’s hottest startups took off. There’s an air of intensity about the place,
even on a Sunday evening.
After a two-hour wait, Balaji Srinivas, the party’s social media convener in Karnataka,
arrives at the coffee shop. He explains that his tardiness was in most part due to an event
featuring the party’s chief ministerial candidate BS Yeddyurappa, and also, Bengaluru’s
infamous traffic.
With less than three weeks to go for the Karnataka assembly elections, these scenes are
more the norm than the exception. A few kilometres away, on Cunningham Road, the
incumbent party in Karnataka, the Congress has a similar war-room. Members of the
digital communications team, led by Srivatsa YB, troop in and out of the office, as they
accompany candidates filing their nominations. And soon after they return, a prominent
“central” leader from Karnataka starts his press conference. And thus begins an unending
torrent of WhatsApp updates, Facebook Live and live tweets, with quotes from the leader.
While the two parties seem poles apart, hurling the most frivolous electoral barbs against
each other, they see a point of convergence—how the Karnataka assembly elections’
digital campaign could become an important test ground for the grandest battle of them
the-ken.com-Karnatakas WhatsApp-first assembly elections 1/2 465

all. In 12 months. The 2019 general elections. “This is by far one of our most important
campaigns. The last time when we had elections in 2013, social media and other digital
platforms weren’t as big, nor were they as influential,” says Srinivas. “Today, at both BJP
and the extended Sangh Parivar, we have shown that we are keen to change with how
society changes, both in terms of use and adoption of technology.”
That importance is not entirely misplaced. Karnataka is one of the more digitally
progressive states in the country, both in terms of penetration and usage of platforms—
with nearly 30 million subscribers as of December 2017, as per Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (Trai). Of this, 23.54 million are urban and 6.42 million are rural
subscribers.
Compare this to the total number of voters in the state, which according to the official
Election Commission rolls, stands at 51.2 million. At the very best, political parties can
access nearly 58% of the electorate through social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp,
and Twitter. In addition to these numbers, as per the internal party estimates of both the
Congress and the BJP, the state is home to at least 20-25 million smartphone users, a
majority of whom, i.e.
the-ken.com-Karnatakas WhatsApp-first assembly elections 2/2 466

Keep it simple, silly
the-ken.com/story/keep-it-simple-silly
November 3, 2018
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“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
That was the tagline for the Apple II personal computer in 1977. It’s an admirable
sentiment. But how do you define simplicity? #lmgtfy (let me Google that for you): 1) the
quality or condition of being easy to understand or do and 2) the quality or condition of
being plain or uncomplicated in form or design.
A prime example of the power of simplicity comes from the investment world—the
systematic investment plan, or SIP in common parlance. For the uninitiated, an SIP is a
way to automatically invest a certain amount every month into a mutual fund. Its
simplicity lies in the fact that it takes the burden of “timing the market” off an investor.
And it just works (for the details, take a look at the concept of cost averaging).
The SIP has exploded in popularity in India, a testament to its effectiveness from the
average investor’s point of view. The Association of Mutual Funds in India estimates that
there are 24 million SIP accounts, and total SIP collection was a whopping $1 billion (Rs
7,365 crore) for September (incidentally, a rough month for the markets). And yes, both
of us are among the 24 million accounts.
Zoom out from the Indian to the global markets for another example—the exchange-
traded fund, or ETF. It’s a type of mutual fund that, instead of having a fund manager
actively pick out stocks or other assets, “passively” invests in markets by just tracking an
index such as the S&P 500. Simplicity at work—and it trumps all manner of sophisticated
investment strategies, according to the likes of John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard
Group.
the-ken.com-Keep it simple silly 1/2 467

Through Vanguard—one of the biggest asset management companies in the world—Bogle
has shown that the most sensible way to make money in the stock market is through a
tracker fund. This is a type of low-cost mutual fund which merely mimics the main stock
market index (and therefore does not need to pay a fund manager millions of dollars for
potentially non-existent skills).
So useful are Vanguard’s offerings that not only does the firm manage $5.1 trillion of
assets, investors as revered as Warren Buffett have also said that the portion of their
inheritance which they will leave for their families will be invested in Vanguard’s tracker
funds.
Simple businesses can also make for great investments. Branding firm Siegel+Gale runs
the Simplicity Index, which surveyed 14,000 respondents in nine countries to gather
perspectives on simplicity and how industries and brands make people’s lives simpler or
more complex. Siegel+Gale even made a stock portfolio comprised of the publicly traded
simplest brands in their global top 10 list. That portfolio rose 433% from 2009 till 2016,
compared with 135% for the S&P 500.
the-ken.com-Keep it simple silly 2/2 468

Lessons for India from three women taking on Google,
Facebook and Amazon
the-ken.com/story/lessons-for-india-three-women-big-tech
May 8, 2019
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Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—meet Margrethe Vestager, Lina Khan and
Dina Srinivasan.
Vestager is the European Union’s (EU) competition commissioner; Khan, a law student in
her late twenties; and Srinivasan, a veteran ad-tech entrepreneur. Three women, one goal:
dismantle the dominance of Big Tech. Vestager, Khan and Srinivasan have decoded
Pichai’s Google, Bezos’s Amazon and Zuckerberg’s Facebook, respectively, to isolate the
same antitrust DNA that runs through all these companies. All laid bare in the form of
explosive research papers and orders.
These ideas—Srinivasan’s February paper on Facebook’s market dominance and privacy

issues leading to lower quality of service, Vestager’s multiple rulings and multi-billion
euro fines against Google and Khan’s 2017 article examining Amazon’s predatory pricing
—are leading to a groundswell of action the world over.
At least 10 different regulators in different countries are probing at least one of the three
companies for antitrust violations. Including, most recently, the US Federal Trade
Commission, which is considering fining Facebook up to $5 billion over privacy
violations.
In India, however, these ideas are still ricocheting off the walls of the antitrust watchdog,
the Competitive Commission of India or CCI.
the-ken.com-Lessons for India from three women taking on Google Facebook and Amazon 1/2 469
“The CCI so far is being pro-industry in its stance,” said a lawyer specialising in antitrust
cases. She asked not to be named as she is not an authorised spokesperson for her firm.
“They are watching what is happening globally, but there is this understanding that India
is in an early phase of the digital economy, and the CCI doesn’t want to scuttle it.”
For example, the CCI was taken to the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal
(NCLAT) in January by a union of 3,500 online sellers. For dismissing a case they had
filed against Flipkart, complaining that the Walmart-owned e-commerce firm abused its
dominant position in online retail. The CCI said it hadn’t.
“We have challenged the impugned order before the NCLAT, because contrary to the
Hon’ble Commission’s opinion, we feel we presented reasonable evidence to prove the
case of dominance,” says Chanakya Basa, an antitrust lawyer who argued for the All India
Online Vendors Association. The NCLAT is set to hear the appeal next week. Its decision
could set a new precedent for competition law in India.
The one thing Facebook, Amazon, and Google have in common is their ability to use their
size and adjacencies to trample over the competition. What may be a whole business for
another company is just a feature for these three. The companies’ network effects create
switching costs and erect barriers to entry or expansion. That’s why venture capitalists’
favourite question to ask before investing is “What will you do if Google, Facebook or
Amazon decide to do this”—a measure of competitive fear.
the-ken.com-Lessons for India from three women taking on Google Facebook and Amazon 2/2 470
Literacy through an app: Pipe dream or secret sauce?
the-ken.com/story/literacy-through-an-app-pipe-dream-or-secret-sauce
February 16, 2019
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Just last week, the XPRIZE Foundation announced that AmritaCREATE, a team from
Kerala-based Amrita University, finished as one of the top four in its Adult Learning
XPRIZE. Winning $125,000 dollars for an app that teaches adults how to read and write
English, and aimed at the US market.
At the same time, the foundation’s Global Learning XPRIZE—also focused on basic
literacy, but for children—is set to conclude in the coming months. Up for grabs is $10
million, courtesy Tesla founder Elon Musk. And another Indian team—Chimple Learning,
founded by Bengaluru-based IT veteran Srikanth Talapadi—is among the five finalists
(each of whom, by the way, have already received a $1 million “milestone” award in 2017).
Depending on how you see it, it’s either natural or ironic that two teams from India—
which has the largest population of illiterate adults in the world, close to 300 million—are
leading races to develop apps and software that can help teach people to read and write.
For the uninitiated, XPRIZE is a non-profit launched by American serial entrepreneur

and engineer Peter Diamandis that runs global competitions to develop technological
solutions to intractable problems. From moon landings to AI to mapping the ocean floor.
And for the past five years or so, literacy.
With both the Adult Literacy and the Global Learning prizes, the goal is to develop
applications that an adult or a child, respectively, can use to learn how to read and write
on their own. No intervention from any sort of instructor, or caretaker for children.
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The million-dollar question (or 10-million-dollar question, as the case may be) is, can an
app really solve a problem as big as illiteracy? And if yes, if the likes of AmritaCREATE
and Chimple really have hit upon a digital solution, can they bring it to India’s notoriously
fragmented education system?
All work and no play…

“We don’t really believe in videos,” says Talapadi, whose non-profit company Sutara
Learning Foundation developed Chimple (“simple” plus “chimp”, their logo).
“It’s exciting to watch videos for some time, but after that, it doesn’t really stimulate the
minds of children. So our software is completely gamified and interactive,” he says over
the phone. From playing with alphabets to figuring out connections between words to
counting fish.
Talapadi, who has for 15 years now run an IT outsourcing firm called Amiti Software
Technologies Pvt. Ltd along with his wife Anupama Kolamala, first heard of the Global
Learning XPRIZE back in 2015, a year after it was launched. It was a big, hairy goal, and
he thought he could do something about it.
"Basically, our premise is that children should be able to read and write on their own"
Srikanth Talapadi, founder, Chimple
And so, he started Sutara (initially called Zoolore) and put together a 12-member team
(now expanded to 16) to develop what the Global Learning XPRIZE wanted.
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Local with solar: As China goes cheap, India loses the
beat
the-ken.com/story/solar-china-india-loses-the-beat
June 15, 2019
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When China sneezes, as the (modified) adage goes, the world catches a cold. And India, at
least when we’re talking about solar power, is today the first to start sniffling.
The year 2018-19 was a special one for India’s solar industry. For the first time since 2014,
new installations of solar power declined, by about 10%. To put that in context,
installations had roughly doubled in each of the two previous years.
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The obvious reason was a set of safeguard duties imposed on imports of solar equipment
starting July 2018. Intended to insulate domestic manufacturers from cheaper Chinese
solar modules, the move drove developers to halt plans for new solar plants.
A seemingly straightforward tale of a protectionist policy that backfired. But behind it lies
a complex interplay that results in Chinese policy effectively dictating the dynamics of the
Indian solar industry.
And with Indian policymakers unable to put together anything more than a piecemeal
response, the country’s vaunted National Solar Mission—with an ambitious goal of 100
GW of solar power generating capacity by 2022—is lumbering along, far short of its
targets.
The China shadow

The Chinese government, over the past two decades, has progressively increased support
to expand both renewable energy generation and equipment manufacturing.
By 2012, China-based solar module makers had enough capacity to supply the entire
world’s solar panel needs. The resulting glut in the early 2010s led to the collapse of
several Chinese—as well as American and European—manufacturers. Both the US and the
European Union had slapped anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese solar cells
and modules by the end of 2014. Undeterred, Chinese companies set their sights on a
new, rapidly growing market—India.
The Narendra Modi government in 2015 raised the country’s solar capacity target to the
current 100 GW from the earlier 20 GW. (As part of a bigger renewable energy target of
175 GW from solar, wind and small hydropower projects by 2022.) India rose to become
China’s biggest solar export market in 2017, accounting for about 30% of shipments by
Chinese manufacturers.
Full house
Nine of the top 10 manufacturers in the world are based in China; the sole exception is
South Korean company Hanwha Q-Cells
Much as in the US and Europe before, cheap Chinese equipment drove down costs for
developers, giving India some of the lowest prices for solar-based electricity tariffs in the
world. Tariffs fell to less than Rs 3 ($0.04) per kilowatt-hour as companies bid furiously
for projects in 2016 and 2017, as imports accounted for about 90% of module sales.
Making hay
India has a 100 GW solar target to meet by 2022. The sector was
dancing to Chinese manufacturers’ tune in the past. But now, as
China tweaks its policies and subsidies, India is backing out.
Probably not for the best either
Pranav Srivilasan, 15 Jun 2019
Over the past couple of decades, as China poured funds into boosting its solar power
sector, India has dragged its feet
As the Indian government ramped up its renewable energy ambitions starting 2015, it
became a ripe opportunity for Chinese panel makers
While power producers rejoiced, and electricity tariffs at auctions and tenders fell, local
solar cell and module makers struggled
Now, India's trying to use safeguard duties and a number of schemes to prop up
domestic manufacturing, but it may be too little too late
Lockdown lessons: India’s affordable private schools
face a reckoning
the-ken.com/story/covid-affordable-private-schools
May 22, 2020
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The impact of Covid-19 on education has been staggering. In April, roughly nine out of ten
students worldwide were out of school. The most common response to the pandemic, it
seems, was an abrupt nationwide shutdown of schools.
Denmark, the first country to do so, is now trying to ease back into a normal routine
through split classes and outdoor teaching. It has opened up only primary sections but
even this drew the ire of scared parents. This is possible because Denmark’s infection
count has fallen below 3.5 per 100,000 citizens.
Schools in India shut down around the same time as Denmark—17 March. But the
situation here couldn’t be more different. Between 1 May and 21 May, the daily reported
cases grew 2.6 times, from 2293 to 6088. School owners and principals The Ken spoke to
claim that the new academic session isn’t likely to start before September.
The extended lockdowns have brought one major section of Indian schools to the brink of
closure—the 270,000 affordable private schools (APS) that cater to 30-40% of Indian
students. Approximately 79 million students attend these local private institutions
according to a report by FSG, a social impact consulting firm.
“Affordable schools, even normally, exist hand-to-mouth. Fees are the only revenues we
get. And that’s completely stopped since March,” says Kulbushan Sharma, an APS owner
and president of the National Independent School Alliance (NISA). Sharma’s 450-student
school, based in Ambala, Haryana, is still due to receive Rs 9 lakh ($11,920) in fees from
parents for the last academic year. He will most likely write off the amount, equal to about
a third of total income. Other schools in the NISA network have received less than 30%
fees, and are struggling to pay teachers and non-teaching staff.
“We’re facing an existential threat because of the pandemic,” Sharma tells The Ken.
Structurally, APSs lie at the intersection of need and want. “They started as a grassroots
response to the lack of quality schools in low-income slum areas or outer fringes of the
city,” says Parth Shah, founder of the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), a Delhi-based think-
tank.
"Higher end private schools charge between Rs 18,000-25,000 per year; the mid-priced
section between Rs 8,000-18,000 and lowest tier charges below Rs 8000 a year. It's like a
pyramid. The lower you go, the more schools there are"
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Gaurav Singh, founder, 321 Foundation
Shah claims that APSs also bridge the gap between elite private schools and low-quality
government schools, charging between Rs 500-3000 ($6.62-39.72) a month, depending
on where they are located.
Against all odds
Nearly 79 million Indian students attend affordable private

schools, which plug a crucial gap between the demand for quality
education and access. With Covid upending education as a
recession-proof business, these schools will have to find ways to
stay relevant or die out
With parents unable or unwilling to pay fees, India’s nearly-270,000 APSs face an
existential threat
They are trying to retain students through WhatsApp classes and phone calls. Without
any fees coming in, this is getting tougher
Many students will turn to government schools, which have rolled out extensive online
classes
Without government bailouts, APSs will have to ride out this storm by re-building their
value online
the-ken.com-Lockdown lessons Indias affordable private schools face a reckoning 2/2 478
Losing faith: India’s anti-vaccine scourge
the-ken.com/story/india-anti-vaccine-movement
November 11, 2018
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In a cafe inside a suburban Mumbai hospital, a man dressed like a doctor is on the verge
of cursing like a sailor.
There’s no white laboratory coat, but the stethoscope around Ajit Gajendragadkar’s neck
gives away his ‘Dr’ prefix. The bespectacled paediatrician in a crisp, grey khadi shirt and
black trousers alternates between animated gestures and folded arms while talking about
his reviled topic of choice: the anti-vaccination (or anti-vax) movement.
Modern anti-vax sentiments can be traced to the late 19th century, when the Anti-
Vaccination Society of America opposed compulsory smallpox inoculation until the 1910s.
It resurfaced and gained ground in 1998, when researchers published a paper suggesting a
link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and child autism. The
MMR-autism link has since been disproved multiple times, but the seeds of suspicion
have sprouted into tendrils of misinformation.
The number of unvaccinated American children below age two today has quadrupled
since 2011, but the movement also has tentacles across Europe—enough to be a suspect
contributor to a measles outbreak across the continent.
That said, it may not be just a white people thing.
While there’s no official nationwide data for vaccine resistance, a 2017 38-country study
on vaccine misperceptions by Ipsos showed that 44% of Indians it surveyed believed in a
link between vaccines and autism. (The usual caveats apply: it was an online survey of
500 people in the country, and so is not likely to reflect trends among rural or lower-
income groups.)
the-ken.com-Losing faith Indias anti-vaccine scourge 1/2 479

“These crusaders don’t understand. They’d have died at 32 [India’s life expectancy at birth
at the time of independence] if it weren’t for vaccines,” says an exasperated
Gajendragadkar.
We’ve spoken to Indian parents who claim herd immunity is a conspiracy, we offer.
“And what do they say?”
That if their children aren’t vaccinated but everyone else is, how can they be a risk to a
group with supposedly better immunity?
“Too many people read shit on the internet but don’t use common sense,” he sighs. “Do
they know about antigenic (immunological) memory, and how it wanes with age? Which
is why booster shots are sometimes recommended? And the difference between live and
dead (or inactivated) vaccines?”
One father said if we follow a lifestyle devoid of anything unnatural, there’d be no need for
immunisation. Clean air, clean food, clean practices…
Gajendragadkar goes from a sigh to a guffaw.
“There was more natural food, better air and ways of life centuries before vaccines. By
that logic, humans shouldn’t have been wracked by disease. When will this rubbish stop?”
Anti-antigens
Home birthing, homeschooling, extended breastfeeding, clean eating and natural
medicine are five of six lifestyle choices Hemant and Sangeeta Chhabra made over the
course of 30-odd years.
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Make in India vs having made it in India: Skanray’s
peculiar struggle
the-ken.com/story/make-in-india-skanray-struggle
August 29, 2019
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Earlier this month, Niti Aayog, the Indian government’s think tank, held a high-level
meeting, with the secretaries of all stakeholder ministries—including the Ministry of
Health—present. The agenda was simple. Boost the local manufacturing of medical
devices—currently a $10 billion market.
India’s medical devices market is the fourth largest in Asia—after Japan, China and South
Korea—and is projected to grow to $50 billion by 2025, as per industry estimates.
However, while there are over 6,000 types of medical devices available worldwide, barely
one-sixth of them are made in India.
You see, in India, imports rule. About 80-90% of the medical electronics/equipment in
the country are imported, according to the industry body Association of Indian Medical
Industry (AiMED).
So import-dependent is the sector that AiMED submitted a seven-point agenda to the

Pharmaceuticals Secretary this month in a bid to ‘revive’ it. Among other points, AiMED
suggested increasing the import duty to incentivise domestic manufacturing.
One would think this pro-indigenous manufacturing move would be celebrated by the
likes of Vishwaprasad Alva, founder of Indian medical device company Skanray
Technologies Pvt Ltd. After all, Skanray launched commercially in 2011 with the aim of
manufacturing devices such as X-ray machines, ventilators and patient monitors from the
ground up in India. Years before “Make In India” became fashionable.
the-ken.com-Make in India vs having made it in India Skanrays peculiar struggle 1/2 481
But now, eight years later, the Mysuru-based company is yet to fulfil its potential. The
rampant imports have hamstrung Skanray, and Alwa does not mince words when asked
about the AiMED’s push for local manufacturing. “I can’t sit with these so-called Indian
manufacturers with outdated technology and push outdated tech into the market. But I
also don’t want to be seen as somebody who is hostile to Make in India. So it’s a very
tricky situation,” he says.
Skanray’s financials over the years do not make for pretty reading. It has been profitable
in only two years, and its revenue growth has been erratic—spiking only when Skanray
made acquisitions.
The biggest jump came in the year ended March 2014, shortly after the company made
multiple acquisitions, most notably that of engineering company Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T)
medical technology business in the end of 2012. Skanray’s revenue surged to Rs 115 crore
($16 million) in the year ended March 2014 from a meagre Rs 0.49 crore ($68,200) three
years prior. It was a statement of intent. Skanray had acquired a business with Rs 145
crore ($20 million) in revenue—20X its own turnover. “But in terms of valuation, we were
1.5 times higher,” Alva says, looking back.
M&A
In 2016, Skanray acquired Mectron India and Cardia International in Netherlands.

Cardia’s acquisition added to their portfolio stressSKANcardi that provided vitals like
pacemaker pulse and defibrillation protection. In 2017, it had joint ventures in the US,
Mexico and Brazil, distribution agreements in Southeast Asia, Egypt, the Middle East and
North Africa region.
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Making sense of the Byju’s hype machine
the-ken.com/story/byjus-hype-machine
April 6, 2017
Byju Raveendran has just too much energy. Like, shake your legs constantly and fidgeting
with stuff on the table; a pen, an iPad, sort of energy. Also, he is quite the looker. Tall,
about six feet, dark, pumped out chest, body-hugging black tee and blue jeans. It adds to
his whole persona that Byju has cut his teeth in the art of performing; for years, he has
been a sought after teacher and taught mathematics to a crowd of thousands. Tens of
thousand. So, fairly apt then, that right now, at the corporate office of Byju’s at IBC
Knowledge Park in Bengaluru, inside a large conference room, seated at the head of a long
conference table; the last relic of corporate productivity, Byju is turning on the charm.
Man, you are so, like full of energy.
“Yes. I am very restless. Restless is the word.”
Yeah.
“That’s because when I look around, I see everything growing at an exponential pace,
everyone is adapting new things, new ways. I am someone who believes that we are still
trying to grow linear. So in an exponential phase of growth, once you are halfway there,
you end up underestimating your and your company’s potential…may I?”
…yeah sure.
Byju picks up my pen and notebook and draws this.
the-ken.com-Making sense of the Byjus hype machine 1/9 483

Credit: Nikita Takkar
“I think I am at this stage,” he says, circling, stressing on the dot.
“So everything has to be exponential. How fast things change. How fast technologies are
getting adapted. Even before the regulations are able to catch up; in seven years,
everything will change. Before regulators, governments and people catch up, things will
change because of the intervention of technology. Like what happened with Uber.”
So Byju’s is sprinting, in the pursuit of ‘everything exponential’.
In the last 24 months, the company has raised about $160 million from venture capital
investors. $130 million in 2016 alone. And just to put things in perspective, of the total
money that went into education technology in India in 2016, 81% came to just one
company. Byju’s.
Contrast this with what’s happening around the world—2016 was a bad year for education
tech globally. According to CB Insights, funding in education tech startups declined from
$3.3 billion in 2015 to $2.2 billion. Clearly, Byju’s is an outlier, and its successive funding
rounds signal two things: One, this company is super hot. Two, investors are considering
it the best bet in the education tech business. The investor set is a curious bunch; Sequoia
Capital, Lightspeed, Sofina, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, IFC (International Finance
Corporation) and the most recent investor announced just last week, Verlinvest, a
Brussels-based family fund.
Money aside, it will be fair to say there’s a similar sprint in what Byju’s does.

Not long ago, in 2011, Byju’s was a plain vanilla classroom-based, test preparation
company. Its bread and butter was helping students crack CAT (Common Admission Test,
a national-level management entrance examination conducted by the Indian Institutes of
Management). Then it changed to offline plus online videos of teachers taking test prep
classes. Then it changed to completely online videos and weekend doubt-clearing classes.
Then it put the test preparation business on auto-pilot and ventured into a learning app
for students in grades 11 and 12. It started with mathematics and physics and soon added
chemistry and biology. Fast forward, Byju’s has added courses for more grades; Grade 9
and 10, 8, 7, 6, 5 and very recently, 4.
Phew!
“Exponential growth is not just what I am preaching, I’m also doing it,” says Byju. “One
thing, which we have done is transitioned. You have to change faster than things around
you. But I still feel we are struggling to catch up with the potential available.”
In Byju’s head, the potential is around 250 million kids enrolled in schools in India. He
wants to sell his online learning app to all of them. By them, he means parents. Those who
are keen to see their children learn beyond what they can pick up in classrooms and post-
school, in tuition classes. Parents who are so invested in their child’s education that they
are willing to shell out at the very least Rs 23,000 per annum on Byju’s The Learning App.
Credit: Nikita Takkar
As things stand today, Byju’s is nowhere close. Not even 0.5% of his target audience has
opened their wallets to pay up. But then, Byju has a plan on how to get them. To
appreciate that, you must first take a peek inside the company and understand how it
works.
Hello video, meet sales

Think and Learn Private Limited or Byju’s is a large company. It employs close to 1400
people, minus some 100 interns. The company, of course, for the lack of a better word is
growing exponentially—every month it adds about 50 people. And over the next 4
months, the total staff count should reach 2000.
In its simplest form, the premise of Byju’s existence is this: Video is a superior form of
learning compared to text. And if that be the case, then in today’s world, distribution is
inexpensive and no more a challenge.
Thanks to the internet and increased usage of smartphones, phones and tablets in India,
any child can access this superior form of learning and become smart. That smartness will
reflect in her understanding of the concepts of mathematics and science and in turn,
getting better grades in school. If the child’s grades improve because of the time she’s
spent on Byju’s app, the parent will keep buying the next grade courses. If the child’s
grades do not improve or if she isn’t interested in spending a good number of hours on the
app, then there is no business case.
Not a surprise then that everyone at Byju’s is engaged in the pursuit of solving the twin
problems of engagement and customer acquisition.
Let’s dive in.
What Byju’s does, as a company, has been structured in three parts. Part I is content and
media. Or video.
This is a 400-member team led by Vinay MR, a former student of Byju’s. The media and
content team’s job is first to define how a concept should be taught and then do
storyboarding for all the videos. This is done in consultation with teachers, who if you
have to understand it simply, teach in front of a camera, in a room that’s entirely green.
While they are talking and explaining something, they move their hands feverishly,
pointing at imaginary stuff. This is where the animation team comes in. Add to this, a
recording studio full of people, who work on the music and sound.
To create a course, for a specific grade, start to finish, let’s say grade 7, the content team
takes a good twelve months. This end product will have videos for all the chapters,
suggested questions at the end of each video and 3 sets of 15 objective questions for every
chapter. The questions at the end of every video are personalised, in the sense that if you
get an answer wrong, the app will suggest watching another video or prompt something
like, Hey, that was a wrong answer, no worries, how about this other question?
Part II of Byju’s organisation is the real deal. A 600-member sales team. And growing.
Theirs is a fascinating job of waiting and hunting.
The Call
A subject downloaded the Byju’s app and began playing with it. Grade 6. Soon, the call
came. The sales rep invited the child and the parent for a counselling camp over the
weekend. In essence, a pitch to buy the subscription. The rep tried convincing the subject

that the app is a new, alternative way of education in which the child learns faster and
without the pressure of a classroom. When told that the subscription was too expensive,
the sales rep said that a negotiation is possible
Once a user downloads the app, the team begins tracking usage. Like how many videos
have been watched or how many questions answered. Once someone passes a certain
threshold level of usage, the sales team starts calling; a parent in most cases. The pitch is,
“Look, this is your child’s engagement on the app, these are the areas your child is good
at, these are the areas where he can improve, how about a paid subscription to the Byju’s
app.”
As of date, Byju’s claims that the app has close to seven million downloads; Google Play
Store and App Store combined. Byju says that despite its best efforts, the team is currently
only able to reach some 27% of the total leads. He wants to improve that number to 50%,
which means adding more sales people. The conversion from download to a paid
subscriber is about 5%, he claims. (Keep these numbers handy)
Part III of Byju’s is the tech and product team. All put together, this is about a 200-
member team. It is an important part of the whole operation but its work is more tinker
and fix, as the app to put out the courses is pretty much stable. Once you have the
platform ready, adding more courses isn’t very complex. This team is also growing
because the way Byju sees it, the company needs to go international. He thinks that
English-speaking markets are an absolute product fit, now that the company has already
proven that the business model works. Now that Byju’s has received significant validation
from investors. And from customers.
Is that so?
Plans, challenges and checks

Byju’s belief in the higher purpose of his venture is infectious. When he talks, and he talks
real fast, it is a mix of the enormity of the task before him, educating millions and the role
his company is playing in making it happen. “Today, the focus is on how we can reach out
to more people,” he says. “I will think we are successful when we are able to make a
difference to at least 10% of the total students. 10% in India is 26 million students. We are
not even at 1% today. We haven’t even scratched the surface. Once this 10% is done then it
will happen on its own.”
“We are only limited by the bandwidth. At what pace can we create new products? We
need much more than a video library. It is videos, interactive formats, questions,
personalised learning journeys. People talk about our videos because they are very
different and powerful. Compared to what is available globally. I don’t want to boast but I
don’t think companies have approached education, the way people have approached
movies or games for entertainment. Our product is world class.”
The way Byju sees it, learning on a mobile phone through videos is the future of
education. Where concepts can be explained using 3D animation and live examples from
the best of teachers around the world—something that sitting in a classroom or reading
from a book can never do. If you give a child a mobile phone and a book, what will she
pick? Byju’s answer: “The mobile phone.” It is another matter altogether that Byju doesn’t
see the reality that a mobile phone is an extremely distracting device. A child is a swipe
away to something else more interesting.
Byju says this hasn’t been a problem with his company. The app is already seeing really
good traction among students. Thanks to his television campaign, downloads have
increased. While there is still a need for push sales, considering that Rs 25,000 is a big
amount, the numbers look good, both in terms of paying customers and engagement.
“The per day average is about 40 minutes,” says Byju. “Engagement is the real validation
of the fact that students are liking it. People who are downloading, we get a very high
engagement rate but you get access only for the first 15 days. The renewal was 89% last
year. This is why there is so much excitement from investors, and there are five more guys
wanting to come in.”
He continues: “We are probably one of the really few companies in India with a solid
business model who have figured out the path to revenue, path to profitability. There is no
competition. It is just a matter of, can you run faster. This is core, not trivial. Students are
joining a school, which you know, they don’t join just for a year. Which is why I think we
will repeat our renewal rate this year too. And there aren’t any options either. It is not like
you can watch free videos on YouTube. It is nontrivial. Also, there is already a big filter,
right? Out of 100 people downloading, only 5 people are buying. In education technology,
these are unheard of numbers.”
Needless to say, The Ken looked at the numbers. Independently. To see if they check out.

Using App Annie, a business intelligence company, which tracks apps and provides data
and intelligence reports. Data from App Annie is the go-to-source for due diligence and
research. And here, it will be fair to say that Byju’s numbers aren’t very good.
In the period, 1 January-25 March 2017, Byju’s app (Android phone and tablet) in India
clocked a Daily Average Users (DAU) of 1,50,129. Compared to the DAU on 2 January
2017 of roughly about 85,000, the DAUs have grown 2x in the 3-month period (might be
worth keeping in mind the fact that March is exam time for most schools in India). The
open rate of the app though is just 6.62%. The average session, user, per day is 3.7. The
average session duration per user is about 3 minutes. And the average time spent on the
app by a user per day is just 11 minutes and 37 seconds.
Eleven minutes suggest that a child is hardly spending any time on the app. The run time
of just about two full-length videos.
We looked at the average session duration of users from the period February 2016 to
February 2017 (for the Android phone and tablet).
The average session, user per month was a paltry 6.4.

The average time spent by a user per month was a total of 19 minutes and 29
seconds.
The average active days: 2.1.
These are not particularly good numbers. And they suggest an anaemic level of
engagement.
Of equal concern is the difference between Byju’s Monthly Active Users (MAU) and DAU.
In the period, February 2016 to February 2017, Byju’s recorded MAUs of 1.6 million. In
the same period, its DAUs were just around 1,60,000. That’s a worrying 1/10 drop—for a
gaming app, a 10% DAU to MAU metric might be considered stellar but for an educational
app, it shows that the students are not relying on the app anywhere close to what they do
for their other educational material.
Some other numbers of note. Starting August 2015, till date, on the Google Play Store, the
Byju’s app has 6.5 million downloads, with average monthly downloads of 2,97,683.
Financials
As of 31 March, 2016, Byju's recorded revenue of Rs 110 crore. Loss of Rs 50 crore
What Byju’s loses in engagement, it makes up in sales.
While the engagement number is poor and not quite lining up with the company’s PR
claims, you have to give credit to Byju where it is due. Byju claims that only 5% of his total
app downloads convert into actual paying customers. 5% of the 7 million downloads (70
lakh) is 3,50,000. Let’s take it at face value that these are the paid users. The Byju’s story
actually starts looking really good when you multiply the paid users with the lowest price-
point of a course. That’s 23,000 rupees.

Do the math. That’s total sales of Rs 805 crore per annum. Whoa! What’s not to like?
The room for growth is enormous (remember, 250 million students). And if Byju’s runs a
tight ship, dishing out videos, course after course, in several languages, perhaps investors
are right in their bet that they will soon be raking in the moolah. It is also why Byju says
that his most immediate target is to reach 10,00,000 paid subscribers.
The faster you reach to a million paid students, you will create a big entry barrier
Byju Raveendran
It is true. Byju is a sharp entrepreneur, and he fully well understands the opportunity
before him. But here, a question must be asked. When is it that content and sales take
over, and education takes a backseat?
The content vs education conundrum
Zishaan Hayath, the founder of toppr.com, is in a similar business as Byju’s. Albeit,

having raised much lesser funding, around $12 million. Hayath says, he understands the
challenge Toppr is up against. To put it simply, if a child has to choose between studying
and cricket, she would choose cricket. “I’m clear about this,” he says. “We are competing
against cricket and Snapchat. Given a choice, what will a kid do? He will play cricket and
on a smartphone, he will use Snapchat. A kid will only spend time on my product if
he/she enjoys the content. Feels challenged by it.”
The way Hayath sees it, a video-focused approach is not the answer.
“Video content is passive consumption,” he says. “I don’t know how you’d interpret what
you’ve seen. Different people interpret movies differently. There are two drivers to a
learning product. First is content, which ensures that you spend more time on the app.
And second, it should improve your efficiency and make you better. Animation is not the
driver. Sure there should be video, but I believe application and problem solving is more
important in learning.”
Contrary to Byju’s approach of building a top-notch content, animation and gaming

approach company, Toppr is focusing on adaptive learning for individual users, using
questions and answers. In the order of priority. 1. Practice. 2. Tests. 3. Doubts. 4. Videos.
On the face of it, this might sound fairly easy and inexpensive to build but Hayath says
that the tech involved is not trivial. “Let’s say the guy has answered 30 questions,” he says.
“What should be Q number 31? Should it be easy, difficult, repeat. Because you need just
the right question. Which is part of the syllabus.”
He continues: “Let’s say we are creating content for 5 grades. 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. There are
10 board exams. CBSE. ICSE. State, etc. There’s different content in different boards.
Then there are Engineering entrance exams like IITJEE, BITS, Karnataka SET, MHCET.
And there are medical entrance exams—NEET, AIIMS, etc. If I’m a student appearing for
the Telangana Board and preparing for BITSAT, IITJEE mains, IIT Advanced—my

syllabus combination is unique. And there are 50 million such unique combinations to
cover all syllabi in India. We need to ensure there’s no duplication, that the content is
adaptive. These are all real tech problems.”
“We have 5,00,000 questions in the system. There are 9,00,000 plus learning items in
total. How do you create a content repository, which can serve this to you on the fly? With
minimum friction. This is the tech problem we are trying to solve. The entire thing has to
be built so it can scale.”
A video-first approach eliminates the need for such complexity.
Khan Academy
Earlier this month, California-based Khan academy added the Indian math curriculum of
Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) from grades 5-12. Khan Academy is a not-
for-profit education company, which puts out free learning videos on YouTube
As part of research for this story, The Ken reached out to an investor, from one of the
largest venture capital funds in India, who had closely looked at Byju’s, a while ago. While
this investor was okay sharing his perspective, he requested not to be identified. “We
passed,” he said. “Our first reason was that we found it to be a content company. Not
education technology per se. Because there you have to ensure learning happens and
deliver better results for your users. If you don’t, then it will catch up to you, not today,
but in the long run. Second, we found the company’s valuation too high.”
Of course, while these challenges are endemic to the education technology sector, Byju’s
continues to sprint. With money in the bank, Byju is looking at the holy grail of 10,00,000
paid users. To get there, he has been actively scouting for companies to acquire in India
and abroad. Those that can help him beef up animation skills and in a way, add some
gamification to the courses. Especially, apps for lower grade courses. Earlier this month,
Byju’s content & media team finally delivered a course in Hindi. Byju wants to take this to
government schools but is still contemplating on what’s the best way. Government school
children don’t own mobile phones, and he can’t just give it away for free even if he wants
to. Perhaps there is merit in tying up with a government agency.
“We have raised capital only to accelerate our business,” says Byju. “I have no reason to
raise more primary unless I am able to close some acquisitions, which can accelerate our
product development. Which will be content teams abroad. For Europe. The faster you
reach a million paid students, you will create a big entry barrier.”
I asked Hayath, what would he do, if he had access to the kind of money Byju’s has raised.
“Sure, who doesn’t want money,” he said. “But I don’t know. I wouldn’t know where to
spend it.”
Update: The story was updated on 6 April to replace Toppr Learning with toppr.com.

Manipal to Medanta: Will Ranjan Pai finally break the
no-deal jinx?
the-ken.com/story/manipal-to-medanta-will-ranjan-pai-finally-break-the-no-deal-jinx
May 1, 2019
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A hospital-private equity deal is always in the works in India. Entrepreneurs prefer to buy,
not build. For obvious reasons. Borrowing is limited for acquisitions, owners need equity
financing. Why not. A mid-to-large size hospital is a 15-20 year business, yet it’s being
grown with funds on 5 to 8-year exit plans. It’s a necessary evil.
By these measures, if Manipal Group CEO Ranjan Pai has been looking at every hospital
worth buying in India in recent years, it’s understandable. Why hasn’t he closed any deal
is the million dollar question. For Fortis Healthcare, last year, he made three bids but
eventually lost to IHH Healthcare Bhd of Malaysia. His focus then shifted to Medanta
Medicity in Gurgaon, which, as we wrote, has been up for acquisition because both its
promoter, Dr Naresh Trehan, and investors want an exit. Pai, a trained medical doctor,
has bid for it. In fact, left to the two doctor promoters, he says, “they’d have closed the
deal a year ago”.
Backed by Manipal Hospitals’ existing investors TPG and Temasek, Pai has reportedly
made a binding offer of Rs 5800 crore for Medanta. At 24X Ebitda (earnings before
interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation multiple) valuation measure for this sector,
Medanta is a prime asset whose founder is as worried about his exit as he is about leaving
the hospital in the right hands.
Will Pai close the deal this time?
Situated on the 15th floor of the JW Marriott Hotel in central Bengaluru, the Manipal
Education and Medical Group office is spacious, plush and quiet. There’s an air of
discomfort about Pai. He has been reading The Ken prior to our meeting on Thursday; he
the-ken.com-Manipal to Medanta Will Ranjan Pai finally break the no-deal jinx 1/2 492
has a question: “Your stories are good, analytical, but they mostly are… negative.”
“Is it so? I think we write truth,” I counter.
Pauses, again. “That’s right, it’s truth,” he says, easing up.
Perhaps more than any entrepreneur, 46-year-old Pai has raised 16 rounds of private
equity with 14 exits across his healthcare and education businesses. Excluding the current
round for Medanta. Buying assets at a certain price is his imperative. “If you buy
expensive, you will have to take the hit for somebody else,” he argues. It isn’t blitzscaling.
Even for his upcoming digital health business, he’s clear the traditional manner in which
health tech startups burn cash to acquire customers is not his thing. He’d prefer external
capital for a business which, he thinks, can be built on the back of a mere one-tenth of the
clinical base of his hospitals. With Medanta in their fold, they’d have 5 million patients
passing through their gates.
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Matters of the heart: India’s statin problem
the-ken.com/story/indias-statin-problem
August 21, 2018
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A woman, 31, went to her doctor for a routine checkup in May. Her lab report showed
cholesterol levels outside the normal range (LDL: 117 milligrams per decilitre of blood
(mg/dL); TG: 255 mg/dL; HDL: 37 mg/dL). She smokes around five cigarettes a day. Her
doctor prescribed her a statin, a drug that acts to reduce cholesterol levels in the blood,
for six months. After that, they would retest her blood.
Was the doctor right?
India is in the middle of a statin over-prescription and under-prescription crisis. Rich,

urban folks—the ones who can afford private hospitals in big cities—are being oversold
statins. Meanwhile, poor and rural Indians, who ought to be on the pills, are not.
“There is a fair amount of inappropriate prescription of statins, both ways,” said Prem
Pais, dean and professor of medicine at St. John’s Medical College in Bengaluru.
“[Doctors] just go, ‘Here’s somebody who smokes and has a little high [cholesterol], let’s
give her statins’. You [also] have people who have had heart attacks and are not given
statins.”
Unequal access
Less than 10% of Indians with heart disease, who ought to be on medication, use statins
regularly. If they took just three pills—a statin, a blood pressure medication and an
aspirin—it would cut Indians' risk of death by two-thirds.
the-ken.com-Matters of the heart Indias statin problem 1/2 494

At the heart of the over-prescription crisis is a debate over who qualifies for treatment.
There is little doubt within the medical community that statins should be given to heart
patients. But what about the people who don’t yet have heart disease? How much
cholesterol can an Indian have in her blood before a doctor judges it dangerous and
prescribes her statins to prevent a potential heart attack or stroke? Surprisingly, this is
more a matter of educated opinion than strong evidence. There is little data about heart
disease in Indians, so most doctors go by international guidelines instead.
But now, an association of doctors from some of the biggest private hospitals in India has
come up with a consensus statement on managing cholesterol. The recommendations, put
forth by the Lipid Association of India (LAI) in 2016, are the most aggressive in the world.
They suggest cutting LDL levels in heart disease patients to below 50 mg/dL. That’s 20
mg/dL lower than the most-stringent international guideline, currently followed in
Europe. They also recommend lowering the threshold for defining patients at risk of
developing heart disease.
The recommendations, if followed, would bring millions of Indians under screening or

treatment. More than 30 million people have coronary artery disease in India, and even
more people are at risk.
These guidelines would also potentially earn the pharmaceutical industry millions in
revenue. Some Rs 2,625 crore ($373 million) worth of statins were sold in India in the
year ending June 2018.
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MedGenome has a silver bullet for TB diagnostics, but
no gun
the-ken.com/story/medgenome-tb-diagnostics-spit-seq
September 17, 2019
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August saw two major milestones for diagnosing and curing extensively drug-resistant
tuberculosis, or XDR TB—the most drug-resistant of TB strains. On 14 August, the US
drug regulator approved a new drug—Pretomanid—only the third new antibiotic
developed to fight TB in over half a century. It’s a ray of hope for some 2,700 people living
with the superbug in India, as per 2018 figures from the Revised National Tuberculosis
Control Programme (RNTCP).
Pretomanid is promising, especially since, unlike the last two drugs—Bedaquiline and
Delamanid—it is developed by the non-profit TB Alliance rather than a traditional
pharma company. As The Ken has reported earlier, pharma companies prefer to control
supply. TB Alliance, meanwhile, is all about access. US-based Mylan N.V. will bring
Pretomanid to India after November 2020. While this is reason enough to hope that the
drug will be available to those in need, the story is not the same for the second
breakthrough that also came about in August.
On 8 August, six-year-old Bengaluru-based genomics company MedGenome announced it

had developed India’s first Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS)-based test. Called ‘SPIT
SEQ’, it provides a detailed analysis of every single mutation present in tuberculosis
bacteria directly from a phlegm sample. Sequencing of the bacteria’s DNA can show the
entire resistance profile of the patient, allowing doctors to determine every drug they are
resistant to in one go.
SPIT SEQ is a marked improvement from the conventional culture growth test. Not only
does it test for antibiotic resistance across a wider range of drugs—13 as opposed to 4—but
it also brings down diagnosis time. Currently, patients must wait until testing on all
possible drugs is done. With a long turnaround diagnosis time, repeated testing leads to
multiple changes in the course of treatment. The whole process can take upwards of eight
weeks—a criminal delay when time isn’t a luxury. Finally, after much trial and error,
doctors settle on the right cocktail of drugs necessary for treatment. ‘SPIT SEQ’ cuts
through this, enabling doctors to quickly prescribe the most effective drug to a
tuberculosis patient within days.
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SPIT SEQ is special because while WGS itself is common the world over, most of it is done
using culture. This isn’t ideal because the TB bacteria (mycobacterium tuberculosis) takes
upto eight weeks for culture growth. MedGenome, however, uses a microbacterial bait to
isolate and extract the TB DNA directly from phlegm samples, speeding up the process
while remaining accurate. At present, SPIT SEQ allows for diagnosis in less than 10 days,
and has been validated with over 100 samples where it recorded 100% sensitivity and
98.04% specificity when compared with German company Hain Lifescience’s Line Probe
Assay.
However, this leap in TB diagnostics has a catch.
History repeats itself
India—home to the largest number of people living with drug-

resistant TB—now has a first-of-its-kind test to diagnose TB drug
resistance fast and with precision. But like the two diagnostic
tests before it, SPIT SEQ must now figure out how to sell to
millions
Suraksha P, 17 Sep 2019
India’s 2.8 million TB patients received a rare dose of good news in August—an
indigenous, more thorough and accurate test for TB
But SPIT SEQ’s path to the mass market won’t be easy. At Rs 7,500, it’s close to 10X
more expensive than existing diagnostic tools like TrueNat and GeneXpert
It took TrueNat years to get approval to become part of the national TB programme.
SPIT SEQ, though, is from the stable of Sequoia-funded MedGenome
With deep-pocketed backers and a huge potential market the world over, SPIT SEQ
could still have a bright future
Meet the man who took WhatsApp to the Supreme
Court
the-ken.com/story/whatsapp-supreme-court-virag-gupta
January 20, 2019
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Russian interference in the US elections via Facebook. The Cambridge Analytica data
breach. “Fake news” entering the lexicon. Data security and privacy becoming the need of
the hour. Mob violence sparked off by rumours and spread via WhatsApp forwards. A
growing drive towards data localisation. The past two years have shaken the world, with
governments in India and elsewhere sitting up and taking notice of social media and
internet companies. More specifically, trying to rein in and regulate
For at least six years now, Gupta, a Supreme Court lawyer, and others working with him
have taken on the likes of Facebook, Orkut (a once-popular, now defunct social media
network), Google and Uber. And most recently, WhatsApp—Gupta’s organisation, an
NGO called the Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change (CASC), filed a petition
against the Facebook-owned messaging company and the Indian government in the
Supreme Court. The petition accused WhatsApp of failing to comply with regulations on
data storage and not appointing a grievance officer.
“We are not against any individual organisation, but we are working that the new legal
system must evolve along with the new digital economy,” he says over the phone. One
carefully measured, lawyerly word at a time.
To that end, Gupta and CASC have many a grouse. That digital businesses in India get
unfair advantages; that foreign companies aren’t paying taxes here; that many social
media platforms are not properly regulated; that Indians’ data on said platforms is not
secure.
And—very, very specifically—that these companies do not have “grievance officers” (we’re
going to be seeing this term a lot) in the country.
"What action can be taken against those [companies] having no physical presence in
India?"
Virag Gupta, lawyer, in a column in the newspaper DNA
Gupta embodies a drive towards both privacy and protectionism—and against what he
sees as “neocolonialists spread all across the globe” and “the new-age East India
Companies”. A push to safeguard people’s data from foreign companies not “abiding by
Indian laws”, with a strong nationalistic flavour. Gupta, for his part, is firm that he’s
the-ken.com-Meet the man who took WhatsApp to the Supreme Court 1/3 499
apolitical. However, at least one of his associates has links to the Hindu nationalist
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A frequent face on news television debates on cyber law—conspicuous by his greying hair,
trademark square spectacles and a thick moustache—the 49-year-old lawyer is
emblematic of a certain type of legal activism. One which has the potential to shape
policymaking on digital rights and regulations, and more. And has only been rising in the
wake of India’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem.
The aggrieved
Virag Gupta and others have spent years crusading against what
they see as a lack of regulation when it comes to online
businesses operating in India—an arena of policy that's seeing
legal battles rapidly flare up
Pranav Srivilasan, 20 Jan 2019
In 2012, RSS member KN Govindacharya and Gupta, a lawyer, filed a petition against
companies such as Facebook and Google in the Delhi High Court
Since then, Gupta has joined in a series of legal actions on how internet businesses
should be regulated in India
It's a thorny issue, and one that's pitted governments and some legal activists against
companies like WhatsApp in recent years
There have been wins and losses on each side, and the battle to decide the future of the
digital world, in India and elsewhere, is far from over
Memes to an end: The underbelly of Reddit’s
IndianPeople Facebook
the-ken.com/story/memes-reddit-indianpeoplefacebook-racism
September 16, 2018
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When Asif Raza Rana, a Pakistani government worker, posted an image to his Facebook
page on 13 September 2015, he had no idea that it would make internet history. It was a
photograph of him shaking hands with a man named Salman, above two small photos of
another man—Mudasir—who had been crossed out in each one with a lime-green X.
Colourful WordArt letters at the top blared “Friendship ended with Mudasir / Now
Salman is my best friend”. A caption explained that Rana was parting ways with Mudasir
because the latter had become “selfish” and “proudy”.
Rana’s post got thousands of shares and likes, and in the three years since he first
uploaded it, it has spawned countless memes riffing on its “Friendship ended with X…”
phrasing. For example, a recent one, made and circulated after this year’s fractious G7
summit, showed Donald Trump shaking hands with the leader of North Korea under the
heading “Friendship Ended With Western Allies / Now Kim Jong Un Is My Best Friend.”
One of the engines that fuelled Rana’s post and its virality was r/indianpeoplefacebook, a
forum (or “subreddit”) on the social news aggregation website Reddit. The blurb that
introduces r/indianpeoplefacebook to newcomers defines it as a place where anyone can
post “screenshots of Indian and other non-English speaking internet users discovering the
wonders of Facebook and other social media”.
Three days after Rana made the announcement, a Reddit user shared a screenshot of it to
r/indianpeoplefacebook, titling the post “Mudasir done fucked up.”
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It became wildly popular across the internet, and news outlets soon began running
articles about the severed friendship. Some of them even wrote follow-ups a month later,
when Rana posted another image to announce that he and Mudasir were friends once
again.
Rana’s meme is still r/indianpeoplefacebook’s biggest claim to fame, but the subreddit
has grown at a steady clip since then. From about 41,000 subscribers when Rana’s meme
was first posted, it now has over 340,000. R/indianpeoplefacebook has also since
emerged as a watering hole for humour about how South Asian people supposedly behave
on social media—a subject of jokes that, in today’s increasingly niche-based meme
culture, seem to be getting more and more popular both on and off Reddit.
As this meme economy of voyeuristic “cringe” humour grows, so too does the potential
fallout. Apart from the racial stereotypes that this supposedly harmless mockery furthers,
it also raises serious questions about the privacy of people like Rana who are the butt of
the jokes. The exposure of content meant to be, at the very least, semi-private is a
dangerous tool in the hands of the troll or the cyberbully, for instance.
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Missed deadlines and half-measures: India’s telecom
equipment has a security problem
the-ken.com/story/telecom-equipment-security-problem
March 13, 2019
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Despite being the second-largest smartphone market in the world—not to mention the
fastest growing—India has very few checks and balances in place to control telecom
equipment quality. This has resulted in everything from mobile phone batteries heating
up or outright exploding. Radiation emissions being above prescribed limits. And the very
real threat of data theft and spying. These dangers aren’t just limited to smartphones
either. There are examples galore of other telecom equipment, like routers, for instance,
being equally susceptible to safety and quality issues. Any way you dice it, a substantial
amount of poor quality products are dumped in India.
But with the Huawei controversy exploding over the past few months, this lackadaisical
approach to telecom equipment standards simply isn’t tenable. For those not in the know,
Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei has faced allegations that its equipment could
be used by China to spy on other countries. Huawei India’s revenue for 2017 (Huawei
follows the calendar year for accounting) was a cool $1.16 billion.
Concerns about telecom equipment, though, go far beyond Huawei. Currently, about 97%
of telecom equipment used in the country is imported. India imported about $21 billion
worth of telecom equipment in FY18, up from $16.2 billion in FY17. And the crazy part?
Most of the equipment used in the country—barring equipment procured by the
government itself—is self-certified. This, despite some experts comparing self-
certification to asking a student to check her own exam paper. Unless there are proper
third-party audits, self-certification can’t be trusted, they say.
the-ken.com-Missed deadlines and half-measures Indias telecom equipment has a security problem 1/3 504
For government procured equipment, things are better—all equipment must be approved
by the Department of Telecom’s (DoT) nodal agency for this very purpose, the TEC
(Telecom Engineering Centre). However, if the government’s recent noises are to
believed, MTCTE (Mandatory Testing and Certification of Telecom Equipments) might
soon become a reality across the board. This means that any telecom equipment—both
imported or locally produced—will have to qualify on certain parameters to be sold to
operators. TEC will be in charge of approvals, and no telecom equipment—including
mobile phones—can be sold in the country without being tested and certified.
This will be easier said than done, though. While the government set 1 April as the
deadline to introduce MTCTE, this is unlikely to proceed as planned. In all likelihood, this
deadline will be extended, with a notification regarding the same expected before the
month ends.
The impending delay is on account of strong lobbying from billion-dollar equipment

manufacturing companies (backed by their telecom operator clients, of course), with the
government seemingly bowing to the whims of the powers that control the market. This,
despite domestic companies as well as a relatively unexpected lobby—testing companies—
in staunch support of MTCTE. To make matters worse, India is also woefully
underprepared to implement MTCTE, at least for the foreseeable future
With global concerns about telecom equipment security growing, the fact that India is set
to allow the MTCTE deadline to come and go to no avail is worrying.
Testing Troubles
India’s data is at risk because of a lack of standards and testing
for telecom equipment. The government says it wants to fix this,
but is set to further postpone its deadline for the same
Vandana, 13 Mar 2019
Most telecom equipment in India—barring what is procured by the government—is self-
certified by manufacturers
This has led to a situation where poor quality telephone gear is being dumped in the
Indian market
Worse, 97% of telecom equipment in the country is imported, giving rise to fears of
unchecked data theft and spying
The govt wants to implement mandatory testing and certification in the near future, but
may have to put its plans on hold
MobiKwik
the-ken.com/story/btn-mobikwik-2017
January 19, 2018
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MobiKwik was flanked by Paytm on one side and FreeCharge on the other. With the
largest wallet company deciding to become a payments bank and the third largest finding
a less-than-desirable exit into Axis Bank, MobiKwik is the only real wallet company left in
the payments ecosystem. It has an interesting set of investors that includes a lender—
Bajaj Finserv—and a payment gateway company—Japan’s GMO—among others. Whether
it will evolve from being a wallet into something bigger is what 2018 will decide.
Total funding
$115 million+
MobiKwik
One MobiKwik Systems Pvt Ltd
Name as per MCA records
Bipin Preet Singh
Co-founder and CEO
Gurugram
Headquarters
Read more
Investors
Sequoia Capital
the-ken.com-MobiKwik 1/4 507

Bajaj Finserv
Net1 UEPS
Read more
Competitors
Paytm
PayU
Capital Float
PhonePe
Read more
What has MobiKwik been up to, in the last year?
A distant second from Paytm, MobiKwik claims to have 65 million users, who make about
3 million transactions daily, compared to Paytm, which has 200 million users (pre-KYC)
and claims to process close to 10 million transactions a day. A total of 15 lakh merchants
accept MobiKwik, the company claims. Even though in 2017, it raised fresh funds, the
Reserve Bank of India with its guidelines for pre-paid instruments, undid whatever little
wallets had going for it. Mandating Know Your Customer (KYC) norms for customers to
transact using wallets means more investments for these companies. MobiKwik has said it
will invest (read: spend) Rs 400 crore for KYC over the next five years.

Results
Rs 27.3 crore: This is the standalone revenue the wallet company made from the sale of
its services. It grew only 15% from Rs 23.8 crore in 2016, despite tailwinds like
demonetisation. The company claimed that it was going to process $10 billion in
transaction volumes in 2017 but those claims have left little impact on its topline.
Rs 168.4 crore: The company’s total expenses. It rose 14%. Most of those expenses
came from other expenses that include marketing.
Rs 14.5 crore: The advertising and marketing expenses of the company. It scaled back
on spending in FY 2017 by 33%—a significant call for a company to make. The company
moved to a loyalty model to incentivise users over cashbacks in the middle of last year.
Rs 21.7 crore: What it spent on salaries for its employees—a 13% increase from a year
ago.
Rs 131.3 crore: The losses of MobiKwik. The company’s losses grew 20.1% in this
financial year. It may have cut down on its marketing spend by a third and managed just a
marginal increase in employee expenses but the losses have been mounting. MobiKwik
needs a path to follow. And soon.
Where is the company headed?

The wallet player had the world at its feet. Demonetisation was supposed to turn things
around for MobiKwik. There was even talk of it being the next unicorn. But far from it.
The latest round of funding from Bajaj Finserv, a non-banking financial company values it
between $300 to $350 million. But it isn’t time to hit the panic stations yet. MobiKwik is

at an intersection. It can keep pretending to be a wallet player when the likes of PayU are
shutting down their wallets, or it can pick one of two things: turn into a lending company
or help people invest. MobiKwik wants to do all the three. In the next year, expect the
wallet company to start making one of these three its primary focus. The others will be
distractions, at best. But if CEO Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku, his wife and co-
founder, want to run all three races at the same time, they’ll need more cash, and that will
be an interesting sell.
*Paytm’s founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, is one of the investors in The Ken
Edit: The story has been updated at 6:00 PM to remove the reference to Mobikwik’s
valuation
1. The valuation of Mobikwik in Series C was $100-$200 million and in Series D,
$300-$350 million
2. The stake held by one of its investors Bajaj Finance changed thanks to a service
transaction converted into equity, it is not technically a fall in valuation

Moving the needle: MIA for 20 years, Parkinson’s drug
Apomorphine still evades Indians
the-ken.com/story/india-apomorphine-shot-in-arm
March 16, 2019
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Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/6Ul9f2CPanQ
P hasn’t been able to walk properly and has suffered from tremors for
over 12 years. He is shown getting a shot, and seconds later, he’s seen
doing push-ups. Mumbai-based Nanavati Hospital’s video on its
antidote to Parkinson’s Disease, uploaded earlier this month, seems
too good to be true. In fact, neurologists all over the country say it’s barely true.
“The drug’s effect lasts only for one hour. The video doesn’t mention that,” says Dr
Charulata Sankhla, President, Movement Disorders Society of India, Mumbai.
Having said that, the video has achieved “viral” status. Or so doctors say.
Parkinson’s Disease is a disorder of the central nervous system that causes tremors and
affects movement. Its symptoms include stiffness, difficulty in speaking, poor balance,
amnesia, anxiety, and loss of smell. It usually affects patients aged 60 or older, but now,
earlier onset is being seen in patients under 40.
And India, most bafflingly, is treating it as a non-issue. There’s little to no access to the
drug shown in the video—Apomorphine—that can help contain symptoms of Parkinson’s
if taken regularly. In its injectable form, the drug is rapidly absorbed by the body,
providing relief to patients within six to nine minutes. In the US and Europe, the drug has
been in use for more than 20 years, and yet, until recently, Indian Parkinson’s patients
couldn’t get it anywhere.
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Underused
Apomorphine received regulatory approval in the UK in 1993 but despite its efficacy has
been underused, according to K Ray Chaudhuri, a leading global Parkinson's researcher
from King's College, London
But is Parkison’s really that prevalent in India? Enough to warrant access to the only
effective drug.
According to the medical journal The Lancet, in 2016, 6.1 million had the disease
worldwide as opposed to 5,75,946 in India. However, doctors suspect the numbers are
much higher—to the tune of 300-400 for every 100,000 citizens, and they expect this will
double by 2030.
The mainstay of Parkinson’s treatment in India is orally-administered medicine, namely

Levodopa and Carbidopa, which help control the tremors and ease muscle movement.
There are also other tablets such as Pramipexole, Ropinirole, Amantadine,
Trihexyphenidyl, Safinamide, and Rotigotine which take 30-60 minutes to kick in.
The tablets are cheaper. But don’t come anywhere near the effectiveness of Apomorphine,
which takes a patient from an “off” to an “on” state in minutes, making her feel alive.
Apomorphine is a necessity for Parkinson’s patients. According to Dehradun-based Rusan
Pharmaceutical Ltd—an indigenous manufacturer of the drug—it is a non-controlled (no
narcotic permission required), non-narcotic, non-addictive substance.
Much ado about India’s health insurance 2.0
*conditions apply
the-ken.com/story/indias-health-insurance
June 13, 2019
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The Narendra Modi-led government has made a comeback in India. For healthcare, its
second-term return greenlights an ambitious health insurance scheme—Ayushman
Bharat. The government, over the next five years, intends to provide health insurance
cover to the 500 million poorest in the country. Meanwhile, private insurers have a plan
of their own. To boost the most profitable kind of health insurance—the one that
individuals buy.
There is tremendous scope for health insurance in general to grow, but individually-
bought health insurance is the most unpenetrated market right now. Indians with
disposable incomes have opened their wallets for fast-growing industries such as e-
commerce and fintech over the past five years. Investors are now betting that the next five
will be the right time for insurance, especially health, to become a want. Not just a need
that corporations and the government traditionally provide.
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Divya Sehgal, an investor, goes as far as using American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s
‘hierarchy of needs’ pyramid theory to explain the motivation behind investing in health
insurance. Sehgal is a partner with the PE firm True North which bought a 51% stake in
insurer Max Bupa in February this year.
Now, according to Maslow’s theory, once the human needs for food, shelter and clothing
are met, safety comes next. “Every person would spend more on premium to cover
themselves from basic risks,” Sehgal says. Insurance, particularly health, may have been a
low priority for Indians up until now (as it is an evolved need), but this would change as
purchasing power rises, he expects. The evidence supports the hypothesis. Life, motor and
other general insurances are not as high a priority on Maslow’s pyramid, and so, they’re
seeing relatively slower growth.
This vision isn’t limited to Sehgal either. A consortium, led by Mauritius-based

investment firm WestBridge Capital and Indian billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, got
approval from the government’s statutory body Competition Commission of India (CCI)
to buy over 90% stake in health insurer Star Health in April this year. Similarly, private
equity TPG-backed hospital chain Manipal Hospitals bought out the 31.5% stake of Indian
business group TTK from Cigna TTK health insurance, resulting in a name change to
Manipal Cigna in the first week of this month. HDFC Ergo general insurance, meanwhile,
has been in discussion to buy a stake in health insurer Apollo Munich over the last few
months, said an employee of the insurance company. Reliance Capital got approval for a
health insurance company back in October 2018. According to two persons in the know,
the Mumbai-based conglomerate Bajaj Group (that operates Bajaj Allianz General
Insurance) has, since 2001, been planning to launch a standalone health insurance
company. However, the company itself hasn’t confirmed this.
All of them expect younger Indians to fall sick more often as time progresses. They realise
the importance of health insurance—inpatient and outpatient.
My home is a demon-goddess
the-ken.com/story/my-home-is-a-demon-goddess
December 16, 2018
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Gate 42C of Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport takes you back in time.
As you descend the two storeys from the other gates, you move from plush carpeting to
linoleum floors, out of the silent airport to gates where flights are announced on speakers
and yelled out by staff members.
Uniformed staff have given way to a middle-aged woman in salwar kameez and cardigan,
with a name tag around her neck, talking on the phone to her son who has or has not yet
eaten breakfast. The aeroplane, when it arrives two hours late, turns out to be equally a
creature of some decades ago, a small ATR plane with 70-odd seats and doors that fold
down to form its short staircase to the ground. On the flight, a group of middle-aged
women on holiday repeatedly ask the air hostess if the plane is safe, if it is pressurised, if
it can fly.
The setting is strangely apropos for the beginning of a trip to a home I left 27 years ago. It
is snowing in Manali, the year’s first snowfall, and as we circle the airport, waiting for
clear weather and the signal to land, I press my forehead to the window. Soon, barren hills
give way to lush valley. I can see a frothing river—my frothing river. A sudden runway
adjacent to the riverbank, a bumpy landing, ears popping from the change in pressure,
and I am home.
***
“Home” is a funny word for a place to which you have never belonged—not in any of the
traditional ways of belonging, not by birth or marriage or ancestry. But something has
carried four generations of my family in and out of the state of Himachal Pradesh, some
the-ken.com-My home is a demon-goddess 1/2 517

calling that I have inherited, some way in which we have always belonged to these
mountains.
At Partition, my maternal great-grandparents moved to Shimla while it was capital of

Indian Punjab; one great-grandfather as vice-chancellor of Panjab University, another at
the department of agriculture. My grandparents met in a rare co-ed college there, and
long after they moved to Delhi, the mountains continued to be central to their lives.
My mother went to school in Shimla, and then, during a family holiday to Manali at the
age of 15, she fell in love with the little town of apple orchards, tall deodars and gushing
river. In the early 1970s, she made many solitary trips there for her architecture
dissertation; after college, she married my father and moved back, first to Shimla and
then, when my brother and I were toddlers, to Manali.
My parents were building Riverbanks, a hotel at Chaudhan Meel (which literally

translates to “14 kilometres”, because this spot on the national highway is marked only by
its distance from Manali).
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Nazara’s 22-year survival journey to $80 million gaming
IPO
the-ken.com/story/nazaras-journey-to-80-million-gaming-ipo
March 25, 2021
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“This is the decade of gaming in India,” says Nitish Mittersain, founder of Nazara
Technologies, in an interview with The Ken. Mittersain isn’t shy to admit that he’s
probably said this line about 500 times in the last month alone as part of initial public
offering (IPO) roadshows. Still, he insists, the sentiment is genuine. “I’ve never felt it
[before] really as much as I do now,” he says.
Mittersain clearly isn’t the only person who feels this way. Gaming company Nazara’s Rs
583 crore (~$80 million) IPO issue was oversubscribed 175.5 times last week. It’s the
third-highest subscription for an Indian IPO with an issue size of more than Rs 200
crore ($27.5 million).
When the 22-year-old company lists on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on 30 March,
analysts expect a market capitalisation of around Rs 6,000 crore ($826 million). “It
should list on the market at about Rs 2,000 ($27.5) per share,” says Altaf Siddiqui,
managing director and CEO of Enrich Advisors, an investment advisory firm focused on
pre-IPO equities.
To put Nazara’s prospects in context, Info Edge, which owns companies like job portal
Naukri and property portal 99acres, is one of the few other tech stocks in India. It trades
at about Rs 4,337 ($59.7) and has a market capitalisation of $8.4 billion.
Among the companies floating their IPOs this time around, Nazara is not just the only
tech company, but also the lone gaming company of its vintage.
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While ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s investment in the company is significant in
convincing investors, in many ways, it’s impressive that Nazara has even survived this
long. The last 20 years have seen scores of gaming companies launch and then fall by the
wayside as the sector evolved from online games to SMS-based games, WAP games, and,
finally, smartphone games. Nazara has seen the gaming verticals of internet portals like
Indiatimes, Sify, and Rediff come and go. Getting to where it is now required cockroach-
like survival skills— stubbornly clinging to life despite the universe conspiring to render
it extinct.
Game theory
If the size of the Indian gaming industry is about $900 million, $500 million of that is
from real-money games like rummy, according to Nazara’s annual report for the year
ended March 2020.
Nazara survived two near-death experiences. First, when the dotcom bubble burst in
2000; and then again in 2016 after the entry of telco Reliance Jio, which killed mobile
value-added services ( VAS
AUTHOR
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NCDC moves from frontline to sidelines in India’s
epidemic response
the-ken.com/story/ncdc-india-covid-response
June 23, 2020
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On 2 April, the World Bank approved $1 billion in aid to bolster India’s response to the
Covid-19 pandemic. The funding was to help sharpen the tips of India’s trident in the fight
against the virus—the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the National Centre
for Disease Control (NCDC), and the National Health Mission (NHM).
Already, India’s health ministry has released about half of this aid—Rs 4,114 crore ($540
million)—to states, and hopes to see results soon. But while the funding has helped ICMR
and NHM ramp up testing and treatment, respectively, NCDC—which is meant to monitor
and trace the spread of Covid-19—finds itself in a rut. Its flagship programme, the
Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), could have done more during the
unfolding health crisis.
World Bank’s funding

It includes $350 million in emergency support for scaling up isolation wards and
intensive care units, and purchase of testing kits, personal protective equipment,
ventilators, and medicines. The other portion of the committed $1 billion will be utilised
to strengthen India's ability to respond to such healthcare emergencies in future.
Part of this comes down to the logistics involved. Conducting testing and treatment is
straightforward enough. Tracing, however, is a whole other matter.
“It is IDSP’s job to control disease outbreaks from turning into epidemics,” said an official
working with the health ministry, who did not want to be named because they are not
the-ken.com-NCDC moves from frontline to sidelines in Indias epidemic response 1/2 521
allowed to talk to the media. “They have been India’s first line of defence. But it is a
hugely manpower- and resource-heavy task to control outbreaks.”
IDSP, after all, is tasked with tracing outbreaks of 21 infectious diseases—including

malaria, viral hepatitis, and chickenpox. To do this, it is expected to collect data from
every healthcare body across the country, from primary care centres to community
healthcare centres, hospitals, and laboratories. In case this wasn’t hard enough, the
private sector, which accounts for 70% of India’s inpatient capacity, isn’t obligated to
share data with IDSP.
“IDSP always finds obstacles and challenges in working with everyone, and we have found
no permanent fix to it,” said a senior executive with a not-for-profit, which is working
with the government.
contact tracing
Covid-19
ICMR
Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme
Ministry of Health
National Health Mission
NCDC
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News from the Editorial team
the-ken.com/blog/news-from-the-editorial-team
June 4, 2018
After news of profitability, our post on privacy and data collection, let me shift the
conversation back to business. Back to telling good stories. Back to journalists who do
most of the heavy lifting. In that context, I’m glad we have another writer joining us.
the-ken.com-News from the Editorial team 1/3 523

Vivek Ananth joins us from Cogencis. After dabbling with an auditing job and then at a
software product company, Vivek decided to take the plunge into journalism. In his last
assignment, Vivek was at Cogencis, a financial newswire. He says that it was his love for
writing that got him excited about journalism. A Chartered Accountant, Vivek completed
his post-graduate diploma in journalism from IIJNM Bengaluru in 2016. The man says
he’s a knowledge hog but hasn’t yet learned how to stack reams of information in his
head. For now, I’ve told him to focus. At The Ken, Vivek will write on the intersection of
technology and business. Simply put, a world of possibilities for good stories.
You can reach Vivek at first name at the rate the-ken dot com.
Hiring
Vivek Ananth
AUTHOR
Ashish K. Mishra

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No rapid results in India’s race for rapid testing kits
the-ken.com/story/no-rapid-results-for-rapid-tests
April 10, 2020
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It was as recently as 12 March when Ram Pramod Tiwari began work on a rapid antibody
test to detect Covid-19. By 25 March, claims Tiwari, he and his team of two lab assistants
had a sample kit ready to be vetted by the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune,
Maharashtra. Tiwari is the technical director of Vanguard Diagnostics, a five-year-old,
Delhi-based diagnostics manufacturer. Vanguard’s rapid antibody test is one of the few
kits approved for usage by NIV.
Getting this approval amid a nationwide lockdown wasn’t easy. Vanguard had to obtain
special passes to transport the kit samples by autorickshaw to the Delhi airport. From
there, it was flown to Mumbai, where a partner agency was waiting to collect and
transport it to NIV in Pune, Tiwari says. The effort paid off—on 2 April, two days after
shipping the kits to Pune, they received NIV approval.
Vanguard’s lucky. So far, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR)—the apex body
in charge of India’s Covid-19 strategy—had a rather conservative approach to testing. But
that is simply no longer an option as the spread of the virus continues.
"No one knows the etymology of this disease. As a scientist, even I'm scared to handle
these [infected] samples"
R P Tiwari, Vanguard
Already, the infection rate is doubling every four days. Densely populated cities like
Mumbai are now feared to have entered the dreaded community transmission phase.
States like Maharashtra and Kerala have clamped down on all movement to and from “
hotspots ”—areas with a wide prevalence of the disease. Within these zones, states need a
quick surveillance and segregation mechanism to figure just how quickly the virus is
spreading.
A new phase of response demands a new testing regime. One that’s nimbler, quicker, and
less expensive than PCR tests. Rapid antibody tests, like those produced by Vanguard,
check all those boxes.
Chain reaction
India’s entering a new, more aggressive phase of the Covid-19

pandemic control. Rapid antibody tests will be crucial, both as
screening and epidemiological tool. Diagnostic companies see a
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golden opportunity but none yet are close to delivering the
massive numbers that India needs
Olina Banerji, 10 Apr 2020
Rapid antibody tests are the newest weapon in India’s response to the Covid-19
pandemic. Except they’re in short supply globally
The sharp rise in infections has increased the need for testing at scale. PCR kits,
expensive and difficult to use, can’t get the job done
But ICMR’s approval process is a bottleneck for manufacturers. They’re trying to

circumvent the process by sourcing globally
Rapid kits are the new Covid-19 gold rush. But manufacturers still aren’t close to
delivering them in sizeable numbers
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No room to breathe: India’s oxygen scarcity isn’t just
about production
the-ken.com/story/no-room-to-breathe-indias-oxygen-scarcity-isnt-just-about-production
April 30, 2021
A breathless country
After being caught unprepared for a lethal second wave, India has
ramped up its oxygen production and sought foreign help.
Fundamental problems with India’s oxygen supply chain,
however, could keep India’s oxygen tanks empty
Maitri Porecha, 30 Apr 2021
India’s oxygen needs have shot up to over 11X of its pre-pandemic demand, almost all
of which needs to be directed towards medical use
While production is being ramped up to over 9,000 metric tonnes per day, there are not
enough tankers to supply oxygen to its end point in hospitals or patients' homes
Efforts to speed oxygen transport through rail and even air-lifting empty tankers has also
been limited in impact, while oxygen plants promised by the govt are a long way away
With oxygen supplies scarce, a black market has emerged. Vendors are selling oxygen
cylinder refills at up to 4X the price, while oxygen concentrators have also become more
expensive
the-ken.com-No room to breathe Indias oxygen scarcity isnt just about production 1/2 528
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This week, India crossed a grim milestone—over 200,000 people have officially died due
to the Covid-19 virus. The situation in the country is dire—patients and their desperate
families are scrambling to secure potentially life-saving resources to avoid joining the long
queues forming outside the country’s overburdened crematoriums. Social media
platforms remain cluttered with urgent appeals for everything from drugs like remdesivir
and favipiravir to blood plasma. The most glaring shortfall, though, has been Liquid
Medical Oxygen (LMO).
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Not all is gospel in Cyble’s bible
the-ken.com/story/not-all-is-gospel-in-cybles-bible
November 17, 2020
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On 14 October, when hackers breached the database of online grocer Bigbasket, it set off a
chain of events that other startups have become only too familiar with over the past year.
As in the case of platforms such as concierge service Dunzo and edtech unicorn
Unacademy, the breach was not brought to light by government agencies or established
private cybersecurity companies. Instead, it came from a two-year-old cyber threat
intelligence firm, Cyble.
The company, headquartered in Georgia, USA, has a simple modus operandi. First, it
notifies the victim. In Bigbasket’s case, offering to resolve the matter, albeit for twice as
much as the $40,000 ransom being touted on the dark web. If the victim doesn’t enlist its
services, the consequences effectively amount to public shaming.
When Bigbasket declined Cyble’s offer, choosing eventually to file a First Information
Report with the Bengaluru Police cyber crime cell, Cyble went public with details of the
breach.
Southeast Asian hotel aggregator RedDoorz knows this playbook well. Its own breach
occurred well over a month before Bigbasket’s hack. On 19 September, Cyble informed the
company of the hack, claiming hackers on the dark web were willing to trade massive
amounts of its customer data. Cyble’s initial pitch was straightforward—it would help in
retrieving the stolen data only if the company subscribed to its services for $140,000,
alleged an executive who works closely with RedDoorz.
Like Bigbasket, RedDoorz declined to play ball. Still, Cyble persisted, telling the company
that the data would be out for sale on the dark web in the next 72 hours, claims the
executive quoted above. Having verified the hack did actually happen, RedDoorz chose
instead to go public with details of the hack the next day, informing users and police
authorities about the breach.
Despite this, Cyble took one last crack at pitching to RedDoorz, says the executive. It told
the startup that it had bought the hacked data outright—about 5.7 million records in all—
asking RedDoorz one final time if it would like to subscribe to Cyble’s services, says the
executive quoted earlier.
The Ken has accessed a report the startup compiled for law enforcement agencies
following the event. It raised two red flags—Cyble refused to disclose any details of the
dark web source on which RedDoorz’ data was available.
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The Breach
Two-year-old cyber threat intelligence firm Cyble has made a

name for itself by flagging data breaches in massive startups like
RedDoorz and Bigbasket. Not everyone is convinced of its
intentions and methods
Pratap Vikram Singh, 17 Nov 2020
In just two years, Cyble has built up a formidable reputation as a cyber threat
intelligence company
It has been first to flag data breaches at unicorns like Bigbasket, as well as SEA's
RedDoorz
The victims of these breaches, however, aren't always grateful. Many accuse Cyble of
using these hacks to push its own services
For some who refused its services, Cyble publicly blogged about the breaches. Some
companies even took legal action against the firm
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Not all’s lost; some jobs could survive post-Covid India
the-ken.com/story/post-covid-jobs-market
April 8, 2020
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India’s economy has faced three big blows over the last decade. First, the global financial
crisis of 2008, which saw the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate
collapse to 3.9%—the lowest growth rate since 1991. Then, in November 2016, India saw
demonetisation , the economic impact of which has been likened by some experts to 86%
blood being changed in the human body. And now we have the Covid-19 pandemic, which
is a bit like the financial crisis and demonetisation rolled into one.
There is no telling how long the Covid-driven slowdown will last. But the demand shock
the economy is currently experiencing should sow the seeds of a turn in the business cycle
a few quarters from now.
In the larger scheme of things, India’s already-stressed job market will be hit hard. But as
inventory piles up, the current reduction in demand is bound to drive down general price
levels. This reduction—for raw materials, rentals, wages—should then translate into a
lower cost of production, which eventually should cause demand and supply to rise again.
This whole loop also tends to speed up if oil prices drop, because companies can then cut
back on costs.
This is not an unfamiliar pattern. After the financial crisis, in the year ended March 2009,
India’s nominal GDP growth rate crashed to a five-year low. But the next year saw a 68%
increase in inventory, as per national accounts data —this was serendipitously
accompanied with oil prices dropping to a three-year low. Eventually, India’s nominal
GDP growth recovered and rose to 20% by the year ended March 2011.
Similarly, following demonetisation in 2016, the year ended March 2018 saw an 82%
increase in inventory levels. Fortunately, oil prices were low through 2017, averaging $33-
34/barrel. This, in turn, laid the foundation for an improvement in activity levels in the
year ended March 2018.
The key takeaway here is that it’s not necessarily all doom and gloom. While jobs, make
no mistake, are scant—with high unemployment at the aggregate level—there are sectors
in the economy that continue to grow and hire.
The last available big-picture government report on India’s employment scenario is the
July 2017-June 2018 labour force survey.
The right resumes
the-ken.com-Not alls lost some jobs could survive post-Covid India 1/2 532
As the pandemic shakes up the jobs market, it is worth
identifying pockets that had been hiring, and therefore, could get
back up on their feet soon
Ritika Mankar, 8 Apr 2020
Newer sectors together added about 95,000 more jobs in 2019 as compared to 2018—
which is 2.6X the jobs created by old-economy industries
That's not the only kind of new stepping in for the exhausted oldies. Younger cities are
taking the baton and stepping up to provide employment
80% of the increase in new jobs have been concentrated in four cities—Bengaluru,
Hyderabad, Pune, and Ahmedabad
This is no coincidence. A lot of the new opportunities come from tech-related fields, and
these cities are young and tech-savvy
the-ken.com-Not alls lost some jobs could survive post-Covid India 2/2 533
NPCI, The God of Many Things
the-ken.com/story/npci-god-many-things
February 26, 2018
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The hottest sector for investments, innovation and burning venture money in India aren’t
e-commerce, food delivery or ride-hailing. It’s digital payments. From 671 million
transactions in Nov 2016 when over 85% of India’s physical currency was summarily
demonetised, the volume of digital transactions has grown to over a billion by the end of
2017. The projected market is slated to be $500 billion by 2020. Whether local or
international, all the 800-pound gorillas of tech are battling it out for leadership with
their own payments products—Flipkart with PhonePe, Google with Tez, Facebook with
Whatsapp Payments, Amazon and Alibaba-backed Paytm*.
The Indian government itself is putting all its might behind digital payments, even
spending serious taxpayer money to get more people to adopt it.
And at the epicentre of this action stands the National Payments Corporation of India
(NPCI)—a creature like no other. Like a mythical god with multiple faces or avatars, it is
simultaneously one thing, many things and nothing.
NPCI owns and operates all retail payments including the Unified Payments Interface
(UPI), an instantaneous payment network that helps send money to people the way we
send emails. UPI is a one-of-a-kind system, with no precedents. It is the rails on top of
which tech companies are building their own branded payments apps.
Depending on the time and context, NPCI is a competitor. It is a platform. It is a

regulator. It is an industry association. It is a profitable non-profit. It is a rule maker. It is
a judge. It is a bystander.
“Beta” in Hindsight
the-ken.com-NPCI The God of Many Things 1/2 534

In May 2017, we were the first to call out NPCI’s identity crisis and its potential conflicts
of interest. It’s now February 2018, and NPCI’s metamorphosis is complete.
The immediate trigger is, once again, our 14 February article on Facebook’s WhatsApp
getting preferential treatment by NPCI to pave the way for the launch of its payments
features. And that reminder came from the founder of India’s biggest payments company
—Paytm. (Editor’s note: Sharma is one of the angel investors in The Ken.)
After failing to win war against India’s open internet with cheap tricks of free basics,
Facebook is again in play.
Killing beautiful open UPI system with its custom close garden implementation.
I am surprised, champions of open @India_Stack , let it happen ! https://t.co/wIsNuF1AiB
— Vijay Shekhar Sharma (@vijayshekhar) February 14, 2018
The after-effect was immediate.
The news of WhatsApp’s business head for India Neeraj Arora quitting Paytm’s board
broke the very next day (it would later emerge that he had quit earlier, over conflict of
interest).
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Of pride and prejudice: Inside the human mind
the-ken.com/story/human-mind-limits-multitasking
October 6, 2018
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If you were a teenager in the 1990s, you may remember En Vogue’s chart-topping song
which went “Free your mind and the rest will follow”. Western philosophy has celebrated
the past three centuries or so—the modern era, if you will—as the freeing of the human
mind. (The 18th century, for instance, is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of
Reason.) Indeed, this time has been dominated not only by the rise of Western
democracies but also, in parallel, the rise of scientific thought and technological progress
—most spectacularly embodied in the Industrial Revolution.
Even with the benefit of hundreds of years of hindsight, the mind boggles at the sheer
number of inventions produced by this revolution—the steam engine, the internal
combustion engine, the telegraph, the light bulb, the sewing machine and much more.
And there you were celebrating Elon Musk’s car floating in space?
The human mind created all this, and therefore it stands to reason that the human mind
must be a super-charged supercomputer powering the progress of civilisation. Spinoza,
the German philosopher, said in Proposition 23 of Ethics, “The human mind cannot be
absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal.”
His exaggerated faith in the human mind was symptomatic of the era he lived in (1632 to
1677).
And what of our brain, that physical human organ that is closely related to our intangible
mind? The mind might truly be without limits, but psychologists have shown us over the
past 10 years that there is a gulf between our perception of how powerful our brains are
and their true abilities.
the-ken.com-Of pride and prejudice Inside the human mind 1/2 536
The hubris of the free mind
Everyone agrees that traffic sucks. But here’s the problem: over the past 50 years, urban
planners across the world have struggled to predict traffic flows, in spite of sustained
efforts to do so. The difficulty stems from two distinct factors: the lack of systematic and
accurate data on traffic flows across entire cities and the diversity of drivers’ self-adaptive
decisions with regards to the routes they take.
To complicate matters further, the advent of GPS has made these decisions even more
self-adaptive. Last year we took Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Road to go to IIT Bombay for
the Mood Indigo festival because Google Maps told us so. But Google Maps also told the
same thing to another 150 people. The result? By the time we reached the college, our
friends, who took the Eastern Express Highway had already arrived.
Complex traffic flows are like the complex neural networks in our mind. Vanilla or
chocolate ice cream, mid-cap or small-cap stocks, route 1 or route 2—there’s a battle
royale raging in the different factions of your brains over simple decisions. Understanding
this chaotic complexity of the brain—and abandoning the computer-related analogies of
the brain—is central to coming to terms with its strengths and weaknesses.
the-ken.com-Of pride and prejudice Inside the human mind 2/2 537
OLX India
the-ken.com/story/btn-olx-india-2017
November 15, 2017
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What does OLX do? OLX is a “horizontal classified” company that allows folks to post free
online ads to sell services and goods of all kinds—from electronics and furniture to bikes
and cars. Unlike traditional classifieds where companies advertise their wares, OLX is
primarily focused on the C2C (Consumer to Consumer) space where individuals sell pre-
owned household items and vehicles. OLX India also serves as an online marketplace for
jobs and real estate. Originally founded in Argentina in 2006, the company has operations
in more than 45 countries today and has a footprint that serves more than 200 million
users every month. Naspers, the South African media conglomerate, owns 95% of OLX.
Olx
OLX India Private Limited
As per MCA records
Amarjit Singh Batra
CEO
Headquarters
Gurgaon
Read more
Investors
Naspers
Competitors
the-ken.com-OLX India 1/3 538

Quikr
What has OLX been up to?

OLX now claims to have more than 80% of the market share in the C2C classifieds space
in India and is engaged in an attritional battle with its direct competitor, Quikr. OLX’s
sweet spots are the pre-owned cars and pre-owned bikes categories where it claims to
have a 70% share of the market. And make no mistake about it, the market is huge—the
company itself believes that the value of unused goods stored away in Indian homes is Rs.
79,000 crore. As is inevitable, such a large potential market attracts multiple companies
angling for a piece of the pie. Quikr, the Tiger Global-funded Indian Unicorn, has been
spending millions of dollars every month attempting to capture the market and stave off
OLX. Amazon’s recent entry in the space brings forth new competitive challenges to the
incumbents. OLX has a second string to its bow in the form of services such as jobs and
real estate.
Results:
Rs 8 crore: This was OLX’s profit after tax for the year ending March 2017. One of the
few e-commerce companies in India that actually pays income tax.
Rs 92.6 crore: The revenue OLX made from its operations in the year ending March
2017. The figure is a 58% increase over the previous year.
Rs 76 crore: The revenue OLX India made by providing Business Support Services
(marketing, customer support & other services) to its holding company, OLX India BV.
Even though the company counts this under operating revenue, the fact of the matter is

that this is a related party transaction that has little to do with the core market-facing
endeavours of the company.
Rs 16.6 crore: How much OLX made from subscription and advertising services. This
figure represents the “true” operational revenue of the company. While this sum is
admittedly a lot smaller than the nearly Rs 100 crore topline mentioned above, the
company’s progress can be measured by the fact that the corresponding figure for the
previous year was just Rs 68 lakhs, representing an increase of nearly 25X.
Rs 56 crore: The amount OLX spent on employee benefits including salaries, a 53%
increase over the previous year’s figure.
Rs 19.7 crore: This is how much OLX spent on other expenses, including a surprisingly
low figure of Rs 69 lakh on advertising and business promotion. This sum is probably
lower than the daily marketing budget of many other e-commerce firms in India.
Rs 8.5 lakh: OLX’s prescribed CSR expenditure (2% of average net profit for last three
financial years)
Zero: OLX’s actual CSR expenditure – the company apparently “could not identify a
suitable organisation for this purpose” and intends to spend the prescribed amount in the
next financial year.

In the past year, OLX has improved its business traction and metrics steadily but not
spectacularly. Despite the headlines touting OLX’s profitability, the company still has a
long way to achieve operational profitability in its core subscription and advertising
business lines. The recent announcement that OLX India’s long-time CEO, Amarjit Singh
Batra will be moving out of OLX and India to Naspers means that in addition to external
market and competitive challenges, the company has to deal with internal organisational
and leadership issues too

On the elevator pitches of Niti Aayog’s Champions of
Change
the-ken.com/story/elevator-pitches-niti-aayogs-champions-change
September 5, 2017
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On 8 August 2017, about 200 entrepreneurs’ inboxes lit up with an email from an
unexpected sender. It was Amitabh Kant, the chief executive of Niti Aayog, inviting them
for a special interaction with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I first thought someone
was pulling my leg,” says one of the founders who was invited. After Digital India and
Start-up India, a new initiative called Champions of Change was floated. Simply put, the
Niti Aayog wanted to get itself a room with the vaunted Indian entrepreneurs and hear
first hand what they had to offer.
“The general assumption is that one needs a lot of influence to get the audience of the
Prime Minister, but here we were almost getting wooed,” adds the founder quoted above.
Conspicuously absent at the event though were foreign tech companies like Uber and
Amazon. The event was strictly for Indian companies. Only. Some of these foreign
companies, commented one of the attendees, “interact regularly with the government, and
have already managed to establish a relationship there.” If the government didn’t invite
the foreign companies fearing they would extend a wish list to the government, the Indian
startups made up for it.
But in the end, it turned to be a John F Kennedy-moment when the US President

famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country.”
“I was not very clear what the event was for, but when we got there we realised it was
about what startups can do for the country, and not the other way around,” says the
founder of a Bengaluru-based startup. In fact, the Niti Aayog officials intervened multiple
times during the group discussions as a lot of entrepreneurs kept asking for tax breaks,
subsidies, and incentives for their sectors, said another founder. Also, many
entrepreneurs could not come up with specific suggestions for the government to
implement; instead they asked for general benefits for their sector or their own
companies.
In all fairness, startups are hardwired to not just pitch but pitch hard. So it is unlikely to
find startups who would have passed up on this opportunity to make the most of the
uninterrupted face time with the who’s who of the government
An eclectic mix of startups was invited to attend the event on 16 and 17 August—it
included some of the biggest names as well as those still in seed stages—to meet with PM
Modi and a retinue of secretaries and cabinet ministers. Another 200 young CEOs of
the-ken.com-On the elevator pitches of Niti Aayogs Champions of Change 1/2 541
more mature companies were invited on 21 and 22 August.
The Niti Aayog had a crew of 20-25 young professionals, with subject knowledge,
managing the event. The startups were shepherded into six groups of 25-30 people each
to come up with solutions on themes like education and skilling, digital India, health and
nutrition, sustainability, including one on soft power.
All ears
What happened in a room full of startup founders who had the

ears of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet?
Arundhati Ramanathan, 5 Sep 2017
Niti Aayog's Champions of Change initiative was rolled out to assess what startups had
to offer
Startup founders had a wishlist that if rolled out could benefit their companies
It ranged from creating a 'Bhasha Mission' to setting up policy think tank under each
ministry
Niti Aayog is demonstrating that it is keen on following through with the ideas
discussed
the-ken.com-On the elevator pitches of Niti Aayogs Champions of Change 2/2 542
On the road to killing cash, debit cards need a rethink
the-ken.com/story/cash-debit-cards-rethink
April 16, 2019
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The humble debit card may already be on the verge of obsolescence in India.
A couple of months ago, I had questioned the logic of the fee structure for card payments
—particularly debit cards—in a piece titled “How to kill cash”. Banks across the board
have little incentive to push for greater use of offline card payments, and the way to fix
that, I’d argued, is to flip the free structure on its head.
A quick recap: the card payment industry works on a decades-old model. You have an
issuing bank—the one that issues you your debit or credit card. Let’s call it Bank A. On the
other side you have the acquirer bank, Bank B, which “acquires” merchants—i.e.
convinces them to lease card machines, or point-of-sale (PoS) devices.
When you use your card at a PoS terminal, Bank B pays the merchant the amount
entered, after deducting a fee called the merchant discount rate (MDR). This is usually a
combination of device rental, fixed fee and variable fees tied to the number or value of
transactions the merchant accepts.
Bank B then collects from Bank A, which in turn, bills you (if you have a credit card) or
debits your savings account instantly (if you have a debit card). But Bank B also has to pay
Bank A an interchange fee.
I suggested that Bank A should instead pay Bank B a nominal fee for using the PoS
terminal—exactly as it works when you use Bank A’s debit card to pull out cash at Bank
B’s ATM. I assumed two things in my hypothesis: (a) debit cards would continue to be the
payment instrument of choice; and (b) there is leeway for debit card issuers to fund a
payment transaction, given that their costs were very different from credit card issuers.
The article generated lots of discussion, led me to dig deep into issuer-side economics
and, surprisingly, has led to a very different interpretation—thanks to the Unified
Payments Interface, or UPI, debit cards may be the first roadkill on the way to killing
cash.
Consider a few data points. Over a 10-month period starting April 2018 (the latest for
which comparable data is available across the payments ecosystem).
the-ken.com-On the road to killing cash debit cards need a rethink 1/3 543
1. Debit cards in circulation stagnated at 931 million. The number of unique
cardholders is much lower—perhaps about 700 million. But according to some
estimates, almost half of India’s retail bank accounts are inactive. And while the
government has created over 350 million new bank accounts under its flagship
financial inclusion programme, the Jan Dhan Yojana, there is no data available on
their uniqueness (i.e. did the beneficiary already have an account?) or their usage.
Plastic's troubles
Challenged by the rise of more flexible digital payment systems

like UPI, debit cards need to change—or die
Srikanth Rajagopalan, 16 Apr 2019
Transactions through the Unified Payments Interface have been booming—back of the
envelope estimates put UPI merchant payments at 36% of debit card payments
The debit card, on the other hand, has been in a state of stagnation, with growth in the
number of cards issued, or even the number of transactions, slowing
But while the future of finance may very well be all-digital, the basic debit card still has a
role to play in fostering a cash-free world—if the industry gets its act together
Can large banks and card networks revamp the economics of card payments, rethink
their customer segmentation and explore new use cases entirely?
On the trail of Gilead’s $1000-pill
the-ken.com/story/on-the-trail-gilead-1000-pill
September 11, 2017
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Every once in a while comes a discovery that brings about a seismic change. And every
once in a while, also comes a business decision that enhances the seismic effect. One such
discovery was the drug sofosbuvir, approved in late 2013 by the US regulator for treating
Hepatitis C. It was the first time a drug could ‘cure’ this deadly, but silent, viral infection.
Gilead Sciences sized up the windfall and priced it at $1000 a pill, the total treatment tab
amounting to $90,000. The whiplash against the offensively high pricing was global but
in India, the mood of generics drug makers was somewhat combative. It isn’t so now,
though.
Gilead had reacted swiftly. In September 2014, it chose to give voluntary licenses of its
less-than-a-year old drug to Indian generics makers—not one or two, but to 11 of them for
selling in over 90 countries. Its decision proved to be seismic. As the generics hit the
market, the $10-a-pill price stirred up the global patient group; thousands travelled to
India to buy the full course.
Looking back from the third anniversary of that epic decision, it’s fair to say it woke the
world to the ticking time bomb. Some 130-150 million people worldwide and at least 8-10
million in India have Hepatitis C. On 28 July, the Indian government, under pressure
from the WHO and patient advocacy groups, said it’d start a national programme on Hep-
C, just like it has for TB and malaria, by December.
“For the first time, we have a drug that can finish the virus. Hepatitis C is a low hanging
fruit for success and we must eradicate the disease, like polio,” says Dr SK Sarin, eminent
gastroenterologist, and director of the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences in Delhi. “We
were instrumental in convincing John Martin [current chairman and then CEO of Gilead]
for lowering the price. Thanks to Gilead’s generosity, access to this care is now possible.”
A lot of Indian companies jumped into what was clearly a niche market. Prices crashed in
no time. It turned out to be good in the short term but may prove tricky in the long term
as the market hasn’t grown the way it was expected. As free promotional camps and
diagnostics disappeared, so did the demand burst. Many manufacturers have decamped.
In two years, Gilead’s license to Indian generic companies, which pay 7% royalty to the US
pharma, will come up for renewal. Can Indian patients, generic makers, and government
make a success of this opportunity?
A trigger came on 5 September when the Delhi High Court admitted a public interest
litigation from patient groups asking for free testing and treatment for Hepatitis C in the
National Capital Territory of Delhi. The Court has asked the Delhi government for a status
report.
the-ken.com-On the trail of Gileads 1000-pill 1/2 546

Globally, Indian generics companies are quoted everywhere for bringing down the price of
HCV drugs.
Breakthrough or backbreaking?
You have at least 8-10 million people with Hepatitis C in India; you
are leaving behind 10-15% difficult-to-treat patients, and you have
new infections of this silent killer every year. Yet you can
eradicate it, like Polio. Because there’s a drug. So, what’s next?
Seema Singh, 11 Sep 2017
Gilead’s voluntary license to Indian generic makers for sofosbuvir three years ago,
brought down the price from $1000 a pill to $10, and then to $3 a pill. Leading doctors
believe it’d hit $1/pill soon
Many manufacturers have decamped. The remaining ones believe just reducing the price
will not wipe out this virus which can remain dormant for as long as 20 years, eating
away the liver
Doctors are advocating a ‘recall policy’ on one hand and a national programme on the
other. Both require resources for diagnostics and drugs. A PIL towards this is now
accepted in the Delhi High Court
By the time Gilead’s voluntary license comes up for renewal in two years, would drug
companies, government and Indians be moving towards Hep C eradication?
the-ken.com-On the trail of Gileads 1000-pill 2/2 547

One down, nine to go: TeamIndus’ baby step in the
giant moonwalk
the-ken.com/story/one-nine-go-teamindus-baby-step-giant-moonwalk
October 6, 2017
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If in August the Google Lunar XPRIZE cheered the finalists by relaxing the launch date
from December 2017 to March 2018, on Thursday it kicked off the first formal evaluation
process from India. It isn’t surprising that the GLXP has chosen to start with Bengaluru
because two finalists are hitching their ride on an Indian rocket, one of whom has chosen
a very public path to this mission. In a 10-step evaluation process, the Indian finalist,
TeamIndus, has crossed the first step towards the $30-million prize. It has demonstrated
the ‘readiness’ of its spacecraft and payload to the visiting judges.
After initial dillydallying, TeamIndus has secured qualification testing of its spacecraft at
the Research Centre Imarat (RCI), a defence facility in Hyderabad. The test was initially
planned to be conducted at the Isro Satellite Centre in Bengaluru. From the earlier
prototype, the qualification model has come a long way. Most significantly in reducing the
weight of the structures, from 92 kgs to 58 kgs, which should come as a relief to the team
because every gram saved in a space endeavour means cost reduction.
With dozens of cameras clicking away, PS Nair, TeamIndus’ Jedi Commander

(Structures), showed the spacecraft with a touch of sangfroid: “The qualification tests
were done in record time of one week.” Traditionally, such tests take 4-12 weeks. If all
goes well, learnings from such testing would add to the repertoire of what is now termed
as ‘new space’ technologies. Derek Webber, vice chairman of the judges’ panel, and a
former space industry executive said it was an unusually compressed testing period but
such are the ideas and technologies (if they eventually work) that the XPRIZE wants to
the-ken.com-One down nine to go TeamIndus baby step in the giant moonwalk 1/3 548
incubate. “As we evaluate these teams we are even discussing the definition of soft-
landing. We are open to new things, we are here to help not hinder the team,” Webber
said.
Team HAKUTO of Japan and TeamIndus are competing with three other teams for the
GLXP which requires private teams to land a spacecraft on the moon, move a rover for
500 metres and send pictures and video down to earth. The Japanese team is sending its
rover on the TeamIndus spacecraft.
The qualification model of TeamIndus' spacecraft
There are nine more steps to go before the judges give TeamIndus the green light to dock
its spacecraft on the Isro rocket in Sriharikota. The company also unveiled its mission
control centre on Thursday which would see the judges visiting again for a review when
the full flight rehearsals begin.
In fact, the ongoing first mission plan review isn’t complete yet but it is an opportune way
to drum up public support and enthusiasm. Chairman of the panel of judges, Alan Wells
from the University of Leicester, who has worked on 10 space missions, was mildly
surprised that TeamIndus had organised such a big event because most teams “prefer to
do reviews quietly”.
Chandrayaan-2
GLXP
Google
Isro
Team HAKUTO< Japan
TeamIndus
XPRIZE
Open Data: Choking India’s Innovation Pipe
the-ken.com/story/choking-innovation-pipe
June 13, 2017
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Know Your Defaulter, or KYD, launched in mid-2016. The startup’s software spiders
crawled through dozens and hundreds of data sources each day – court cases, company
filings, credit ratings and defaulter lists put out by banks and financial institutions. It
allowed anyone to instantly conduct an online due diligence on a company before entering
into any sort of agreement with it. In less than a year, KYD had saved tens, possibly
hundreds of millions of dollars for its users by helping them spot companies that were
unscrupulous.
Best Trip, a trip planning app that showed real-time road traffic conditions in the top six
Indian metro cities was credited with saving millions of commuter hours, vehicle fuel and
generating hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity and healthcare costs savings in
just the 17 months since its launch in late 2015.
There’s also the story of Compliance Scanner which started in 2014 as Data Watch. After
the first year of meandering, trying to find its business purpose, it pivoted into a useful
tool that allowed anyone to instantly identify the statutory compliance status of Indian
firms on various laws. Regulators, lawyers, consultants, civic-minded citizens and NGOs;
all relied on it to spot variances between what a company claimed in public, and what it
practiced in private. It was single handedly responsible for dozens of well-known
companies being found of falling short of their provident fund (EPFO) obligations.
This is where we must apologize and tell you that none of the above three examples are
true.
Know Your Defaulter, Best Trip and Compliance Scanner do not exist.
the-ken.com-Open Data Choking Indias Innovation Pipe 1/2 551

In fact, these startups cannot exist (and neither can the efficiency they generate) because
of the way various Indian governments and regulators have either ignored or actively
stymied the “Open Data” initiative.
What is open data?
“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any
purpose.”
Data = Innovation Fuel

A 2013 McKinsey research report showed how governments around the world could
unlock an additional $3 trillion (yes, that’s right) in economic value merely by enabling
open data across seven domains.
To quote from the report: “An estimated $3 trillion in annual economic potential could be
unlocked across seven domains. These benefits include increased efficiency, development
of new products and services, and consumer surplus (cost savings, convenience, better-
quality products). We consider societal benefits, but these are not quantified. For
example, we estimate the economic impact of improved education (higher wages), but not
the benefits that society derives from having well-educated citizens. We estimate that the
potential value would be divided roughly between the United States ($1.1 trillion), Europe
($900 billion) and the rest of the world ($1.7 trillion).”
The seven domains McKinsey identified were education, transportation, consumer

products, electricity, oil & gas, healthcare and consumer finance.
the-ken.com-Open Data Choking Indias Innovation Pipe 2/2 552

Otsuka, Mylan, & Government: A deal that will only fuel
the superbug
the-ken.com/story/otsuka-mylan-deal-superbug
August 30, 2017
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Well, it’s too late tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
— One, U2
The Irish rock band U2 committed the proceeds from its hit number ‘One’ to AIDS
research over two decades ago. The song was intended to shame pharmaceutical giants; to
make them provide HIV drugs to those who could not afford them in the developing
world. If it was a virus then, it’s bacteria now. The song can offer direction to the Indian
TB programme which is battling a superbug, too. Only if the Indian government listens,
carefully.
The hopes of those carrying drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) bacteria in India were
pinned on the decisions taken in the offices of the national TB programme, Indian Council
of Medical Research (ICMR) and Drug Controller General (DCGI) over the last one month
in Delhi. On 2 August, India became the first developing country to register Tokyo-based
Otsuka Pharmaceutical’s wonder drug—delamanid. It is one of the two new drugs
developed for TB in nearly 50 years. The drug did make it to India, but eight years after it
was granted patent and after registering in the European Union, Japan, Republic of
Korea, Hong Kong, and Turkey. But better late than never.
This approval is a win for the Indian patient. For now, at least. Delamanid, marketed
under the brand name Deltyba, is one of the two drugs that can treat the most desperate
cases of DR TB. Its presence is already high as India carries the highest burden of TB
anywhere in the world. Delamanid is recommended by the World Health Organisation for
all persons with multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) who are at high risk of treatment
failure, and this could be as many as 70% of persons living with MDR-TB, says Jennifer
Furin, a professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. There
is no doubt that delamanid could prick the expanding bubble of DR-TB in India, but that
is not why Otsuka has entered India.
the-ken.com-Otsuka Mylan amp Government A deal that will only fuel the superbug 1/3 553
The Japanese major, that was until a month ago patiently capturing the Western market,
had made it clear that if the drug will cross the ocean, it will be on its terms. On 24
August, Otsuka announced a deal with the US-based generic pharma Mylan which has a
large presence in India. The terms are: Mylan will only ‘help deliver’ the drug, not
manufacture it; and the government of India will accept a donation of the drug, not sell it.
Donation is better than no donation

Otsuka has claimed that because it does not have a commercial presence in the developing
world, it has not been able to make delamanid available, unlike bedaquiline.
Just do it
Plan A was local production of delamanid. Plan B could be using

the donated drugs to stall the superbug spread. If both fail, India
needs to act on plan C
Ruhi Kandhari, 30 Aug 2017
Over 100,000 people are infected with drug resistant tuberculosis in India. The most
resistant cases need access to either one or both —bedaquiline and delamanid
The government has not tried to license these life-saving drugs to ensure production and
affordability. Instead, it has accepted donation only to be used in six government funded
centers across the whole country
Donated, 10,600 courses of bedaquiline and 400 courses of delamanid are not nearly
enough to meet current and future needs of these drugs
The government has moved at a glacial pace in even using these drugs. Only about 600
patients have had access to bedaquiline till date. Is donation the best way to ensure
drug availability?
OYO’s Battle of the Bulge
the-ken.com/story/oyo-battle-of-the-bulge
February 20, 2020
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OYO is currently the most important startup in India, if not the world.
Hyperbole?
Maybe not.
For one thing, the budget hospitality startup is currently the great white hope for
SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund, the biggest and most influential VC in the
world. If SoftBank’s “crown jewel” turns out to be a lump of coal, the fund can all but kiss
its chances of raising the second Vision Fund—which is already struggling to get off the
ground—goodbye.
For another, OYO is India’s second-largest startup in terms of valuation. If OYO flames
out, the seismic repercussions on startup funding in India will reverberate for years.
So why are we discussing this now?
Because OYO is currently facing the unenviable position of having to fight the “Battle of
the Bulge”.
History aficionados will recognise the Battle of the Bulge as an iconic “last-stand” battle
during World War 2—one last desperate offensive campaign that Germany launched to
avert what seemed like inevitable defeat. OYO’s current predicament is something similar.
The last year has been annus horribilis for OYO. It saw widely-publicised problems
around dissatisfied hotel partners and disgruntled customers culminating in a purge
where nearly 20% of the company’s 12,000-strong workforce in India was laid off. There
were similar layoffs across its other group entities around the world. OYO now needs to
win a last-ditch battle to prevent these eddies from cascading into a deluge that takes the
company under.
But OYO has another “bulge” problem—the bulge of the wallet kind. A large part of OYO’s
mercurial growth can be attributed to the enormous sums of money raised from its
financial backers, most notably SoftBank (which owns nearly 50% of the company). Post
the chastening that SoftBank received during the WeWork IPO imbroglio, the halcyon
days of bottomless pits of capital were given a quiet burial. Like other SoftBank portfolio
firms throughout the world, OYO has discovered that even a seemingly infinite $100
billion fund has limits. Instead, it has been forced to abandon its “grow-at-all-costs”
mantra to build a “sustainable path towards profitability”.
The stakes are high. Can OYO conceivably progress towards this holy grail of profitability?
the-ken.com-OYOs Battle of the Bulge 1/3 556

OYO’s recently released audited financials for the year ended March 2019 is a good
starting point to help answer this question.
The sum of its parts

The headline numbers make for dire reading.
According to OYO’s latest results, its consolidated revenue stood at $951 million in the
year ended March 2019, compared to $211 million in the previous year. While this 4.5X
increase in revenue might seem impressive, it pales in comparison with the net loss—a
whopping 7X increase to $335 million in the same period, compared to $44 million the
prior year.
New numbers, old OYO
OYO’s latest audited financials show a company struggling both

home and away. These numbers highlight the long and winding
path to profitability OYO must walk
Sumanth Raghavendra, 20 Feb 2020
OYO is still far from positive unit economics in India and unlikely to get closer to
profitability
Its 2019 financials make for dire reading—its net loss increased 7X
OYO's topline operating revenue number of $581 million and gross margin of 14.7%
seem impressive, but are misleading
With nearly 75% of its losses stemming from its China business, OYO faces a tough road
ahead

Patanjali and the Pirates of Perfidy
the-ken.com/story/patanjali-brand-packaging
September 30, 2018
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Let’s start today with a quick game. Take a look at the image below for just one second,
not more.
Now, if we were to ask you what brand came to mind first, there is a good chance the
answer would be “Maggi Noodles”. The image, as you’ll see if you spend more than a
second, shows a packet of Patanjali Noodles.
This is what a pack of Maggi Noodles actually looks like:
the-ken.com-Patanjali and the Pirates of Perfidy 1/5 559

Here is a close-up of both the products side by side:
Notice the similarities—everything from the choice of the colours to the choice of imagery
is uncannily similar, yet just different enough to be distinct (say, keep the characteristic
red and yellow, but invert). Must be an accident, right?
Perhaps not.
Let’s play the game again. Take a look at this image for one second, just one second, and
tell us what comes to mind.
Cadbury’s 5 Star, anyone? It’s obviously not—this is a caramel chocolate from Patanjali
called Super Star—but the name and the visual cues immediately bring to mind 5 Star.
Here’s an actual one for comparison:

A coincidence? If once is an accident and twice is a coincidence, what would you say if it
happens three times? Five times? Ten times? Here, take a look.
Patanjali oats on the left, Kellogg’s Heart to Heart brand of oats on the right.
Patanjali biscuits on the left, Britannia’s Good Day biscuits on the right.
Patanjali’s basmati rice on the left, Daawat’s on the right.
Ditto with brown rice from the same two brands.

Coming back to Cadbury again, Patanjali’s got Power Vita (now, what does that sound
like?), a brown powder that’s a “herbal health and brain tonic”, with a chocolate flavour.
The similarities don’t stop at just food items. Here is Patanjali’s Kesh Kanti hair oil.
Now compare this with Emami’s Kesh King hair oil below.

And Patanjali’s Green Flush toilet cleaner with Harpic (see the labels).
While we are going to stop now, rest assured that this is by no means the entire set—there
are several more examples where Patanjali products are eerily reminiscent of other
brands.
Clearly, there is a zero percent chance that this is a coincidence.

Payments banks struggle to move beyond payments
the-ken.com/story/payments-banks-struggle-move-beyond-payments
March 23, 2019
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The first time around, payments banks—the country’s central bank’s biggest experiment
in creating a half-bank half-payment entity—bombed. In the short two-year history of
payments banks, everything that could possibly go wrong for them did. Crippling rules
from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Check. Companies backing out. Check. Regulatory
flip-flops on know-your-customer (KYC) norms. Check. Frauds. Check. Suspension and
fine. Check.
Payments banks run by Airtel, Paytm* and Fino were asked to suspend operations in
2017 and 2018 for serious transgressions—ranging from not taking explicit consent to
opening a bank account while doing KYC to not adhering to the Rs 100,000 (~$1,447)
deposit limit that the RBI imposed on payments banks. Before 2018 ended though, the
suspension was lifted from all three.
And now, when they have a second shot at this, they’re walking on eggshells. The banks
hired an army of banking correspondents (BCs) to go out on the streets and get people to
open payments bank accounts. But the kind of action they are now seeing is a tell. Agents
we spoke to now do two to three account openings a day, as compared to the hundreds
they were doing before the RBI stepped in.
In the bylanes of Mira Road, a suburb in Mumbai, The Ken visited at least seven mobile
retailers who are banking correspondents. And all of them have resumed doing KYC,
though this time they are sticking to the traditional paper-based KYC. Not the Aadhaar-
based electronic KYC (or e-KYC), which allowed banks to play fast and loose while taking
consent.
the-ken.com-Payments banks struggle to move beyond payments 1/3 564

The Supreme Court first banned the use of Aadhaar for e-KYC by companies in
September 2018, and then, in a total volte-face, the government introduced a bill in the
Parliament in January, which would amend the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 and the
Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002 to make the use of Aadhaar
during KYC voluntary. On 13 February, the ministry of finance released the amendments
to the PMLA.
This did bring cheer to payments banks, as the new amendments allowed voluntary e-
KYC for banks and telcos.
However, this joy was short-lived. Earlier this month, the Unique Identification
Authority of India (UIDAI) announced that private entities will have to pay for the e-KYC
and authentication services provided by the Authority.
“We could scale faster with e-KYC as it costs less compared to physical KYC, but to some
extent, the UIDAI has nullified it because now they are going to charge for it,” says
Shailesh Pandey, head of strategy and marketing at Fino Payments Bank.
Though the Aadhaar ordinance has now been approved, payments banks are not going
ahead with voluntary e-KYC as they are waiting for a formal circular from the RBI,
Pandey says. The retailers, meanwhile, are also holding back on Aadhaar-based e-KYC as
they have not been told by banks yet to resume it.
Aadhaar
Airtel
Fino
India Post
Payments Bank
Paytm
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
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PCOS—Diabetes’ little sister is growing up fast
the-ken.com/story/pcos-diabetes
March 22, 2019
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Always a skinny girl, Swati (name changed), a 25-year-old biochemist, started putting on
weight in her early twenties. Chalking it down to a slowing metabolism, she didn’t think
much of it. Until she missed her period. And missed it again in the following months.
After visiting her gynaecologist and undergoing an ultrasound exam, Swati was diagnosed
with polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS.
Put simply, PCOS is a metabolic syndrome that manifests in women of childbearing age
(between 15-30 years). Its external symptoms include irregular or no period for months,
growth of excess facial and body hair, mild to severe acne, and weight gain. Internally, it’s
characterised by increased levels of androgens (male hormones) in the body, resistance to
insulin and/or multiple cysts (follicles containing immature eggs) on one or both ovaries.
Swati’s blood work bore this out. It confirmed high levels of androgens, leading to
hirsutism (excess growth of hair on the female body), and above normal (>100mg/dL)
fasting sugar levels, indicating insulin resistance. And Swati is far from alone. It is
estimated that PCOS affects 1 in 5 women in India, compared with a global prevalence of 1
in 10.
Women with PCOS are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular
disorders (CVD) and infertility. And while research is yet to prove exactly why women
develop this condition, lifestyle and genetics are considered to be major factors.
But here’s the thing—we don’t know what comes first.
Does weight gain, due to an unhealthy lifestyle, cause insulin resistance that, in turn,
leads to the production of excess androgens and irregular menstrual cycles? Or does
genetic predisposition to developing insulin resistance lead to a hormonal imbalance that
causes women to miss their period and consequently put on weight?
Opinion is divided.
Dr Padmaja Pepalla, for example, believes it is heavily lifestyle related. Poor eating,
sleeping and exercise habits, she says, lead to weight gain. Dr Pepalla is a gynaecologist at
Padma Hospital in Vadodara.
Dr Maya Hazra agrees that lifestyle plays a major role in the development of PCOS.
However, she leans towards genetic predisposition as the primary cause. “There is a
definite correlation with diabetes. I have seen women who have a family history
(especially mother or maternal aunt) are extremely prone to developing insulin resistance
the-ken.com-PCOSDiabetes little sister is growing up fast 1/3 567

themselves and consequently PCOS,” she says. Dr Hazra has been a practicing
obstetrician and gynaecologist (OB/GYN) in Vadodara for the past forty-five years. She
has seen PCOS grow its claws over time, with her experiences leading her to believe it is a
condition born of diabetes.
Both Pepalla and Hazra, however, are only making educated guesses. The reason could be
both or neither, as research doesn’t clearly spell out the cause.
Wild West
PCOS, a commonly diagnosed syndrome in young women, is

facilitating the off-label use of drugs due to divided opinions in
the medical fraternity and a lack of biomedical research
Tanvi Joshi, 22 Mar 2019
PCOS cases in young Indian women are on the rise; studies say 1 in 5 Indian women of
reproductive age suffers from PCOS
Most diagnosed women are prescribed oral contraceptive pills and insulin-sensitisers
such as Metformin to manage their symptoms
The medical community is divided on treatment guidelines due to limited evidence and
flexible definitions

The result is a diagnosis and prescription overdrive, leading many to question
whether the whole thing is a pharma-driven bubble

PepperFry
the-ken.com/story/btn-pepperfry-2017
December 12, 2017
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PepperFry, the biggest furniture startup in India, was founded by Ambareesh Murty and
Ashish Shah—both former eBay India employees. It originally started off as a web-based
lifestyle company and pivoted successfully to selling furniture. A market valued by some
agencies to reach $32 billion by 2019. Now, how much of it will be online is the question.
If you look at PepperFry’s moves in the last year, it seems the majority of it is still offline.
And that is probably why the company has been slowly inching towards a strong focus on
selling in high street stores. It has some amount of investor confidence and has raised
almost $160 million so far. Its closest competitor, Urban Ladder, has raised almost $95
million, in comparison.
Total Funding
$159 million
PepperFry
TrendSutra Private Limited
Name as per MCA records
Ambareesh Murty
Founder and CEO
Mumbai
Headquarters
Read more
Investors
the-ken.com-PepperFry 1/4 570

Goldman Sachs
Norwest Venture Partners
Bertelsmann
Read more
Rivals
Urban Ladder
FabFurnish
Read more
What has PepperFry been up to, in the last year?
The transition to offline stores seems to be going full tilt. Its CEO, Murty, told the press
that the company planned to invest $7 million to open 50 new stores by the end of 2017.
It currently has over 22 stores across India. Its closest rival, UrbanLadder, too, has
decided to go the offline way and is now trying to go from a web-only company to being a
brand. The market it operates in is changing.
PepperFry also raised $31 million from Goldman Sachs in September 2016. And there
has been speculation that it has been in talks with Flipkart with a strategic investment in
mind.

Results
PepperFry is split into two companies: Trendsutra Client Service Pvt Ltd and Trendsutra
Platform Pvt Ltd.
Rs 273 crore: The combined revenue of Trendsutra Client Pvt Ltd and Trendsutra
Platform Pvt Ltd for FY17 registered a 30% year-on-year jump. The company has been
steadily raising its profile over the last year.
Rs 140.5 crore: The cost of advertising during the financial year, a 10% reduction
compared to FY16. A large portion of the revenue is clearly driven by extensive
marketing spends. Last year, too, the company relied heavily on its marketing to drive
sales.
Rs 51.4 crore: Salaries paid to employees in FY17. A 6.2% drop from FY16. The
company has been talking about trying to reach break even and spending wisely. It has
taken a step in the right direction.
Rs 245 crore: The combined loss recorded by Trendsutra Client Pvt Ltd and
Trendsutra Platform Pvt Ltd in FY17. A fall of 18% compared to FY16. In FY16, Murty
had said the company would break even by 2016. That did not happen.
Rs 316: What PepperFry spends per order on logistics. It clocked Rs 38 crore spends on
logistics in FY17 and the company says it records 100,000 orders a month.
In FY18, there will be more of the same. PepperFry seems to be on the track to breaking
even and will continue to rationalise expenses and increase the number of stores. So far,
the company directed all its walk-in customers to the website, but recently, it has started
selling low-value products directly from the store. This will continue and it may start
stocking and selling high-value products as well. Murty told The Ken that he considers
his stores a surrogate for marketing and that he will continue to turn down his
advertising spends while increasing the number of stores.
Quotable quotes:
“We are hopeful of reaching the Rs 3,500 crore-GMV milestone over the next three years
and also turn profitable,” Ambareesh Murty told PTI in January 2017.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla

the-ken.com
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Pfizer snuggles up to India’s prized vaccination
programme
the-ken.com/story/pfizer-vaccination-program
November 13, 2017
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In a single stroke, the Indian Patent Office set the dominoes falling on 11 August when it
granted $53-billion pharma major Pfizer a patent for a vaccine that can prevent
pneumonia. On 28 September, Panacea Biotec was the first to cry foul. After working for
over a decade, it was close to a breakthrough, planning to launch its own Pneumococcal
Conjugate Vaccine (PCV) by 2020. It was relying on the government to buy its affordable
version over Pfizer’s expensive one.
Pneumonia and such influenza infections lead to 5% of all deaths in India.
Delhi-headquartered Panacea, which grossed Rs 555 crore ($85 million) in revenue

in FY17, is not the only one. Serum Institute in Pune and Aurobindo Pharma in
Hyderabad are feeling the pinch, too. After all, who doesn’t want a piece of the Rs 3,500
crore ($537 million) estimated budget for the national immunisation programme growing
every year. In May, when the Minister of Health JP Nadda included PCV in the
government-funded programme, he had said: “No child should die in the country from
Vaccine-Preventable Diseases”.
The dominoes do not stop falling at Indian companies’ disappointment for losing the
revenue government tenders would have brought if Pfizer had not secured the patent. The
potential sellers are nervous, and so are the ultimate users of the vaccine. The
international humanitarian not-for-profit Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) moved the
Delhi High Court to set aside the patent in October. It spoke for the ultimate user—
millions of Indian children, who will likely get the vaccine only if their government can
afford it.
Both Panacea and MSF right now have the power to do just that. Their respective
businesses and public health interests aside, they are standing their ground that the
patent itself is undeserved. And they are not the only ones to object to the patent. The
European Patent Office (EPO) in 2014 revoked the patent for Pfizer’s vaccine which sells
under the brand name Prevnar 13. (The number 13 stands for the number of
pneumococcal bacteria that the vaccine protects against.) The patent is disputed in South
Korea and the United States as well.
While MSF and Panacea are girding up for a legal battle against the Indian patent office
and Pfizer, the Indian ministry of health holds a trump card. It has its first real
opportunity to bring the MNC to its knees and use a compulsory licence—a World Trade
Organisation (WTO) provision to override a patent to secure affordable vaccines. As it is
the-ken.com-Pfizer snuggles up to Indias prized vaccination programme 1/2 574

the only time the large-scale public health relevance of the vaccine was proven when it
was included in the government programme early this year, said an official in the know
who requested to not be named.
Rule the world
Step 1 - Convince the government to use the vaccine. Step 2 - Get

it patented. And now, Pfizer paves the way for Step 3 - Become
the first patented vaccine the government will have to buy
Ruhi Kandhari, 13 Nov 2017
Pharmaceutical major Pfizer's vaccine Prevnar 13 (to prevent pneumonia) is the first
vaccine in the government programme to get a patent
Panacea Biotec and Médecins Sans Frontières have challenged Pfizer's patent in India,
one which was revoked by the European Patent Office
Pfizer is currently offering each dose to the government at less than $3.30 due to Gavi's
support. It is priced at $65.38 in the market
Prevnar 13 is an ideal candidate for a compulsory licence because it is part of the

government programme
the-ken.com-Pfizer snuggles up to Indias prized vaccination programme 2/2 575

Platform ambitions: The story of how iSpirt lost its true
north
the-ken.com/story/platform-ambitions-story-ispirt-lost-true-north
September 21, 2017
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Editor’s note: On 17 January, India’s Supreme Court commenced the final hearing on
petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar, the unique identity
programme. On the same day, The Economic Times reported that a group of private
companies have filed a petition to the court, extending support to and seeking continuity
for Aadhaar. The petitioners argue that Aadhaar is used by private companies ‘in a big
way’ and ‘innovative solutions’ are being created in the digital economy using Aadhaar.
To recap, some of the people in these private companies were part of the Unique
Identification Authority of India team that conceptualised and built Aadhaar. The
conflicts of interest are sometimes subtle and sometimes glaring. It is in this context that
we are republishing our September 2017 two-part investigative series on iSpirt and
India Stack, the two entities around which the private Aadhaar ecosystem has been
built.
It was January 2016 and Jitendra Gupta, the founder of Citrus Pay, a young and nimble
digital payments provider with over $32 million in VC funding, was beginning to see the
possibilities offered by UPI. UPI, or Unified Payments Interface, was a new digital
payments standard that would allow Indians to send money to each other as simply as
they sent emails.
Gupta could see how disruptive UPI could be for the payments industry and startups like
his own. India’s digital payments startups had no shortage of technology or product
design chops but were limited by the country’s fairly conservative banking standards. UPI
would change that, and those startups that were early to adopt and harness it would
leapfrog over others.
the-ken.com-Platform ambitions The story of how iSpirt lost its true north 1/13 576
So, Gupta reached out to a few of the banks. Startups would need to go through the
software development kits (SDKs), made by banks, that acted as ‘wrappers’ on top of
UPI’s core technology (APIs). Only banks would be allowed to directly access UPI’s APIs
directly, so startups would need to find a bank willing to license it an SDK.
How could Citrus Pay get access to early beta versions of UPI, so it could start building its
own product harnessing it? Gupta was eager for his company to be among the first
startups to support UPI when it would go live in April. The response was lukewarm.
Meanwhile, PhonePe, a startup that had launched just a few months ago, was already
doing deep work on building a UPI product in partnership with Yes Bank.
Gupta could only watch in silence as Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company,
acquired PhonePe on 1st April for its UPI app. An app that hadn’t even launched yet. Just
a few days later, on 11 April, NPCI announced a “soft launch” of UPI.
But Citrus Pay hadn’t progressed much beyond its initial conversations.
On 25 August, UPI went live. On 29 August, PhonePe went live, becoming the first UPI
payments app in the country.
Citrus Pay was still waiting. Within a few weeks, it would get bought by PayU India, a
larger rival backed by South Africa’s Naspers Group. Gupta, along with Citrus Pay’s MD
Amrish Rau, would end up being in charge of the combined PayU-Citrus Pay entity.
On 8 November 2016, the equivalent of a tsunami would hit the Indian digital payments
space as India’s Prime Minister would announce the “demonetization” of 85% of the
country’s currency notes. With most currency notes rendered useless, Indians would have
no option but to turn to digital payments.
Of these, UPI was the simplest to use.
In just over a month, more than 4 million Indians had downloaded the PhonePe app,
making it the most popular UPI app. By January, that number had hit 10 million.
Meanwhile, on 30 December, NPCI itself would launch its own UPI app, called BHIM,
queering the competitive field further (related story, “The unlikely story of BHIM, the
upsetter of plans”).
Citrus Pay was still waiting for its banking partner to provide access to UPI APIs of the
same quality as accessed by PhonePe and BHIM. In March 2017, 15 months after it first
began conversations with NPCI and banks, that the Citrus Pay UPI app would be
launched.
The market for UPI apps had by then become a de-facto duopoly, with BHIM and
PhonePe the undisputed leaders. Their combined market share for UPI transactions in
August was over 85%. On Google’s Android Play Store, Citrus Pay’s UPI app has
somewhere between 100,000-500,000 downloads. Both BHIM and PhonePe have
between 10-50 million downloads.
“Our product launch got substantially delayed as we were not being provided adequate
support for API integration. This delay hampered our go to market plans and we missed
demonetization opportunity,” says Gupta.
“NPCI has no accountability. It does not come under RTI (the Right To Information Act)
but runs and controls all major digital payment systems. This was highlighted by the
Watal Committee. This is bad for the payments ecosystem and the country because we
need more competition and openness in payments to grow the market,” says Nikhil
Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a digital news site that has been covering the payments
and fintech space closely since 2008.
Meanwhile, PhonePe’s asking valuation was rumoured to be around $500 million in early
2017, and given its continuing traction, could only have increased subsequently.
The seed of PhonePe’s relationship with UPI was ostensibly planted at a “hackathon”
organized by NPCI and iSpirt, the apex think tank for the Indian software products
industry, in early 2016. Numerous startups competed to build apps that utilized UPI.
“What was promised was that all APIs would be open and introduced through
hackathons. But there has been no equal access. You have to be in iSpirt’s good books.
You have to navigate a lot and know the right people for access. Which means only a few
get access, while everyone else only consumes them,” says the co-founder of one of the
most well-regarded payment processing startups in India.
The Backstory
iSpirt wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was nothing like this.
It started out in 2013 as the “Indian Software Products Industry Round Table”, a think
tank whose sole objective was to help Indian software product companies grow. The two
people behind it were Sharad Sharma and Avinash Raghava, both leading the product
evangelization efforts of NASSCOM, India’s apex IT Services & BPO body.
Disillusioned by the step-motherly treatment towards software product companies from

NASSCOM, Sharma and Raghava formed iSpirt with the support of 30 of India’s best
software product founders and executives. Each of the 30 became part of a “Founders
Circle” and donated money to set up the initial corpus for iSpirt to function.
To maximize impact, iSpirt decided that it would restrict itself to only three areas: policy
advocacy; creating reusable ‘playbooks’ from other successful product companies that
could be used by others; and helping catalyse a market for software products.
Thanks to the sheer energy of Sharma and Raghava, they were able to tap into a
wellspring of knowledge and know-how from India’s best software product startups.
Within a year, iSpirt’s “Playbook” sessions were a highly acclaimed example of how best to
spread insight within the Indian ecosystem. Its blog, “Product Nation”, became a go-to
place for entrepreneurs, developers, and investors from the ecosystem.
iSpirt was helping Indian product startups on two fronts – helping some go global, and
helping others sell local.
On the global front, “M&A Connect” helped bridge the gap between large international
companies and Indian product startups. “InTech50” was a flagship event that showcased
India’s most promising startups.
Meanwhile, on the local front, its “Software Adoption Initiative” was about helping
increase the software product adoption rate in specific sectors, by connecting potential
buyers with software product makers.
To foster the creation of newer product startups, iSpirt held “Bootcamps” across the
country to help wannabe entrepreneurs understand what it took to become successful.
For a small volunteer-led body, iSpirt’s energy and drive were infectious and effective,
quickly creating a network of tens of thousands of motivated founders, entrepreneurs and
developers.
But all good things must come to an end. And the beginning of that end started in 2015.
The Investigation
“One question we’re trying to answer is, was Sharad doing it personally or were more
people from iSpirt involved? We believe Sharad is not equal to iSpirt,” said NRK Raman
to Nikhil Pahwa.
The day was 24 May 2017 and the conversation was taking place over a telephone
conference call. Raman, the former MD and CEO of Oracle Financial Services, was the
head of iSpirt’s recently formed Guidelines and Compliance Committee, IGCC. Other than
him and Pahwa, the others on the call were all senior iSpirt volunteers Amit Ranjan, co-
founder and former COO of SlideShare; Aneesh Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Capillary
Technologies; and iSpirt’s Avinash Raghava.
The IGCC’s remit was to investigate allegations of coordinated and anonymous social
media attacks on critics of Aadhaar, India’s digital identity project that was the bedrock of
“India Stack”. India Stack was a collection of technologies built atop Aadhaar that was
increasingly looking like the tail that wagged the iSpirt dog.
Over the next roughly 45 minutes or so, Pahwa would meticulously explain to the
committee how Sharma had been targeting him and others for what he saw was their
opposition to Aadhaar.
“Sharad is obsessed with IFF (Internet Freedom Foundation*, a volunteer body to support
research and advocacy on a free and open Internet in India, of which Pahwa was a
founding member) and a grand conspiracy against India Stack by IFF,” said Pahwa,
according to multiple people present on the call as well as made aware of it later.
Pahwa told the IGCC members that Sharma had gotten a free run to build a fiefdom with
iSpirt and that now “arrogance and hubris (were) getting the better of him.”
There was mostly shocked silence from the IGCC members.
“He’s a bully, and because of that there is deep dislike and distrust of iSpirt in the policy
circles in Delhi,” Pahwa continued.
Pahwa also brought up SUDHAM, an iSpirt volunteer group that had been set up to do
advocacy but had been traced back as the source of the trolling against critics online.
He said the point of SUDHAM was to create a chilling effect, so people wouldn’t speak up.
“It was used to silence critics, not to respond to critics,” he said. As the conversation
ended, one of the IGCC members told Pahwa they would “come back to you in a couple of
days.”
Nearly four months later, there has still been no formal communication from IGCC or
iSpirt to Pahwa or the other people targeted by the trolling.
“I haven’t heard from the IGCC since my deposition, and I don’t expect to hear from them
now. I don’t know of anyone else who has. The IGCC failed to do its duty,” said Pahwa.
The Drift
iSpirt did yeoman service to the cause of Indian software products during its first three
years. That was made possible by the selfless contribution of hundreds of volunteers, most
of who contributed their time and expertise out of a genuinely greater desire to help other
Indian product companies do better.
But by 2014, something new and alien had seeped into the organization that would over
the next few years completely rewire iSpirt. That was Aadhaar.
Could iSpirt help position Aadhaar with product companies as a new way to target Indian
consumers? Could iSpirt act as an interface between startups and the newly formed
government at the center? Could iSpirt also help build some of the technical scaffolding
around Aadhaar so that startups could just “plug and play”?
At first, it seemed Aadhaar’s effect on iSpirt was only isolated. For instance, of the 11
select presentations made by iSpirt-selected startups on 1 July 2014 to the Minister for IT,
Ravi Shankar Prasad, only one was based on Aadhaar—the one by Novopay.
Novopay was a digital payments startup incubated by Khosla Labs and staffed by a large
number of former Aadhaar volunteers, including Srikanth Nadhamuni, formerly
Aadhaar’s head of technology, and Sanjay Jain, formerly Aadhaar’s chief product
manager.
But as the months went by, Aadhaar’s influence would only continue to grow within
iSpirt.
As iSpirt’s meetings with the government over Aadhaar-based solutions grew in number,
so did Sharma’s rise in power and stature. He saw himself presented with a once in a
lifetime opportunity to build a “platform” that could even outlast him as his legacy.
“No change happens in less than 30 years,” he told The Ken in an interview on 12
September. “The (Indian) IT industry. The fight against smoking and tobacco. The
emergence of Silicon Valley as a design hub in the 1970s. All of these took 30 years.”
What was needed, said Sharma, was a “tech spine” to help entrepreneurs target
consumers in areas like financial inclusion or affordable healthcare.
And so, to iSpirt’s existing three pillars, a fourth was added: “societal platforms”.
By 2015, Aadhaar had started seeping into more and more aspects of iSpirts work,
culminating in “India Stack”.
“India Stack makes a user base of over a billion people readily available through its API.
This means that startups and tech companies can build over this to be able to integrate
various functions for their businesses or for larger enterprises. Every bank or telecom
operator scans through tons of paperwork every day to be able to verify customers and
generate KYC documents. Now imagine the impact if this entire process could be
digitized by building an application which would integrate India Stack and the user
base of over a billion Indians!”
Other than Aadhaar, which was built and operated by its own statutory body, UIDAI,
India Stack champions technologies like UPI (simplified payments), eKYC (digital know-
your-customer processes), Digilocker (online storage of digital documents) and eSign
(Aadhaar-based digital signatures).
India Stack’s goal was—is—to create four technology “layers” any company could harness
into its products: a “presenceless” one where Aadhaar would serve to identify anyone
digitally; a “paperless” one to store digital documents; a “cashless” one to enable digital
payments; and finally, a “consent” layer to enable authenticated transfer of data.
Given that Aadhaar was the lynchpin for all of these, India Stack became closely
associated with the government, which was battling multiple citizen-driven cases in the
Supreme Court, challenging the legality and lack of privacy protections for the identity
project.
The government saw India Stack as a way to irrevocably embed Aadhaar into the lives of
1.2 billion Indians and all digital commerce. Once embedded, it would be impossible to
roll back the ambitious project without causing widespread disruption and harm to people
and businesses.
Towards this goal, iSpirt was a perfect foil, and India Stack a perfect fait accompli.
Soon, India Stack was working closely with not just the UIDAI, but also NITI Aayog (read
our related story, “The NITI Aayog’s midlife identity crisis”), NPCI, and even the Reserve
Bank of India, RBI.
“Sharad started becoming more obsessed with India Stack, and not focused on anything
else. All conversations were around that. He wanted to start an India Stack Fund too, to
ensure that companies building on top of Aadhaar would get funding,” says a senior
member of iSpirt who’s been part of the organization since its inception. He requested
anonymity — as did many other sources for this story — fearing retaliation for his critical
views on India Stack.
“People are afraid of coming on the record because they’re afraid of what it will do to their
businesses,” he apologetically explained.
By 2016, iSpirt and Sharma had become the first port of call when the government wanted
to do something big around technology. From just lobbying with the government, iSpirt
was now helping decide policy and implementation. And as the de-facto head of iSpirt,
Sharma was now the most important gatekeeper in India’s technology ecosystem.
At the organization level, India Stack started slowly taking over its host from the inside
out, cornering mindshare, money and opportunities. The inception was nearly complete.
And as iSpirt slowly lost interest in helping product startups and instead started building
Aadhaar-based platforms, many of the original product founders and volunteers slowly
got disillusioned and withdrew themselves. Highly respected founders like Bharat
Goenka, founder of Tally, and Vishnu Dusad, CEO of Nucleus Software, quietly resigned
from its governing council.
The newer crop of volunteers who replaced the product entrepreneurs were mostly
interested in India Stack, seeing it as a way to get early first-hand experience on Aadhaar-
based technologies.
The Power
“India Stack came as a surprise. For me iSpirt was always about Product Nation,” says
another iSpirt member who had been part of it since inception. He too requested
anonymity.
Meanwhile, Sharad Sharma was now seen as the face of India Stack, and the general
leading the war against multinational corporations like Google and Facebook and their
“digital colonization” of India.
“Imagine fighting the next general election with the tag that the Government sold the
Indian Digital consumer to MNCs like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber under the
guise of the Digital India program. This would be a political nightmare,” Sharma told
Economic Times in a 2015 interview.
But as Sharma’s power and influence grew, those close to him started noticing that so did
his arrogance and anger. According to multiple people who interacted with him during
the past two years, he started seeing any criticism of Aadhaar as an existential attack on
India Stack and iSpirt.
Wherever Sharma saw what appeared to be threats, he tried to either destroy or coopt
them. One such attempt happened in March 2016 at a small meeting he organized in
Bangalore, between Pahwa and Kiran Jonnalagadda, an outspoken technologist and co-
founder of HasGeek, with India Stack members Sanjay Jain and Pramod Varma, both
former Aadhaar volunteers too.
Sharma’s idea was to co-opt the support of Pahwa and Jonnalagadda, both key members
of Save The Internet, an online collective that had got over 1 million Indians to send
letters in support of Net Neutrality to India’s telecom regulator TRAI. Thanks partly to
that campaign, TRAI brought in a strict Net Neutrality law and ended up banning
Facebook’s ambitious Free Basics “zero-rated” initiative.
“They too were afraid of the government misusing Aadhaar. Sharad said, once these
people (the India Stack volunteers) leave, they would have no influence, so it would be
best to make changes while it was still possible. I was impressed they admitted they had
built a beast they could not control. And that they wanted to fix it while they still had
influence,” recalls Jonnalagadda.
Pahwa meanwhile brought up the fact that given Aadhaar lacked any purpose limitations,
it would end up being used for surveillance. And that the law did not allow a citizen even
the right to go to court against someone who may have stolen her data.
The details of this meeting, held under “Chatham House Rules” (no specific quotes can be
attributed to people), were disclosed by Pahwa to the IGCC investigation committee after
their approval.
According to the IGCC sources, Pahwa said that Sharma had rubbished the findings of a
Parliamentary Standing Committee with former cabinet minister Yashwant Sinha at the
helm, tasked with studying the privacy implications of Aadhaar. Sharma shouted that the
findings had been fixed and that it had been written by the noted lawyer and anti-Aadhaar
activist, Usha Ramanathan.
“You don’t understand technology. Technology will supersede the law, and the law will lag
behind. You guys will all remain in the past while all of us go into the future,” Sharma
said.
“You can’t do anything about the law, it’s already sorted out,” said Sharma, according to
Pahwa’s testimony to the IGCC.
Pahwa told the IGCC members that this could only imply Sharma knew that the Aadhaar
bill would soon be passed as a “Money Bill” (a parliamentary provision that bypasses most
standard procedures) a few days later.
Towards the last week of December 2016, multiple sources confirmed a conversation that
took place between Pahwa and a livid Vijay Shekhar Sharma*, Paytm’s founder. Sharma
asked Pahwa why Sharad Sharma was accusing him of funding Pahwa and IFF to the
tune of Rs 1 crore, to create a rival to iSpirt and India Stack.
Of course, there was no such funding, but the incident highlighted Sharad Sharma’s
extreme paranoia about any other organization emerging as a rival to iSpirt.
This intimidation of what Sharma saw as opponents of Aadhaar (though Pahwa is careful
to point out that he only critiques the weakness of Aadhaar in an effort to improve it)
would culminate in a coordinated campaign of anonymous social media trolling in May
2017.
The Trolling
During a roughly two-week period, from 4 May to 17 May, a number of anonymous

Twitter accounts popped up and launched a coordinated attack on some of the most
prominent critics of Aadhaar.
“Don’t you think @nixxin and @jackerhack are responsible for making IFF a shadow of
what it should have been? Both did for ego & business.“ said an account called
@confident_india. The targets of the tweet were Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin) and Kiran
Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack).
(Note: Some of these tweets may have been deleted from Twitter, but have been archived
at a site called Tweepli)
Respected journalist Saikat Datta was accused of being funded by Pakistan’s intelligence
service.
Staff belonging to the Center for Internet and Society were told they could expect to find
themselves in jail.
“@cis-india.org is screwed too. Instead of responsible disclosure you went for political
gamesmanship. Voilated FCRA law. #jail may be nxt”
It became clear very soon that there wasn’t just one account.
“This @Memeghnad is so good at writing dumb fictional fear mongering stories. Must
give him a Pulitzer,” said @draveedian. The target of that tweet was Meghnad
Sahasrabhojanee, a policy researcher at the Office of Tathagata Satpathy, a Member of
Parliament from Orissa state.
It was followed up by another, directly attacking Satpathy, a vocal critic of Aadhaar. “Like
master like disciple. Not sure what that MP has done till date except rant.”
The trolling reached a crescendo on 17 May when Jonnalagadda unmasked at least one of
the accounts, @confident_india, as belonging to Sharad Sharma, based on the fact that
his mobile number was used as the second-factor authentication on the account.
As the troll “gang” imploded in confusion, messages started getting mixed up.
One account, @indiaforward2, clarified in two tweets, “Just woke up to a tweetstorm. I’m
in Atlanta attending to a family medical emergency. I can categorically state…
@product_nation. I can categorically state that I am NOT operating the
confident_india Twitter account @product_nation.”
The tweets were quickly deleted, only for the following to be posted from Sharma’s official
account, @sharads, “In fact I’m on US East Coast with a family member for a serious
medical situation. @product_nation”
Meanwhile @confident_india, up till now a user of impeccable grammar and punctuation,

turned teenybopper. “for d n time. I am not him. Is dis a strategy forcing me 2 reveal
myself? I m not falling 4 this”
The meltdown was painful to watch.
The Coverup
“Who are you to tell me this?” thundered Sharad Sharma. His outburst was received in
the conference room with a shock first and then pin drop silence.
It was 4.30 p.m. on Sunday, 28 May 2017, and in the room were IGCC members Naveen
Tewari, CEO of InMobi; Pallav Nadhani*, CEO of Fusion Charts; NRK Raman; Sanjay
Anandaram, angel investor; Aneesh Reddy; and iSpirt’s Avinash Raghava. Another
member, Amit Ranjan, had joined in via a teleconference.
They had already been in meeting for about three hours at the InMobi office on Outer
Ring Road, Bengaluru.
The IGCC members read out the findings of a report the group had prepared after
speaking to various people during the last few weeks. As the findings were read out, the
tension in the room could be cut with a knife. Some of them were:
– that Sharma step down from the SUDHAM team immediately
– that SUDHAM in its current form was being dissolved
– that Sharma stay away from any public pronouncements on any iSPIRT matters for
a few months
– that Avinash Raghava become the spokesperson for iSpirt for the time being
Sharma had been waiting outside for over an hour. (Perhaps he was not used to being
treated like that.) But he still patiently heard out the findings.
Then he started speaking.
“I created iSpirt and built it brick by brick. Who are any of you to tell me what to do?” he
shouted at the people in the room.
There was stunned silence in return. Not one person spoke back.
“Why are you making such a big account of a troll account? Did you not see that these
people were trolling Aadhaar too? These anti-Aadhaar activists are bad and need to be
countered. People like Kiran Jonnalagadda, Nikhil Pahwa, Usha Ramanathan…”
“We were doing this for the country,” he shouted, livid with rage by now.
In between, Sharma directed his ire at InMobi’s Naveen Tewari, telling him, “I’ve built
iSpirt, what have you done? If you don’t like it, you can leave!”
So Tewari said he was quitting, and walked out of the room.
But after Economic Times covered the news of his resignation a couple of days later, some
iSpirt members convinced Tewari to withdraw it.
Pallav Nadhani also resigned shortly after.
By now Sharma had assumed the role of the meeting’s chairperson, from starting out as
the focus of its investigations. He rejected the IGCC’s findings and said he would tell them
what to do. He went to the whiteboard in the room and started writing down the steps.
He shot down Raghava’s name as the new iSpirt spokesperson and said it would instead
be Sanjay Jain. In his mind, the role required coordination with the NITI Aayog CEO
Amitabh Kant and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The IGCC meekly said okay.
He also told the group that their findings would need to be modified and that a new one
would need to be mailed out to the entire iSpirt team.
The report said that “several emails, queries, comments” had come in on “how India Stack
fits into the overall Product Nation mission of iSPIRT”. Sharma deleted that entire
section.
He deleted a recommendation to create “a more permanent IGCC” to strengthen iSpirt’s

code of ethics and compliance.
He deleted the recommendation for the formation of an advisory council formed of senior
professionals from the industry.
Most importantly, Sharma deleted references to IGCC finding evidence of “some iSpirt
volunteers”, other than him, indulging in the trolling of “those attacking iSpirt and its
causes.” By doing this, he ensured that no one else other than him could be blamed.
It was around 7 pm now, and all that the browbeaten and exhausted IGCC members left in
the room wanted was for the meeting to end.
Sharma’s last point was about a blog post announcing the culmination of the IGCC
process. He wanted closure.
The very next day, he published, “The End Doesn’t Justify The Means: A Public
Statement”
“And on that count, I as one of the builders have stumbled. I condoned uncivil behavior
by some anonymous handles over a period of ten days. I have owned up to this
transgression. It was investigated internally by the iSPIRT Governing Council: Sudham
as a team stands dissolved, and I will no longer be communicating on behalf of iSPIRT
externally for 4 months.”
Sharma had just given himself a clean chit.
“iSpirt/ProductNation is an important organisation because it gives founders the

opportunity to help founders give back to their community. The online trolling via
Sudham was one of many things done to stifle democratic dissent against the mandatory-
ness and poor implementation of Aadhaar. iSpirt needed to look inwards and re-assess
whether this is the kind of behaviour they stand for, develop processes for better
governance, transparency, and accountability. This starts with accepting that there is an
issue, taking ownership of their mistakes, and addressing it in a manner that shows
genuine contrition, without any ambiguity. It failed to do this,” says Pahwa.
The Loss
“As Indian product companies, we at iSpirt were the underdogs. Then how did we end up
building platforms to offer to the very entities we said we wouldn’t touch?” says a product
founder and iSpirt member since its inception.
He was referring to the use of Aadhaar and India Stack platforms by large American tech
MNCs like Microsoft, Facebook and Oracle.
“Ultimately, we can only watch from the sidelines for the scraps left for us,” he said.
Many of iSpirt’s most experienced, passionate and talented volunteers have either
resigned or completely disassociated themselves from it. Of the five members of its
Governing Council—Bharat Goenka, Vishnu Dusad, Shoiab Ahmed (former President,
Tally), Jay Pullur (CEO, Pramati Technologies) and Sharad Sharma—only Pullur and
Sharma remain.
Another product founder, also an iSpirt member since inception, pointed to lost
opportunities for the Indian software product sector, because iSpirt became fixated with
Aadhaar and India Stack. “It will have an impact on “what India could be”,” he said.
“The world is moving so fast that as a nation you have to identify the next big opportunity.
And it’s not chat. Maybe it’s blockchain or augmented reality. That’s where India has to
select and nurture its ecosystem. It needs strategic focus. Without that guidance, lots of
startups will chase things the West has already done five years ago. We will always be
behind the curve. That is what China did for manufacturing,” he said.
“The government does not understand the impact of automation and AI. We’re still stuck
on ‘Digital’, while the world has moved on,” he said.
Another founder reminisces about listening to Sharma criticize NASSCOM (where he
worked as the head of its Product Council) one night over a beer in 2012. “Sharad was
frustrated and angry and said that NASSCOM doesn’t understand products,” he said.
Months later at another meeting, some of iSpirt’s early founders discussed the contours of
the new body and how it would be different from NASSCOM. “We said Bollywood is
India’s soft power. How could we make Indian products the same? IT services had
screwed India’s image because the government now only cared if an industry was big and
had lots of employees,” recollects one of the people at that meeting.
“It’s ironic that iSpirt has become what it set out to defeat (NASSCOM),” says another
founder.
Disclosures:
*Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm, is an investor in The Ken.
*Pallav Nadhani, the CEO of Fusion Charts, is an investor in The Ken.
*Sumanth Raghavendra, one of the The Ken’s co-founders, is an iSpirt volunteer.
*Rohin Dharmakumar, the author of this story and one of the co-founders of The Ken,
was a member of STI and is a member of IFF. He is also the co-founder and CEO of The
Ken.
Playlists vs borders: Music streaming brings South
India closer
the-ken.com/story/playlists-music-south-india
August 12, 2018
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Something remarkable has been happening in South India over the last few decades. It
was slow at first, almost imperceptible. But now, it is undeniable.
Music composers are becoming multilingual at an unprecedented pace. There is a visible

shift in how music gets created, adopted, recreated, shared, consumed, the works.
Composers, to row safely through this musical wave, have adapted by creating music
across South Indian languages.
They launch in one language, say Tamil, then move to creating music in another, say
Malayalam, then test waters in a third, say Telugu. And the cycle continues. Let’s see how
this progressed over time.
Tamil music composing giant, Ilayaraja, debuted with the Tamil film Annakili in 1976.
His move to other south Indian languages started with the Telugu film Bhadrakali, also in
1977 (a remake of a Tamil film by the same name), and then with Kannada film Maathu
Tappada Maga and Malayalam film Vyamoham, both in 1978. (His Hindi debut, Sadma,
was in 1983, though he wasn’t as prolific up North.)
Another Tamil composer, Deva, debuted in 1989. He then flirted with other South Indian
languages: Telugu – 1994, Malayalam – 1996 and Kannada – 1997.
Tamil composer Vidyasagar composed for six films in his debut year, 1988. Then, in 1989,
he composed for three Tamil and Telugu movies each. He eventually picked Telugu as his
base. Vidyasagar went back to Tamil in 1994 with Jai Hind and to Malayalam in 1996 with
Azhakiya Ravanan. Today, he’s known for his music across the three languages.
the-ken.com-Playlists vs borders Music streaming brings South India closer 1/2 589
The world-renowned music composing giant, A R Rahman, debuted in 1992 with two
films—Roja, in Tamil, and Yoddha, in Malayalam. In 1994, he worked on two Telugu
films. By 1995, he had debuted in Hindi with Rangeela.
Joshua Sridhar debuted in Tamil in 2004, then quickly added Malayalam to his repertoire
in 2006 and Kannada in 2007, before eventually picking up steam in Kannada with a
steady stream of successes.
In the last few years, this trend has accelerated tremendously. Now, the gap between
multilingual projects for composers is a few months.
After his debut in 2014, Jakes Bejoy already has, to his credit, five Tamil films, six
Malayalam films, and an upcoming Telugu film.
Govind Menon, the Thaikkudam Bridge band lead, also debuted as a composer in 2014
and has six Malayalam films and four Tamil films to his credit.
the-ken.com-Playlists vs borders Music streaming brings South India closer 2/2 590
Poker operators: Bluffing or calling the bluff?
the-ken.com/story/poker-operators-bluffing-calling-bluff
February 24, 2017
When Ankur Dewani lost almost 80% of his chips, and his best out of five cards were a
pair of fives, one of the lowest ranking sequences in poker, he thought the game would be
difficult to win. And rightly so, because his opponent had been betting aggressively.
Dewani was at a poker tournament, last year, at a casino in Goa. And the last card, which
is called river, had been revealed. Poker, which typically involves two cards given to each
player and five community cards that are revealed to all, requires players to come up with
the best possible sequence of five cards by matching their cards with the community
cards. Of course, the best sequence wins.
“I had a very nominal hand, and my opponent had just put all in when we reached river,
which was rare,” says Dewani. “But I noticed that he was shaking his feet. And I realised,
he had done that before, whenever he wasn’t sure of his hand.”
“By putting all in, he thought I would fold. But it made me feel that he didn’t have a lot. I
called his bluff. He really didn’t have anything,” he remembers. Dewani won the game.
And that tournament won him about Rs 9 lakh.
That is what it comes down to in a game of poker. Or so they say. A sharp mind that picks
up cues and makes the right calls at a time when all is still not lost. Players call it skills—
skills to bluff, to call a bluff and to play the best hand that you can.
Recently, poker has garnered much attention. Earlier this month, India’s first ever Poker
Sports League started its qualifying rounds. Entrepreneurs and executives such as Kunal
Shah, founder of Freecharge, and Amrish Rau, CEO of PayU India, have revealed their
passion for poker. And India’s largest online poker game company Adda52 has just kicked
off a five-day poker tournament called Deltin Poker Tournament (23-27 February 2017) in
Goa.
the-ken.com-Poker operators Bluffing or calling the bluff 1/7 591

And all of them—entrepreneurs, gaming companies and the poker leagues—emphasise on
one common theme. That poker is a mind game, and it needs skills. They are going all out
to change the perception that poker is a chance-based game, which amounts to gambling.
On that perception rests the survival of over a dozen Indian poker operators because
gambling is banned in India.
Playing by the rule book?
India’s 150-year-old central law called Public Gambling Act of 1867 prohibits gambling.
But it gives leeway to those games, which depend on a player’s skill rather than luck. What
it means is—gambling is betting or wagering on a game of chance. Betting on a game of
skill isn’t gambling.
Then, the states have their own approach, gambling being a state subject. Of all the states
and union territories, only two states, Goa and Sikkim, have legalised gambling through
licenses. These include casino games like Blackjack and Roulette among others, where you
wager money, and you need more luck than skill to win.
Chance versus skills

India's 150-year-old central law called Public Gambling Act of 1867 prohibits gambling.
But it gives leeway to those games, which depend on a player's skill rather than luck. What
it means is gambling is betting or wagering on a game of chance. Betting on a game of skill
isn't gambling
For states, which do not have any specific gambling laws, the central law comes into force
by default. But most of the states have regulations, which leave some room for games of
skills, except Odisha and Assam, where none is allowed.
How do betting game companies navigate in legal waters? By assuming that poker is a
game of skill. But so is fantasy sports. Like poker, fantasy sports is a betting game, which
you play atop a real gaming event like cricket—by virtually selecting a team and getting
points for the performance of players in the actual game. And there are seven-eight such
firms.
“Till the time a state doesn’t say yes or no, it is assumed as it is yes because the Central
Gaming Act has said that all games of skills are outside of the gambling law,” says Dewani,
a poker enthusiast who also heads Pokerstars in India, a UK-based online poker firm. It
provides free poker games in India and is in process of getting registered in the country so
that it can offer poker that involves real money.
Nandan Kamath, Principal Lawyer at LawNK, a sports and technology law firm, says,
“The gaming operators can run their games under the games of skill exception in the anti-
gambling laws. If the chance element is greater than the skill element, it amounts to a
game of chance and is considered to be a gambling activity. If it involves a little bit of skill
but depends on mostly chance, it is still gambling. And gambling is prohibited except for a
few states where you can do it with a license.”

But something is amiss here. When these laws came into existence, there was no concept
of online games such as online poker or fantasy sports.
So companies have made one more assumption: Laws, which were made for on-ground
betting activities are automatically applicable to their online avatars as well. However, one
of the major skills in poker or other such card games is reading body language, which is
eliminated in an online game. Thus, out goes the skill component.
“For online firms, the skills that are offline have to be properly translated into the online
context, which is called functional equivalence. So if they want to be treated equally by the
law as their offline counterparts, they should maintain the balance where skill element
predominates chance in determining outcomes,” says Kamath, admitting that online
poker doesn’t have this particular skill element involved.
In this confusion, online operators are adapting. They go with the regulations that suit
them. For instance, in case there are no specific state regulations, they go with the central
law, which exempts skill-based games, but is more applicable to offline betting activities.
However, in case there is a state regulation, which doesn’t exempt poker explicitly, like
the one in Kerala, the online firms assume that it only applies to offline players and not
them.
“Today, most gaming companies operate in a grey area because there is neither a bright
line test nor an administrative mechanism to determine what is a game of chance and
what is a game of skill. This interpretation is left to the courts only when a dispute arises,”
Kamath adds. Which means that if tomorrow anybody challenges that poker is not a game
of skill, poker operators will have to prove otherwise in court.
Online poker-your hand; courtesy: pokerstars.com

You hand looks like this after first four community cards; courtesy: pokerstars.com
Your hand after the river, you have three of a kind; courtesy: pokerstars.com
The perfect trap

The law is further limiting because the Supreme Court has ruled that even if operators are
running a skill-based game, they cannot run it for profit.
“You can be the admin and charge people for playing, but you can’t have a stake in
winning. You can only get the transaction fee and not a percentage of pot money,”
explains Kamath. This gives the game operators a limited opportunity to flourish in an
industry, which is multi-billion dollar globally.

This is a perfect trap.
And operators know this. If they really want to flourish, they’d have to acknowledge that
these are games of chances. Then they can get a gambling license, and although they
would be limited to just two states, they would be able to earn more profit.
“They [operators] are caught in the double bind. ‘Should I acknowledge that it is a game of
chance and go and get a license and operate in only two states [Goa and Sikkim]. Or
should I make the strong argument that it is a game of skill? But if I do so, I cannot make
money out of that,’” says Kamath. “All the online companies make profits on volume.
Even if they are legal, they will have to get through the second challenge, which is that
they can’t make profits out of any betting activity.”
This is why the lobby group, All India Gaming Federation (AIGF), was set up last year.
“We work with different states. We either try to convince them to emulate the Goa model,
telling them that gaming can be a huge revenue generator, or we try and get the states to
include poker and fantasy games in the game of skills so that there is no regulatory
ambiguity,” says Roland Landers, CEO of AIGF. “We also try to get permission from the
states (which do not list poker as skill-based games) to host poker tournaments.” Such
tournaments prove to be a good source of revenue for poker operators.
Luckily for them, there have been some favourable judgments in the past.
One of the latest states to change the Gambling Act is Nagaland. In 2015, under the new
regulations, the state allowed operators to make profits on a game of skills, but operators
were required to get a license from the government. Similarly, in 2013, the Karnataka
High Court declared poker as a game of skill. In another Supreme Court verdict, in 2015,
playing rummy with stakes was considered as not gambling. But there is no such
judgement or regulation when it comes to fantasy sports.
“The ambiguity in regulations hamper the growth of this industry. If the government
wants to regulate it, they can go for licensing. Right now, things are so unclear that it is
tough to start a new business,” says Kamath.
As it is, the illegal gross betting and gambling market in India is pegged at $150 billion,
while global sports betting market is projected to be worth $4 trillion, as per a report by
International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS). The total revenue from the Indian gaming
and gambling industry stands at about $60 billion, as per AIGF, while according to
industry estimates, the online poker market is about $120 million.
Even funding becomes very challenging, says Kamath. First, a company has to convince
the investors that this is a game of skills. Then show that it complies with all the
regulations. And finally, convince them that if ever sued, it’ll be able to defend itself.
“We don’t see many investors taking risks on such businesses. If you see, there haven’t
been many deals in the sector,” says Arpit Agarwal of Blume Ventures.

Flourishing Industry
As it is, the illegal gross betting and gambling market in India is pegged at $150 billion,
while global sports betting market is projected to be worth $4 trillion, as per a report by
International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS). The total revenue from the Indian gaming
and gambling industry stands at about $60 billion, as per AIGF, while according to
industry estimates, the online poker market is about $120 million
Crossing the line

Still, online gaming companies like Moonfrog Labs and Octro have raised money in the
past. The former got $15 million from Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global in 2015, while the
latter raised $15 million from Sequoia in 2014.
Though Moonfrog Labs does not offer poker, it offers Teen Patti (Flush), which is a game
of chance. But it claims that the game does not involve any real money. Octro, on the
other hand, has poker as well as Teen Patti (with the same model as Moonfrog). Can these
be considered as a relatively safe bet? May be. May be not.
“The legality of games such as Flush/Teen Patti is debatable. The business model does not
change the fundamental nature of the activity when offered for money. They still let users
buy chips with real money. And as a reward, they give things like more [virtual] chips,
which are of some value,” argues Kamath.
“Frankly, these companies are pushing their limits,” says a betting game operator, who
did not want to be named. “And we keep worrying about that because when the
crackdown happens due to one company taking a risk, it affects the entire sector.”
The operators’ defense
Online operators believe that they will be able to prove poker as a game of skill if the law
comes charging.
Since online players cannot judge their opponents by body language, they use the bet size
to determine what kind of hands the other person might have.
“In an online game, the only thing that lets you guess your opponent’s position is the bet
size,” says Dewani. “If you play long enough with some people, you can start predicting
their moves based on how much money they bet and at what point. If anything stands out,
then you will tend to reason it. Is that justifiable, or is it looking like an unexplainable
raise? And if it is, then you’ll know it is a bluff.”
“We are very confident of taking this to the court to justify that this is a game of skill. We
would base it on facts and data and how the game is actually played,” he adds.
Well, that is that. But if there were clear rules in place to begin with, nobody would need
to call the bluff.

Polio vaccine breach: India is perched atop the edge of
crisis
the-ken.com/story/polio-vaccine-edge-of-crisis
October 10, 2018
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Around 1.5 lakh kids in UP, Maharashtra and Telangana have received polio vaccines
(OPV) contaminated with poliovirus type 2. A strand that has been pronounced
‘eradicated’. The breach is serious. Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious viral disease that
can maim, paralyze or even kill children. And now, poliovirus type 2 is back in the
environment and there is a small possibility that the virus might cause polio—if not in a
child who received the dose (a tiny but ever-present risk), then in the wider population of
kids born after 2016 who have not been inoculated against polio type 2. The world, and
India with it, stopped vaccinating children against type 2 in April 2016.
“Among non-immune children, there is the possibility of some getting infected from the
vaccinated children,” said T Jacob John, a polio researcher with the Christian Medical
College in Vellore. “Very low probability of that happening, but in case it happens, then
the result will be a polio outbreak.”
Experts say this situation could’ve been entirely avoided if India’s Universal
Immunisation Programme (UIP) predominantly administered an injectable polio vaccine
to kids, rather than the oral one. India does not because there’s a worldwide shortage of
injectable vaccines (the “inactivated polio vaccine” or IPV) that will ease only in 2023—
the result of a lack of foresight on the part of global health authorities.
‘The global community has learned its lesson on polio,” said Raj Shankar Ghosh, deputy
director of vaccine delivery at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “No one expected
the supply shortage’.
the-ken.com-Polio vaccine breach India is perched atop the edge of crisis 1/2 598
Four strategies for polio immunisation
These were endorsed by WHO and followed by India:
National immunisation programme
Surveillance of any child who complains of sudden weakness/paralysis
Mop-up: stepping up inoculations if a case is reported
Pulse polio program
And so, India is mostly giving out oral vaccines and rationing its limited IPV supplies.
Kids are getting fractional doses on a schedule that is relatively less effective, said Vipin
Vashishtha, a paediatrician and polio expert at Mangla Hospital and Research Center in
Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh. And coverage is low—only 47% of Indian kids got IPV last year,
according to the World Health Organization.
“If there is a resurgence or appearance of, for example, vaccine-derived type 2 [polio],
with this type of schedule, you may have compromised efficacy,” said Vashishtha.
“Population immunity may not be that great.”
If polio type 2 manifests in the community, it would be a serious setback to the global and
India’s polio eradication efforts. India’s last wild polio case was in 2011, and it was
certified polio-free in March 2014. The last case of polio type 2 was seen in 2002.
The government and WHO are now rushing to inoculate kids in the affected areas with
IPV from emergency stockpiles.
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Privacy terror to adtech: SilverPush’s rise from the
ashes
the-ken.com/story/silverpush-rise-from-the-ashes
March 9, 2019
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Could I have seen the adverts?
“You could have, you could have,” says Hitesh Chawla.
What are those brands, if you could name them?
In his dimly lit glass cabin on the third floor of a mall in Gurugram, Chawla, co-founder of
SilverPush, a company which sells technology solutions to target consumers with ads
across television and digital media, hesitates slightly. “I am not sure if I should share
names.”
“I can tell you one,” he then continues. “They were a large e-commerce company called
Askme.com. They aren’t in business, so I can tell you. They were a big client.”
In 2014, the e-commerce company was running ads starring the Bollywood actors Ranbir
Kapoor and, later, Kangana Ranaut, Askme’s still-available profile on YouTube shows.
Askme, connected to the Malaysian billionaire Ananda Krishnan, shut shop in 2016.
Chawla says the company still owes him half a million dollars.
Either of those adverts on TV may have emitted an ultrasonic audio beacon, an identifier
embedded in the television signal, using sound close to or beyond the human hearing
capability. If you were watching it and your mobile had an app using SilverPush’s software
development kit (SDK), it would have promptly pinged the company’s server.
Unbeknownst to the mobile user, this allowed SilverPush and its clients to know which of
its adverts were being watched in the vicinity of the device. What’s more, unlike
electromagnetic waves used, for example, in Bluetooth, ultrasonic sound waves cannot
pass through walls. This can let you precisely determine a device’s location. The aim, at
the time, was to have more granularity and real-time data on television viewers by
connecting an offline and an online device.
"We were reaching two to three million mobiles in India"
Hitesh Chawla
Chawla, 36, comes across as charming in an earthy way. Dressed in a blue sweater, jeans
and light shoes with streaks of grey in his curly hair, he later breaks our conversation to
take a call in animated, laughing Punjabi. A 2004 batch IIT Delhi chemical engineer who
the-ken.com-Privacy terror to adtech SilverPushs rise from the ashes 1/3 600
was born near the India border, and spent years in research in Australia, he doesn’t
appear to be the stereotypical villain.
Not long ago though, for US privacy groups and tech media, he was.
Things fall apart

It was between October 2015 and March 2016 that SilverPush’s audio beacon model came
apart. To follow the trail of events is an object lesson in how the interconnected world
operates.
Referencing newspaper reports from the US media and India, the Washington-based
Center for Democracy and Technology had written to the US Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) in October 2015, in anticipation of a workshop on cross-device tracking.
Pushing on
Four years ago, Hitesh Chawla’s Gurugram-based tech startup

made headlines across the world for helping advertisers embed
ultrasonic tracking beacons in TV signals. Revenue collapsed, a
co-founder quit, and vultures circled. In a bind, Chawla turned to
a new business: matching digital ads to television—in real time—
and today claims over 100 clients from Unilever to Nestle to
Spotify
Virat Markandeya, 9 Mar 2019
SilverPush now tracks hundreds of TV channels, with proprietary machine learning
systems that can detect advertisements in real time
Chawla claims revenue more than doubled in 2018, and SilverPush announced just last
month that it had raised $5 million in Series B funding
In patent filings published in December, it claims that it can identify a live TV ad in

under a second, and then trigger related ads across digital media for its clients
SilverPush also helps brands run contextual ads with online videos, attracting a roster
of global and Indian companies, as well as politicians readying for elections
Private sports broadcasters to pay for Doordarshan’s
free lunch
the-ken.com/story/sports-mandatory-sharing-act
October 19, 2018
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There is a new war brewing in sports broadcasting. Between private sports broadcasters
and state-owned Prasar Bharati. And if the latter is victorious, private sports broadcasters
stand to lose. Substantially.
Earlier this week, the information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry proposed an
amendment to the decade-old Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with
Prasar Bharati) Act, 2007. The Act requires private sports broadcasters such as Star India
and Sony to share their live feeds of sporting events that are of national importance with
the public broadcaster. Prasar Bharati, which runs television network Doordarshan (DD)
and All India Radio, then retransmits the broadcast signals on its terrestrial network and
its own direct-to-home (DTH) platform, DD Free Dish.
The idea behind the Act was to make important sporting events like cricket, football and
hockey world cups accessible to as many Indians as possible. Now, the ministry wants
such content to reach “the largest number of viewers, on a free-to-air basis.” With the new
amendment, DD will be able to air these events on private cable and DTH networks as
well. Previously, DD was only allowed to rebroadcast on its own distribution networks.
22 million
The estimated number of subscribers on DD Free Dish.
The proposed amendment will come as a bonanza for DD and its customers. It will,
however, cut into the earnings of private sports broadcasters—adversely impacting the
subscription and advertising revenues of private channels that actually hold the rights to
the-ken.com-Private sports broadcasters to pay for Doordarshans free lunch 1/2 603
these events. Even sporting federations like the Board of Control for Cricket in India
(BCCI) will not be spared as the value of their properties is likely to diminish without
exclusivity.
This doom and gloom sentiment isn’t without cause. In fact, it has been years in the
making. Ever since the Mandatory Sharing Act—as it is usually called—came into
existence in 2007. Right from its inception, the Act drew a lot of flak. The issue stems
from a key part of the Act—there is little clarity on how the government defines or
categorises events of national importance.
In the absence of this clear definition, multiple industry executives indicated that the
central government, which notifies such events, is abusing the Act’s provisions. According
to them, the government often selects events that are less about public interest and more
in line with improving DD’s viewership and advertising potential.
“They pick what they like and what can deliver results, not for the public but for
themselves,” said an industry executive, who has been privy to the discussions between
Prasar Bharati and the I&B ministry.
This is borne out by the I&B ministry’s priorities over the last few years. Last year, for
months, the ministry worked on a proposal to include the Indian Premier League (IPL)—a
T20 cricket tournament run by the BCCI but with teams owned by private players—as a
listed event for mandatory sharing with DD.
the-ken.com-Private sports broadcasters to pay for Doordarshans free lunch 2/2 604
Public vs Private: India in a vaccine Catch-22
the-ken.com/story/public-vs-private-india-in-a-vaccine-catch-22
March 15, 2018
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The Indian health ministry has maintained its position for the last 10 years. At least
formally, with the Supreme Court, the Parliament and the media. It wants to upgrade the
three public vaccine manufacturers to supply vaccines of impeccable quality at a low
price. Now that the government companies have risen from the ashes as competent
vaccine producers, the health ministry needs to make a choice. Are they still a worthy
contender for the now Rs 9,451-crore ($1.44 billion) national vaccination programme?
The three public sector undertakings (PSUs)—Central Research Institute (CRI), Kasauli,
BCG Vaccine Laboratory (BCGVL), Chennai and Pasteur Institute of India (PII), Coonoor
—were shut down in January 2008. The World Health Organisation had questioned the
quality of the vaccines they were producing. They spent a decade to become Good
Manufacturing Practice (GMP) compliant, a sure-fire mark of quality-tested vaccine
producer. The PSUs spent a part of the Rs 509 crore ($78.21 million) allocated to them in
the last five years to upgrade to new quality standards. CRI complied with GMP in
principle in 2012, and the minister of health celebrated by inaugurating the GMP-
compliant facility in 2016. In two months, BCGVL is expecting GMP certification, and in
four months, PII will join the club.
Now, when the executives from BCGVL and PII visit the health ministry, they return
nervous. “The mood at the immunisation programme in Delhi has changed. Over informal
conversations, they say they do not want to procure from us, anymore,” an executive at
PII who did not want to be named told The Ken. The health ministry’s leanings are
evident in supply records from CRI and private companies, over the last two years.
the-ken.com-Public vs Private India in a vaccine Catch-22 1/3 605

Source: National health profile, 2017
Why wouldn’t the ministry want to buy from PSUs? PSUs sell vaccines at the lowest price
decided in a competitive bid involving private players. They either offer or will soon offer
quality-tested vaccines. Further, they are in control of the health ministry itself. Together,
they used to supply over 80% of the essential vaccines before they were closed down, and
now, private players supply the same amount to the Indian government. A Public Interest
Litigation filed in February 2009 did, however, tilt the bar in favour of PSUs, which have
invested in upgrading their facilities to meet the new quality standards. But, in the
meantime, their competition has grown stronger, and the health ministry’s choice has
become more complex.
Since these PSUs were closed down, the budget allocated to the national vaccination
programme doubled and so did the number of vaccines in the programme. The
government learned to rely on the private Indian vaccine sector which grew at 18% to Rs
5900 crore ($907 million) between 2009 and 2016.
With or without you
With a potential budget of $1.44 billion, the health ministry can

have any vaccine producer it desires. Does this mean that PSUs
lose out?
Ruhi Kandhari, 15 Mar 2018
The vaccine producing PSUs have either become GMP-compliant or will this year;
they're worthy contenders for the national vaccination programme

The executives from certain vaccine producing PSUs are nervous because another PSU
(despite GMP) isn't getting health ministry orders
While the Indian retail market for vaccines is small, the national programme is a
significantly larger buyer for them
Why wouldn’t the ministry want to buy from PSUs? There's more to the story

Quo Vadis Snapdeal?
the-ken.com/story/quo-vadis-snapdeal
February 28, 2017
Earlier this month, on 6 February, in an interview with Reuters, Kunal Bahl, the CEO of
Snapdeal, predicted that the company would be profitable in two years, “I see a relatively
clear line of sight to (profit)” and said that it is time to “now take control of our destiny.”
Confident words looking forward to a golden future.
And yet a mere two weeks later, Bahl had to take, what was in his own words “by far the
hardest decision we have ever taken”: A sharp culling of the Snapdeal workforce with
hundreds of folks losing their jobs amidst other major restructuring moves that saw the
elimination of multiple “non-core” businesses within the organisation and sharp pay cuts
for the CXOs starting at the top with Bahl and his co-founder Rohit Bansal taking “100%
salary cuts.”
So how did things unravel so quickly for Snapdeal? If you go by what the mainstream
press is saying, this was the result of Snapdeal not being able to raise the additional
funding it was seeking. While there might be some merit to this, the fact that in the same
Reuters interview, Bahl averred, “whatever capital we have today is largely sufficient for
us” indicates that there could be deeper issues lurking beneath this simplistic reason.
In an attempt to dig deeper, The Ken interviewed several folks at Snapdeal, both current
and former employees, and they painted a picture with far more colours beyond the
obvious monotone of the funding issue.
the-ken.com-Quo Vadis Snapdeal 1/5 608

In their collective opinion, Snapdeal had severe problems, both strategic and
organisational, that made failure almost inevitable.
Well-timed pivots or knee-jerk pirouettes?

In his email to his team explaining the layoff, Bahl said, “We’ve had a phenomenal
journey, with many well-timed pivots” but even to Snapdeal insiders, none of these moves
seemed well-timed or particularly prudent.
Snapdeal made one significant pivot morphing from a site that sold coupons to an e-
commerce marketplace—it is easy to forget that it was the first major e-commerce
company to adopt a marketplace model rather than an inventory-led one. While the
company hasn’t made significant changes in its core business model, it has constantly
chopped and changed the business direction and broad goal.
In 2015, Bahl famously bragged that Snapdeal would beat Flipkart in GMV (Gross
Merchandise Value) by the end of the fiscal year. But shortly thereafter, Bahl changed the
narrative saying that a focus on GMV was passé and the company would henceforth focus
on net revenue.
Now while this may seem like a pragmatic response to the bruising discounting war that
was being fought between Flipkart, India’s top e-commerce company, and Amazon, the
global behemoth, who saw India as its next big market, the company leadership never
actually translated this external narrative to a rallying call within the company. Insiders
tell us of constant flip-flops with constantly-changing goalposts. In one quarter, the focus
was on maximising GMV while in the next one, it would be on other metrics such as
optimising for net revenue or enhancing Net Promoter Score (NPS) followed by a third
flip back to GMV. This constant chopping and changing led to a perception within
quarters of the company that each pivot was the result of Bahl getting a “different
message from the investors” each time he presented to them rather than the result of a
well-informed strategy.
Beyond this change in business direction, Snapdeal attempted a number of minor pivots
to carve out a moat for itself. As our story in November pointed out, none of these
attempts counted for anything meaningful.
That shrinking feeling

As these flip-flops played out, Snapdeal completely lost the plot in terms of the business
metrics that really mattered. Firstly, its market share plummeted from a close second to
Flipkart to a distant third beyond Amazon. According to an estimate for 2016 by Merrill
Lynch, Snapdeal had a mere 12% share of the market in terms of GMV compared to
Flipkart’s 43% and Amazon’s 28%. This might have been okay if the market was growing
but Snapdeal plateaued in terms of daily transactions as well. The company had
approximately 130,000 orders per day in August 2015 and the corresponding number for
August 2016 was exactly the same—130,000. This, despite the increased marketing
spends and major rebranding efforts the company attempted.

This lack of momentum translated into a sense of despondency and cynicism within the
company. Not only were the rank and file unsure about how their performances would be
judged but also plagued by a sense of uncertainty as to whether their individual
performances would matter at all in the first place.
The lack of a core USP
One of the fascinating aspects of our interviews with Snapdeal employees was that not a
single person could articulate what in his/her opinion Snapdeal’s unique selling point was
or has ever been. Bahl has stated on multiple occasions that Snapdeal was the fastest e-
commerce company in terms of delivery—while this may well be true, two things are clear.
Firstly, the speed of delivery may not have mattered as much to customers as Snapdeal
might have thought and more importantly, within Snapdeal itself, this USP had little
resonance with employees either not being aware of it at all or knowing about it but not
convinced that it made a meaningful difference.
So unlike say Flipkart, which has strong moats in mobile phones with several exclusive
tie-ups, fashion with both Myntra and Jabong as flanking brands and consumer durables
with an in-house installation and servicing wing, Snapdeal had neither an
operational/strategic moat nor a unique vision that could serve as a unifying rallying
clarion call for its rank and file.
Of turf wars and redundancies

While Bahl was the public face of the company, from an operational perspective he owned
very few of the functions. Bahl’s role was restricted to strategy and fund-raising and other
than a few streams such as parts of the ad tech business unit, the only functions that
reported to him were ancillary units such as finance. The actual people running the show
on a day-to-day basis were Bahl’s co-founder Rohit Bansal and CTO, Rajiv Mangla, an
Adobe veteran who came on board in August 2015.
The folks we spoke to painted a pretty grim picture of the organisational culture in the
company under Bansal and Mangla—one that was steeped in politics and placed an
emphasis on who-you-know rather than what-you-know. While it is moot if Bansal and
Mangla engineered this on purpose, it is quite clear that there were multiple turf wars
within the company with different CXOs and VPs jockeying for power and influence. The
fact that Snapdeal had bloated to a company that had nearly 10,000 employees at one
point in time made these problems far more acute with the politics of managing internal
perceptions gaining an upper hand at the cost of having a shared vision and unifying goal.
And inevitably for a company of this size with multiple acquisitions along the way, bloat
and redundancies were common. For instance, just for machine learning there were three
different overlapping teams working independently and oblivious to one another—one
team under Mangla in Gurugram, a second in the Bay Area that the investors insisted on
setting up as part of a larger data services team on which they exercised control and a
third under Gaurav Agarwal, the founder of a Bangalore-based startup that Snapdeal
acquired in 2015. Similarly, there were two overlapping customer loyalty/order delivery

initiatives, SD Gold and SD Plus. It was not clear to the employees themselves as to what
the difference between the two was, and people saw this as a knee-jerk reaction to
Amazon Prime.
This overreach seems to extend to another aspect of the business that Snapdeal wasn’t shy
in—acquisitions. Starting with FreeCharge, which is still the largest e-commerce
acquisition in India, it acquired a number of other startups like Grabbon, Shopo,
Exclusively, MartMobi and Unicommerce. In parallel, it invested in several other startups
such as GoJavas. To folks within Snapdeal, many of these acquisitions were puzzles with
people wondering what exactly the company was getting into and what value the acquired
companies brought to Snapdeal. The fact that Snapdeal has now decided to trim many of
these teams probably vindicates these fears.
FreeCharge—the twist in the tale

That said, there is one acquisition that might still save the day for Snapdeal. While
FreeCharge might not have added any meaningful strategic value to Snapdeal, according
to insiders, it has come to epitomise Snapdeal’s ‘get out of jail’ Monopoly card. According
to the sources we spoke to, “Snapdeal is exploring selling FreeCharge lock, stock and
barrel and hoping to use the proceeds from that sale (which it hopes will be in the $300-
500 million region) to its kitty and grow the core business” where it hopes to achieve
“profitable growth” in the words of Bahl.
“Profitable growth”—An oxymoron or a realistic goal?

While there is little doubt that Snapdeal, like its other e-commerce peers, does not enjoy
positive unit economics that would translate to profitable growth, insiders still feel that it
is too soon to write the company off.
They see two aspects as being in the company’s favour. Firstly, employees believe that the
company has significant cash reserves to finance its core operations and the recent cuts
not only increase the company’s runway but also signal the end of overtly wasteful
expenditure. If and when it can successfully hive off FreeCharge, this runway will get a
significant extension. Secondly, according to these sources, even after the company
almost completely shut off digital marketing and discounting, sales figures are still
respectable—at approximately 65,000 orders per day. It is interesting to note that this
number is approximately half of the volume it used to see earlier when bolstered by deep
discounting and hard marketing push. Perhaps this 50% number is its natural level in a
sense and gives us a hint into what multiples to use when valuing the company itself as
well as its peers.
But while there is still hope, there are some grave challenges. Firstly, as per company
insiders, the entire layoff exercise has been handled in a slipshod manner.
Communication has been poor, and there is rampant rumour-mongering with multiple
WhatsApp groups emerging to add fuel to the fire. There is also a general perception that
Jason Kothari, air-dropped from SoftBank via Housing.com, is the corporate equivalent of
Jason Voorhees of cheap horror flicks and slice-and-dice fame. He has wielded the layoffs

move as akin to a sledgehammer rather than a surgical knife. For instance, one of the key
elements of the re-organisational exercise has been to flatten layers completely and
basically let go of everyone who has the misfortune of being slotted in any of these
ostensibly redundant layers across all business units. Govind Rajan, the CEO of
FreeCharge, apparently wasn’t comfortable with laying off folks from his team and instead
offered to take deep pay cuts across the unit to avoid having to fire anyone. However, this
wasn’t accepted and Rajan chose to resign and move on.
There is also a perception that the reason why Bahl and Bansal have gone incommunicado
and are not responding to folks who have questions is that the job cuts exercise is going to
be far wider and deeper than reported. News reports have stated that the company is
looking to lay off 600-800 people and end up with an employee base of around 1,300
people. But there is a fear that the actual numbers are closer to 60-70%, and the employee
base retained will be closer to 700-800 people. This has led to considerable uncertainty
and resentment, and even the executives who have been retained are “actively
encouraging their team members to pro-actively move out rather than wallow in
uncertainty”. Secondly, the move by Bahl and Bansal to take 100% pay cuts, rather than
sending out a positive message, has had a boomerang effect. It is common knowledge
within the company that only these two founders were allowed to sell their personal
shareholdings in the secondaries that have happened in the last two years. None of the
other senior employees were allowed to do anything similar. So there is a perception that
the founders have already made their money, and they have nothing to lose unlike the rest
of the employees who haven’t yet made any meaningful money from their stock options.
All said and done, beyond the vagrancies of the external market and competitive forces,
the eventual success or failure of Snapdeal will now depend on how well Bahl and his
team can manage the internal challenges around retaining employee trust and keeping
the remaining flock together.

Qure’s AI bet goes from TB to Covid
the-ken.com/story/qures-ai-bet-goes-from-tb-to-covid
December 22, 2020
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In April this year, when Mumbai was in the grip of Covid-19, Dr Hemant Deshmukh, dean
of the civic-run KEM Hospital and Seth GS Medical College, had a string of difficult
decisions to make. Patients were pouring in by the dozen every hour and he didn’t have
any time to lose. Who received the limited number of RT-PCR tests available? Who got a
hospital bed? How did doctors make decisions about triaging?
Deshmukh, the head of the city’s Covid task force and a radiologist with over two decades
of medical practice under his belt, had never seen something like this. But all the hours
he’d spent examining countless chest scan images proved handy. He realised that in the
absence of RT-PCR test kits, chest X-rays could help segregate patients with pneumonia-
like conditions.
Covid hits both sides of the lungs, causing bilateral damage. It also typically blocks the
arteries leading to the lungs, making its presentation in chest X-rays somewhat unique
from Tuberculosis and lung cancer, says Deshmukh. Doctors could begin treatments
based on this, he told The Ken.
The idea, however, was only as good as the manpower available to manually read the X-
rays. India is notoriously short of trained radiologists. India has less than 20,000
radiologists, all concentrated in tier-1 and -2 cities—meaning only one radiologist for
every 100,000 people in the country. So, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
(MCGM), Mumbai’s civic body, turned to tech instead.
MCGM has worked with Mumbai-based startup Qure.ai since November 2019, using its
artificial intelligence tech, trained on a repository of 3.5 million chest scans, to detect
early signs of TB in municipal hospitals. India has the world’s largest number of TB cases,
as of 2019, according to the World Health Organization.
The software behind Qure’s artificial intelligence solution qXR takes about a minute to
read each chest scan; the results would then pop up on the qXR app on the doctors’
phones. Pivoting from learning to recognise TB to Covid wasn’t much of a stretch. Both
diseases used the same data repository, and the same set of civic officials was responding
to both crises.
Mumbai’s civic machinery moved quickly, investing nearly Rs 2 crore ($270,000) upfront
for emergency procurement of 10 digital X-ray machines. These were installed in
hospitals as well as mobile vans deployed in hotspots—especially in areas like the densely-
populated Worli and Dharavi—to screen those at risk.
the-ken.com-Qures AI bet goes from TB to Covid 1/2 613

A pandemic pivot
Data from 3.5 million chest X-rays helped Qure’s artificial

intelligence solution qXR detect tuberculosis symptoms early.
Now the four-year-old Indian company is putting the same data to
use with Covid
Maitri Porecha, 22 Dec 2020
At the height of the pandemic, the limited number of RT-PCR tests drove Mumbai
hospitals to look for alternate solutions
X-rays, while an easy method to detect Covid-like symptoms, also need radiologists to
read them; and India has a severe shortage
Half of Qure’s 30 deployments in India are now working to detect Covid symptoms
The company is now expected to register an 18X revenue growth for 2021. AI, however,
is no magic bullet for Covid
the-ken.com-Qures AI bet goes from TB to Covid 2/2 614

Rage against the machine: behind Byju’s swift
silencing of dissent
the-ken.com/story/byjus-silencing-of-online-dissent
October 6, 2020
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On 11 September 2020, 29-year-old Pradeep Poonia uploaded a video to YouTube under a
rather strange account name, Whitehat Sr. Strange, because it closely resembled the name
of WhiteHat Jr*, a popular edtech company based out of the western Indian city of
Mumbai. Its aim is to teach young children how to code, promising six-figure salaries and
a Silicon Valley future to its students.
At the time, Poonia says, he didn’t realise how his simple play on WhiteHat Jr’s name
would land him in social media purgatory.
The video, titled “The difference between Byju’s and WhiteHat Jr” is a dramatic and
comic expression of Poonia’s view of these multi-billion dollar businesses. It is over-the-
top and involves two balloons, a pin prick, and a tacky sound effect. DIY dissent at its
simplest.
A snapshot from Poonia's first YouTube video about Byju's (Picture credit: The Ken/Olina
Banerji)
the-ken.com-Rage against the machine behind Byjus swift silencing of dissent 1/4 615
What it doesn’t display is any logo, trademark or material that Byju’s or WhiteHat Jr
might have proprietary rights on. So imagine Poonia’s surprise when, two days later,
YouTube took down his video citing a “copyright infringement”.
YouTube took down the video on claims of copyright infringement ( Picture credit:
Pradeep Poonia)
This was only step one.
Over the next few weeks, YouTube removed six of Poonia’s videos from WhiteHat Sr and
five from a subsequent channel he created on 18 September titled SafedTopi Sr. “Within
35-40 minutes, I saw that the videos I’d uploaded had been taken down,” Poonia tells The
Ken over a phone call from his hometown Panipat, around 90 km north of the country’s
capital Delhi. On his first account, Poonia received two “copyright strikes”, which
prompted him to create the second channel. By 28 September, SafedTopi Sr had also
received two “copyright strikes”. By midday on 29 September, YouTube had disabled his
second channel.
For most of September, Poonia woke to a ban or a takedown from a different social media
account. Exiled from YouTube, he moved to more community-driven platforms like
Reddit and Quora, where he thought his questions about Byju’s’ business model or
WhiteHat Jr’s coding quality would find more takers.
He claims his questions and posts created a stir there, and he was “moderated out” of
Reddit’s main Indian channel r/India. His two Reddit accounts u/whiteHatsr and
u/Whitehat_sr were disabled as well, on 15 September and 16 September respectively.
Almost simultaneous to the YouTube takedowns. Questions sent to Byju’s and the
moderators of r/India (The Official Subreddit for India) went unanswered. Quora India
didn’t want to comment on specific instances of moderation on their channels. [Post the
publication of the story, the moderators of subreddit r/India clarified that Poonia’s posts
on r/India were approved.
Judge and jury
Two individuals from two different walks of life have challenged

the prowess of edtech giants Byju’s and WhiteHat Jr. But a
system of strategic social media takedowns—of posts and people
—threatens their right to dissent and criticise
Olina Banerji, 6 Oct 2020
The Byju’s-WhiteHat Jr duo have weaponised opaque yet stringent copyright
infringement rules on social media to their own benefit
One of Pradeep Poonia's YouTube videos criticising WhiteHat Jr was taken down;
Aniruddha Malpani was booted out of LinkedIn
Poonia, Malpani claim Byju's is targeting their critical posts through third-party anti-
piracy firms, taking down posts they deem unviable
Platform rules have made entities judge and jury, despite claims of neutrality; legal
complaints, a shift to other channels seem to be only recourse
Raising a stink: India’s big-little STP problem
the-ken.com/story/indias-big-little-sewage-problem
November 15, 2018
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There is one reality we are confronted with in almost all major Indian cities—the
unmistakable, unshakeable stench of rotting sewage.
Year after year, Bengaluru’s lakes continue to froth angrily because of the high level of
waste in them. But these lakes aren’t outliers. Like clockwork, every torrential monsoon in
Mumbai sees the city’s roads flooded with sewer water. And in Delhi, the arterial Yamuna
has been a cesspool for decades.
The cause for all this untreated sewage floating around is as obvious as it is revolting—
sewage management in India is either non-existent or woefully unsatisfactory.
According to the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB) estimates, the overwhelming
majority—some 78%—of domestic sewage is left untreated in the country. It is either
dumped into rivers and lakes or let out into fields, where it leaches into the soil,
contaminating our groundwater. 70% of groundwater, according to the Composite Water
Management Index, is already contaminated. At this rate, 21 Indian cities are well on their
way to having no access to groundwater by 2020. (Read our story on India’s water scarcity
problem)
India’s major cities are starved for clean water. Paradoxically, where clean water is scarce,
the volume of sewage generated is growing unabated. In 2017, India’s class I and class II
cities generated enough sewage to fill up 11,600 Olympic-size swimming pools daily—an
estimated 29,129 million litres a day (MLD). In sharp contrast, the cumulative treatment
capacity is a meagre 6,190 MLD. Over four times less than is needed. Even with another
the-ken.com-Raising a stink Indias big-little STP problem 1/3 619

1,742 MLD of sewage treatment capacity additions planned, the gap reduces by a mere
6%. According to the CPCB, this lack of treatment capacity has led to domestic sewage
being the biggest polluter of our urban water resources.
All of this underlines an inarguable fact. Water runs in an unforgiving ecological loop.
What you give is what you ultimately get back.
The root cause of this predicament are India’s centralised sewage treatment plants
(STPs), which service most urban centres and provide reusable wastewater. And as urban
populations continue to grow, the cracks in the system, long visible, are growing into
gaping chasms.

Even where piped sewage networks exist, their patchy coverage across the city means that
even the available capacity remains underutilised. “States like Tamil Nadu have spent a
lot of money investing in a piped sewage network, but the volume of sewage flowing
through them is very low,” says S.R. Ramanujam, a Mumbai-based water expert. As a
result, only 33 of Tamil Nadu’s 73 sewage treatment plants are actually operational.
In light of all this, there is growing consensus that decentralised STPs are the way
forward.

Rajdeep Sardesai on tracking India in the Modi era
the-ken.com/story/rajdeep-sardesai-on-tracking-india-in-the-modi-era
August 26, 2018
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“When sensation has replaced sense or noise has replaced news, you know, you feel—I
don’t want to say that, but I feel almost an anachronism. Ancient, wrestling with self-
doubt.”
Heavy words, coming from one of the biggest names in television news.
***
It’s a fine August morning in Delhi—it had just rained—when we turn up at the home of
news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai. Currently a consulting editor at the India Today Group,
Sardesai comes on at 9PM, prime time on the group’s television channel, with his
programme News Today.
We’re here to discuss his new book.
A short, bespectacled man ushers us into a hall, and a pudgy beagle welcomes us with
many a wag of his tail. We’ve been there maybe a minute and a half when Sardesai himself
sweeps down the stairs in jeans and a blue-and-white shirt. Hands are shaken,
pleasantries exchanged and we settle down in a small, glass-walled sitting room. There’s
tea, coffee, the usual stuff. He offers us some Maharashtrian chiwda, a sweet and salty
mixture of flattened rice, peanuts and raisins. “I love it. I try to sell Maharashtrian chiwda
to everyone who comes here,” he says with a smile, every bit the affable host.
We jaw on for a while about cricket, his dog, the media industry today and the world at
large. And then it’s down to business.
the-ken.com-Rajdeep Sardesai on tracking India in the Modi era 1/2 622

In Newsman: Tracking India in the Modi Era, Sardesai presents a collection of his essays
and columns from the past four years on politics, the Narendra Modi-led government and
the Indian media. Much as he does on-screen, Sardesai bemoans the rise of an
increasingly aggressive brand of politics and the heightened polarisation of both public
discourse and the news media world that he inhabits.
One line in his introduction to the book stands out in particular: “It is while engaging in
toxic Hindu-Muslim and ‘national’ versus ‘anti-national’ arguments, driven by a rising
Islamophobia, that one feels almost caged in a television (TV) news studio.” Writing in
solitude, Sardesai continues, gives him a chance to free himself from the “TV ‘mock fight’
debate format”.
Viewed as a whole, the book offers a window into Sardesai’s worldview. Politics takes
centre stage, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi—“a charismatic neta who revels in the
image of the muscular nationalist icon”—at the core of it. But equally important is a
thread that runs through the entire text: the hardening of fault lines across politics,
society and, in turn, the media.
One highlight is the growing trend of aggressive nationalism—a point repeated by a

number of commentators in recent years—and the tendency of the government and its
supporters to label opposing voices as “anti-national”.
the-ken.com-Rajdeep Sardesai on tracking India in the Modi era 2/2 623

RedDoorz: The unlikely David to OYO’s Goliath in
Southeast Asia
the-ken.com/story/reddoorz-oyo-southeast-asia
October 23, 2019
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If you were looking for the antithesis to OYO, the controversial $10 billion giant, then
RedDoorz would be it. Both are budget hotel aggregators with India-born CEOs—Ritesh
Agarwal and Amit Saberwal, respectively.
The similarities, however, end there.
While OYO has aggressively expanded across the globe with the backing of VC giant
SoftBank’s bottomless pockets, RedDoorz has taken a more measured approach.
Founded in 2015, it raised just $25 million across the first four years of its existence,
preferring to hone its business model instead. That, too, largely in its home country of
Indonesia.
In fact, it wasn’t until earlier this year that RedDoorz truly made a splash, announcing a
$45-million Series B round in July. One month later, it followed up with a $70-million
Series C. That spree added big name investors like Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten
—which profited handsomely from an investment in ride-hailing major Lyft—newly-
minted PE firm Asia Partners and Qiming, a Chinese VC that manages $4 billion across
12 funds and has over 20 unicorns in its portfolio.
Bolstered by this cash infusion, RedDoorz now stands ready to stake its claim to
Southeast Asia’s budget hotel market. But while its learnings in Indonesia—the region’s
largest economy and the world’s fourth-most populated country—have given the
company confidence, it now has an almighty task ahead of it.
the-ken.com-RedDoorz The unlikely David to OYOs Goliath in Southeast Asia 1/2 624
As it seeks to expand to build its budget hotel network into a bonafide brand among
Southeast Asia’s 600 million-plus populace, it stands smack-dab in the path of OYO,
India’s second-highest-valued tech startup. With its seemingly insatiable appetite, OYO
views Southeast Asia as a key expansion market. Already, it claims to have over 1,500
hotels on its platform in the region, the same figure that RedDoorz publicises.
The battle between a deep-pocketed and ambitious overseas entrant and a wily local
harkens back to the duel between US ride-hailing pioneer Uber and Singapore-based
Grab. That story ended in triumph for the home team. Grab took over Uber’s
transportation and food businesses, adding the US firm as a shareholder—CEO Dara
Khosrowshahi sits on Grab’s board. While Uber has retrenched itself from a market far,
far from its home in California, Grab has assumed a virtual ride-hailing monopoly.
Here too, RedDoorz is betting that—like Grab—it can better negotiate the complexities of
Southeast Asia’s six largest markets, with their different cultures, languages and laws. By
the end of 2020, it’s hoping to have increased its current inventory threefold. Already,
claims Saberwal, the company’s numbers are doubling every six months.
However, with the sustainability of OYO’s business model under-fire, the viability of the
budget hotel concept itself is under question. It remains unclear whether anyone can
build a profitable business, let alone a challenger in a nascent market. There’s also the
challenge of maintaining company culture and values as the underdog RedDoorz
attempts to scale.
While the battle may not centre around taxis, the budget hotel opportunity is no less
impressive.
AUTHOR
Jon Russell
Jon Russell is Southeast Asia editor for The Ken based in Bangkok. Originally from the
UK, Jon moved to Thailand in 2008. He’s passionate about telling thoughtful business
stories, and tracking the impact of the internet in his adopted home of Southeast Asia.
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-RedDoorz The unlikely David to OYOs Goliath in Southeast Asia 2/2 625
Reliance Jio travels first-class on the tariff hike gravy
train
the-ken.com/story/reliance-jio-tariff-hikes
December 3, 2019
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As recently as a month ago, the future of two of India’s three remaining private telecom
players—Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL) and Bharti Airtel—was in doubt. Slapped with
retrospective payments of Rs 53,000 crore (~$7.3 billion) and Rs 35,500 crore (~$4.8
billion), respectively, by the Supreme Court—in line with a broader definition of what
constituted taxable revenues—VIL and Airtel were living on borrowed time. The only
winner in all of this was Reliance Jio, which is owned by the richest man in Asia, Mukesh
Ambani.
Unlike its competitors, Jio was hit with a much smaller payment. Around Rs 60 crore
($8.3 million), since it only came into existence in September 2016. Already the
undisputed market leader in terms of revenue despite being a relative infant in the space,
Jio stared at one of two favourable outcomes:
1) A virtual monopoly if both VIL and Airtel collapsed.
2) A duopoly with Airtel if VIL, hit hardest by the retrospective dues and already heavily
loss-making, failed.
Neither of those happened. Instead, the government intervened.
While the SC-mandated payments weren’t scrapped or deferred, the government gave
ailing telcos a lifeline. It put a two-year moratorium on spectrum-related payments—
essentially, temporary relief amounting to Rs 42,000 crore (~$5.8 billion) for the
beleaguered telecom space.
Buoyed by the reprieve and needing to turn things around, both VIL and Airtel acted
swiftly. They announced they would increase tariffs as of 2 December. At the time,
telecom tariffs in India were the lowest in the world. Reliance Jio has also followed suit by
announcing tariff hikes of its own.
The increased tariffs will be a huge boost to the financials of all three telcos. It is
imperative to increase tariff rates by 10-20% for operators to survive, industry and
government officials said unanimously.
Overall, the tariff hikes will boost the industry’s annual revenue and EBITDA (earnings
before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) by Rs 53,000 crore (~$7.3 billion)
and Rs 42,000 crore (~$5.8 billion), respectively, according to Emkay Global Financial
Services.
the-ken.com-Reliance Jio travels first-class on the tariff hike gravy train 1/3 626
While all of this may seem like a win for VIL and Airtel, who have a chance to turn their
fortunes around, Jio remains the biggest winner. Because while it has benefited
immensely from low tariffs—it crashed industry tariffs with its cut-throat pricing to gain
users since its launch in 2016—it needed this increase. Badly.
According to a senior analyst and sources close to the company’s management, the
prevailing tariffs before the hikes were virtually unsustainable.
"Operators announcing tariff hikes signals that price power is back in the market,"
—ROHAN DHAMIJA, PARTNER, ANALYSYS MASON
“No operator can survive on these (previous) tariffs,” said a former senior official with
Trai, India’s telecom regulator.
Telecom Truce
Tariff hikes were a lifeline for telcos Airtel and Vodafone Idea. For
Mukesh Ambani-owned Jio, though, it’s a ticket to a successful
public listing
Pratap Vikram Singh, 3 Dec 2019
After years of a bruising tariff war, India's private telcos recently announced they would
all be hiking tariffs
The proposed hikes will increase the industry’s annual revenue and EBITDA by Rs
53,000 crore and Rs 42,000 crore, respectively
While it's good news for VIL and Airtel, it takes Reliance Jio a step closer to an initial
public offering
Beside assuring a positive cash flow, tariff hikes over the next few years would give Jio a
return on capital of 12%
Requiem for a dream
the-ken.com/story/requiem-for-a-dream
August 10, 2016
Misplaced Priorities
Perfint Healthcare read the market wrong and then continued

misreading it until it was too late
Seema Singh, 10 Aug 2016
The top floor of a residential building is hardly a place to expect bots. Yet it has been one
for a decade, making robotic arms, not humanoids.
For a visitor, a sensor-rigged, hard-wired sort of entrance would be in order you think.
Instead, parched potted plants, some twenty of them which were meant to brighten up
the passage to Perfint Healthcare’s office in Chennai, greet you. It is peak summer but
the leaves have nearly shed. The workspace inside is unusually quiet for an early Friday
evening in July. The atmospherics is telling.
So are the facts.
“The last two years have been very tough, barely survival,” says Nandakumar
Subburaman, when nudged to talk about the business. “We are three to four years
behind what we had planned to be or liked to be. We had a setback; we had to reverse all
sales, payback all the money that banks gave. That drained the system.”
As co-founder and chief executive, Nandakumar sounds confident as ever but occasional
whiffs of *mea culpas* creep into the conversation. The pivot his experienced team made
in 2006, from an engineering research and development services company to a robotics
product company, has gone awry.
the-ken.com-Requiem for a dream 1/9 629

Started in 2005, Perfint had checked all the right boxes. An ambitious and cutting-edge
healthcare product startup staffed by an all ex-GE founding team targeting the growing
field of cancer treatment. Its promise was robotic devices that reduce cost, enhance
precision and get more radiologists to do minimally invasive treatment of tumors.
Interventional radiology was slated to be big.
The all-star founding team was a hit with investors who saw the potential of locally
developed robotics products from India where imports make 80 percent of the medical
technology (medtech) market. In no time it was seen as the poster child of medtech
startups, drawing glowing news coverage and even awards.
But then, reality set in.
Today, after years of iterations and spending nearly $33 million in venture capital (and
at least Rs 9.95 crore in soft loans from the Department of Biotechnology), Perfint has
neither the topline nor a passionate following for its products among doctors. To the
extent that the company is now looking up to India’s creaking public healthcare system
as its savior even as nearly half its employees have left or been laid off.
What went wrong?
The premise itself

When Nandakumar, a finance professional by training, assembled a team, he wanted to
address a so-called gap in image-guided diagnostics. The ambitious founders chose to
build a minimally invasive robotic arm (stereotactic, to be precise) that would, using
computed tomography or CT, position a needle at the precise point on the body for drug
delivery in cancer or pain management.
Their first device, called PIGA, was ready in 2008 but even before it could be widely
adopted, Perfint figured out “it was not the right device”.
Why? Because doctors were not enthused about having large positioning equipment in
their CT room.
Since they realized they couldn’t do much about the size, in their next iteration they
instead narrowed the focus to oncology, the treatment of tumours. PIGA’s successor was
MAXIO, also a robotic arm. But instead of positioning and inserting a needle, this one
took a 3-dimensional view before deciding where and how much of energy to deliver.
The space it was targeting now was interventional radiology.
If a radiologist is a consultant’s consultant whose job ends with looking at images and
diagnosing, an intervention radiologist is a super specialist who delivers the treatment.
Less than five percent of radiologists in India fall in this category. Which meant the
potential market for MAXIO was very small, but could be expanded to include other
radiologists.

Furthermore, while MAXIO was an advancement over PIGA, it still remained a
“planner”. In other words, it simply didn’t have a generator to deliver the energy for the
burning of tumours, or ablation. Perfint’s business model did not allow for providing
needles and other consumables and that eventually became a tail — a bulky one at that,
weighing more than 200kgs — that wanted to wag the dog.
At around Rs.1 crore, MAXIO also came at five times the price of an energy generator.
Doctors began to ignore it, preferring instead to poke their patients a few times rather
than adding another expensive and bulky variable in their workflow merely to plan their
needle positioning.
“Even those who bought one device would warn us not to come again for a year or two.
There was just not enough use,” recalls a former sales executive, who requested not to be
identified because he doesn’t want to spoil his relationship with the team.
It was an early brush with oblivion.
Post-mortem
“Why did we not know this in the beginning? In GE we were only in imaging, not in
therapy space. If we had combined our product with consumables - needle, energy
generator, etc., maybe it’d have worked”
Nandakumar gets rhetorical. “Why did we not know this in the beginning? In GE we
were only in imaging, not in therapy space. If we had combined our product with
consumables – needle, energy generator, etc., maybe it’d have worked.”
Scrambling didn’t help

To make matters worse, the team, in a mad dash to grow, began to design and develop
multiple products with many variants. “I was not sure how we would justify the value
proposition, we spread too thin; approvals were needed for each one, many of which we
were not able to finish and take to market,” says a former senior R&D executive.
In the absence of a domestic regulator, Indian companies are on back foot in any case.
They have to seek approval overseas where customers as well as regulators lack
confidence in them because if ever there is a product recall, there’s no one in the home
country to penalize the company.
Meanwhile, MAXIO’s design itself was confounding. Doctors found it worked well for
pinpointing tumours of the liver; somewhat well for those of the lungs; but did not
address the chest at all. Which meant doctors would need to move their patients from
the CT room to the ultrasound room for even small procedures – a significant
disruption.
To be sure, Perfint is trying to solve a difficult problem.

Tumours, which are semi-solid in nature, are supported by fluids and move, sometimes
as much as 5 cm, when a patient gets on the couch for radiation. On top of it, ablation,
which is often suitable for tumors of a certain size, less than 3 cm, is one among many
treatment choices before the patient as is the robotic arm one among many technologies.
A former senior sales executive remembers a customer in South Asia telling him, “Your
product is good but it doesn’t work all the time.” He then gave the analogy of a safety
device for a high rise jumper. “If the device protects you seven out of 10 times, but leaves
you three times unprotected would you jump wearing it?”
Soon after, when MAXIO entered the market, in 2012, some senior executives suggested
“let’s fix the product and then launch”. But Nandakumar was not in favour of pulling
back even though a few in the senior management challenged his decisions.
“Even when revenues on paper showed Rs. 22 crore, the product was not being used. I
said let’s fix it or else they are not going to pay you,” said the executive quoted above.
Turns out he was right, Perfint had to reverse sales in the financial year 2013-14, when it
reported Rs 44.87 crores in revenues with a net loss of Rs 17.27 crores. (This is the latest
financial data available with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.)
First mover disadvantage?

When doctors in India did not show interest in testing its technology to generate
performance data for regulatory approval, Perfint chose to go overseas. It was a swift
decision because right from the beginning the team aspired to build a product for the
global market.
The unfortunate reality is that there aren’t many teaching hospitals in India that a
medtech company can partner with for product development.
Very quickly, as clinical sites were developed in Europe and Australia, the sales strategy
turned outwards as well. Regulatory approvals were sought in far-flung countries like
Brazil and sales offices set up without fully ascertaining what the market was all about.
Again, as a slap on its strategy, Brazil turned out to be an ultrasound-driven region.
Old habits
The cautionary joke internally would go as - “we are from GE but we should not be
working like GE”
And in true GE fashion, an event was organized in Singapore, much before the MAXIO
launch. “To create hype”. (The cautionary joke internally would go as – “we are from GE
but we should not be working like GE”.)
In a frenzied flurry, Perfint entered more than 20 countries and ended up having just
one or two installations to show for it.
Did its venture capitalists push the team?

Though Nandakumar says all blame lies with the core team, sources close to the
company, many of them “disappointed” with the way things are turning out, say “they
became slaves of the investors because the latter had pumped so much money”.
Expensive experimentation ensued for a while, primarily because there was much
venture capital to go around. Sources also say Norwest Venture’s $11 million infusion in
January 2013 came in a single tranche.
In keeping with the spirit of venture-fueled ambition, Perfint’s claims started running
ahead of its achievements. Way ahead.
In February 2012, in the freewheeling, quasi public space that Twitter is, the company
tweeted “Perfint sees revenue triple to $5 in million in 2012”.
Though Nandakumar says all blame lies with the core team, sources close to the
company, many of them “disappointed” with the way things are turning out, say “they
became slaves of the investors because the latter had pumped so much money”
In reality, it was nearly half of the claim.
In October 2012, when this writer spoke to Nandakumar for an article in Forbes India
magazine, three months after the MAXIO launch in Delhi, he was on a high. “We are
preparing to launch MAXIO in the US in November,” he had said. But the fact was, the
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval was nowhere in sight. It would come
only 18 months later, in May 2014.
When I asked him last month why he’d been playing fast and loose with facts, he
snapped: “I have to project! If I don’t show projections who will give me cash?”
Meanwhile, the salary payout for just three co-founders in FY 2013-14 was Rs 9.4 cr,
which amounted to 16 percent of the money raised in that year.
“It was basically one-man team. On their part, the Board members, none with any
domain expertise, liked to hear good stories,” says the senior sales executive quoted
above.
For Nandakumar, it’s all in the spirit of entrepreneurship. “I go and explore, if it doesn’t
work, it doesn’t work. I know it is somebody else’s money. We could have saved some,
sure, but hindsight is always 20:20. You learn something [in exploration]. After all, it is
risk money,” he quips.

Perfint founder and CEO Nandakumar
After years of globetrotting, Perfint now concludes that “capex sale in the Western
market is nearly impossible”. While ablation as a procedure is under insurance
reimbursement, it requires a device maker to work with many insurers over several years
to gather local data.
“United States is not a large market for us. Only 20,000 procedures are done across all
hospitals and how much of that will qualify for MAXIO? We will have publications and
advisors from US, even clinical show sites but no commercial sale,” says Nandakumar.
Unsurprisingly (by now), the marketing pick-up line four years ago was just the opposite.
At the time of the FDA approval announcement in May 2014, Guruswamy K, who was
heading sales, said, “Obtaining the 510(K) clearance allows us to start commercial
marketing of MAXIO in the USA. It also makes it easier to scale up in several other
markets globally. We are hoping to achieve Rs 100 crores in revenue this year.”
In the same press conference Nandakumar had said, “We will reach Rs 500 crores in a
few years.”
Their assumptions about Asia market were grossly incorrect, too. The region was not
even performing ablation, they would discover. “And those who are performing their
adoption curve is very steep. Even today, between open surgical and minimally invasive

procedures, it’s the former that wins,” admits Nandakumar.
In how many countries do you have installations today? I ask.
“We don’t keep a count.”
“Maybe 10-12,” he says when I insist.
Overseas markets no longer hold any promise. Not only capital expenditure is tough, pay
per use has a painfully long recovery period.
So many things so off the mark. “You’ve got all your estimates wrong. Did you not do any
market research to figure what was needed and how much the users would pay for it?” I
ask.
“No, that was a mistake. We listened to some physicians’ advice and got on with it,” says
Nandakumar.
Return of the prodigal son

After years of missteps, home is finally where Perfint thinks its panacea lies – lower sale
prices but compensated by larger volumes. Under the National Cancer Control
Programme, 75 hospitals in India will now be upgraded. So Perfint plans to plug its
robotic arms in some of those and other government teaching hospitals.
Unfortunately, that’s once again easier planned than done.
“Senior doctors think they are Gods; they don’t need technology, their fingers can do the
magic. Junior doctors think real skill development is in learning by hand, (so) why touch
a robotic tool?” says a former clinical-marketing executive who struggled to get the
doctors to use Perfint’s equipment in a few cancer hospitals, including the Tata
Memorial Centre in Mumbai.
Moreover, resource-constrained government hospitals have to be prudent in their

expenditure — which means using taxpayers’ money to buy products that are user-
friendly and work, instead of being dumped in unsuspecting corners under plastic
covers.
Perfint’s experience with the government hasn’t been great in the past either. In
December 2013 tenders were floated for six new All India Institutes of Medical Sciences
for CTs with accessories. But just after a year, all accessories were scrapped and only CTs
were taken.
“Our product was shortlisted and then scrapped. Revenues of Rs 8 crores disappeared in
a stroke,” says Nandakumar, fuming.
But the reality is Perfint’s technology flies in the face of bundling, where the thumb rule
is that a higher priced product costing, say, Rs.100, is bundled with a much-lower priced
one costing only Rs.5-10. This way a seller can pass it on after including some markup,

say at Rs 120, and make money.
Hard sell
But the reality is Perfint’s technology flies in the face of bundling, where the thumb rule
is that a higher priced product costing, say, Rs.100, is bundled with a much-lower priced
one costing only Rs.5-10. This way a seller can pass it on after including some markup,
say at Rs 120, and make money
Instead Perfint is trying to bundle a Rs 1 crore-robotic device with a Rs 1.5 crore-CT.

They’re just too darn expensive.
The core team is intact, and making some amends. MAXIO is being integrated with an
energy generator so that it becomes a complete therapy system, but that variant is at
least another 18 months away. An ultrasound-based new system has been under
development, for many years though, albeit in Canada. “In a year’s time it could go into
pilot stage assuming we get funded,” reckons Nandakumar.
A cash crunch has hit the company where it hurts most – funding a large sales force to
drive adoption.
Perfint earned Rs 18 crore in year ending March 2016 and is “likely to make Rs 55 crore
in FY 2016-17” (how remains a mystery), according to Nandakumar who is back in the
market to raise more funds, and even thinking of going public. He might hit rough
weather.
Slower growth, after spending what is certainly no little pizza money, is an admission of
a restricted future and hurts valuations. Emails sent on July 27 to its existing investors,
IDG Ventures, Norwest and Accel Partners were not answered till the time this story was
published.
One silver lining in this saga is a dozen or so journal publications that Perfint has to its
credit, thanks to its multiple overseas clinical associations. At one point, says a Chennai
radiologist, Perfint “roped in some of the best ablation experts, from Italy, US and
Australia”
Looking back, around 2010-2011 Perfint had a good window of opportunity, if the right
steps were taken. It would have been a good fit for consumables companies which could
create a biz model around the equipment, maybe even giving it free and making money
off accessories.
But Nandakumar chose not to head down that path. Now, he says, Perfint’s indicator of
success is not revenue, but adoption, something which he ironically ignored while
chasing revenue.
As loopy as this 10-year journey appears, I asked him if he were to redo Perfint, how
would he do it.

“I’d not do interventional radiology. And if I were forced into it, I’d not do a CT-based
device, I’d go with ultrasound,” he says.
There you go, an admission that is several years too late.
Cancer
Healthcare
Medtech
Robotics
AUTHOR
Seema Singh
Seema has over two decades of experience in journalism. Before starting The Ken, Seema
wrote “Myth Breaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech”,
published by HarperCollins in May 2016. Prior to that, she was a senior editor and
bureau chief for Bangalore with Forbes India, and before that she wrote for Mint. Seema
has written for numerous international publications like IEEE-Spectrum, New Scientist,
Cell and Newsweek. Seema is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MacArthur Foundation Research Grantee.
View Full Profile

Resisting upto 99.9% antibiotics: India’s superbug war
begins
the-ken.com/story/resisting-antibiotics-indias-superbug
July 9, 2019
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When it comes to antibiotics, an over 10% resistance is almost too high.
Indians show resistance as high as 99.9% towards some antibiotics. This, as per a paper
published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) on 3 June—the first paper
that indisputably establishes that Indians are alarmingly antibiotic resistant. Not only are
Indians resistant to older antibiotics like penicillin by over 90%, the resistance to newer
antibiotics like ciprofloxacin is also over 40%. The World Health Organisation (WHO)
classifies antibiotics into three categories—access, watch and reserve, with each category
stronger than the last.
In India, the drugs in the watch category have long crossed the 10% resistance mark. Even
worse, Indians are becoming more and more resistant to some of the precious few drugs
in the reserve category as they enter the human body through meat. The reserve category
drug, colistin, for instance, is used to fatten the chickens in poultry farms.
India is now starting to look deep into this problem. Starting with a government
conference in Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram on 11 June. One that the deputy
director of the national health mission in Madhya Pradesh (MP), Dr Pankaj Shukla,
attended.
Shukla returned to MP, and at a never-before-for-an-Indian-bureaucrat pace, he framed

and executed an antimicrobial resistance (AMR) action plan. In six weeks. As you read
this, he’s giving final touches to it. Other states have also swung into action. Assam hosted
the-ken.com-Resisting upto 999 antibiotics Indias superbug war begins 1/2 638
its first meeting last week. Delhi has started the process to frame its action plan. The
bureaucrats plan to finalise it next month. Shukla is ahead of the pack and plans to launch
MP’s action plan on July 25.
The conference convinced Shukla that AMR, which is killing more and more Indians every
day, can be controlled. By not feeding antibiotics to chicken in poultry farms. Shukla was
astonished to learn that resistance to antibiotics could be so easily avoided. Moreover, the
weight of the chicken and size of the egg remained the same, he says.
Finger lickin’ antibiotics

According to a bureau of investigative journalism report, animal pharmaceutical
companies in India were openly advertising products containing colistin as growth
promoters - including Venky’s, which supplies meat to fast food chains such as KFC,
McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Dominos.
This chicken-and-egg solution is a precedent to a larger drive—an ‘antibiotic stewardship’

programme. And as per Dr Sanjeev K Singh, who instituted the programme in Kerala five
years ago, it has led to a significant reduction in the use of antibiotics.
Singh, medical superintendent at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, narrates

the story of a 3-year-old boy who was brought to Amrita with congenital heart disease. He
caught an infection that resisted all antibiotics; he died after three weeks.
the-ken.com-Resisting upto 999 antibiotics Indias superbug war begins 2/2 639
RIP Tapzo: Will the Ouroboros rest in pieces?
the-ken.com/story/rip-tapzo-will-the-ouroboros-rest-in-pieces
September 12, 2018
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The Ouroboros is dead.
The Ouroboros is an ancient mythical symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It’s often
taken to symbolise the eternal cycle, especially in the sense of something constantly
destroying and re-creating itself. It also represents the infinite cycle of nature’s endless
creation and destruction; life and death.
As we had written earlier, Tapzo, self-billed as “India’s first all in one app”, is the one
Indian startup that epitomises the Ouroboros—displaying a constant, incessant urge to
reinvent itself, pivoting from one avatar to another inconditely. The head eating the tail.
However, unlike the mythical creature that could reinvent itself infinitely, Tapzo’s days of
reinventing itself are seemingly over. In an email to its users, the Sequoia-backed
company announced that it would cease operations by the end of October this year.
“Tapzo app will be shutting down from 31 October 2018. Starting 1 September 2018, we
will be switching off all the transactional categories,” read the email. It also detailed how
users can close their accounts and redeem any unused balance left in their wallets and
accounts.
The email goes on to say, “Since we launched the app 3 years ago, we’ve been fortunate to
serve over 5 million customers. Your feedback and reviews (200,000+ on PlayStore
alone) and the 4.5 rating kept us motivated and always learning. It’s been a pleasure
listening to you all and continuously shipping an app update every few weeks consistently.
But all good things must come to an end.”
All good things must come to an end? I suppose this is true in a broad philosophical
sense. But if you are an eight-year-old startup that has raised more than $30 million in
VC funding and believe that you have a “good thing” going, you don’t come to an end by
way of a summary email to your customers. You don’t shut down your service overnight
and move on.
So, did Tapzo really have a good thing?
A flawed value proposition

Tapzo’s all-in-one app premise was that mobile users in India need not download multiple
apps for cabs, food-ordering and other services. Instead, Tapzo provided access to all
these services within a single app. The value proposition was that users could save space
the-ken.com-RIP Tapzo Will the Ouroboros rest in pieces 1/2 640

on their phones. In addition, they would be able to compare services to choose the
cheapest/best offering at any point in time.
Ankur Singla, the company’s CEO and founder, had claimed in November 2016 that “close
to 140,000 users use our app daily and we do close to 55,000 transactions a day with an
annual run rate (ARR) of Rs 210 crore (~$30 million) in GMV/bookings. And we plan on
growing 2X in the next six months.” The company also claimed to have more than five
million app downloads—a metric that was touted in the farewell email as well.
Tapzo, self-billed as “India’s first all in one” app, has shut down
its offering. Will it find redemption in a new avatar or is this the
definitive end?
Sumanth Raghavendra, 12 Sep 2018
In an email, Tapzo announced that it would cease operations on 31 October 2018
Its end was met with indifference on social media. Odd for an app that claims 5 million
PlayStore downloads
Having pivoted repeatedly, Tapzo—billed as an all-in-one app—seemed to have

ultimately lost its way
Where did it all go wrong for Tapzo?
the-ken.com-RIP Tapzo Will the Ouroboros rest in pieces 2/2 641

Ruhi Kandhari
the-ken.com/blog/ruhi-kandhari
June 6, 2018
In the summer of 2010, Ruhi did the most important story of her career.
She was young, and working at Down to Earth – a publication that focuses on making a
difference by telling stories about issues that affect the world around us. Mostly
environmental. Some health. Some development. Great outlet.
The story was simple. She wanted to write about the e-waste collection and processing
ecosystem in India. Back in 2010, before the mobile phone revolution, when most of the
country still had STD booths; electronic waste, along with Hrithik Roshan’s acting career,
was seen as a relevant, but marginal problem. You bought a computer, and when you were
done with it, you gave it away to a scrap dealer in your neighbourhood. Not many people
really knew what happened after. Fewer cared.
Ruhi cared, though. In 2010, she was fresh, straight out of J-school, and filled with the
kind of idealism that was shared by newly-minted journalists and the people of Delhi
before the Commonwealth Games that year.
What made her unique, was her background and ethnic origin. Of Afghani lineage,
descended from immigrants who moved to Delhi several generations ago, optimism was,
quite literally, in her blood. And her name. Kandhari. It was a vestige of an ancient,
magnificent city, and the centre of civilisation, but in a very different place right now –
Kandahar.
When I asked Ruhi what made Kandharis special, at first she said, “We are just like
everybody else. Nothing special.”
Were there any Kandhari traditions? Or rituals? Anything unique?
the-ken.com-Ruhi Kandhari 1/4 642

She thought for a bit, and said, “Well we don’t have furniture at home. We love carpets
and mattresses. We just sit on them”
Sit on carpets and mattresses? You mean, you sit on the ground?
Even she didn’t know exactly why they did that. It was just the way it was. Always had
been. She remembers large Kandhari families seated together and having communal
meals—naan with a large bowl of meat.
To write about e-waste, it’s important to actually visit the places where it was processed.
In India, this does not happen in an organised manner. Ruhi visited Moradabad and
Seelampur, the hubs where people took apart old computers, keyboards, radios—
basically, anything with a motherboard inside. She watched children half her age,
hunched over, spend hours melting circuit boards to extract copper. She was probably
outraged, but like young journalists who often get cautioned early on about the dangers of
editorialising, she was careful to keep her reporting dispassionate. Look at how she
described the experience:
Naveed, along with his wife Khalida and their three daughters, wakes up every morning
to extract gold and copper from circuit boards of dismantled computers. He can tell
without difficulty which motherboard is from China, and which one from Japan. The
Japanese circuit boards are better, he says, because they fetch him more copper and
gold than the ones from China. As he burns the computer parts the plastic melts,
emitting a red, toxic fume. The remains from the burnt heap—the metals—fetch him up
to Rs 300 per day.
The rest of the article is like that. Clear. Factual. It reads like an analyst reporting on the
stock market.
Her work would take her to darker places. She spent a large part of her career writing
about topics that should wrench your heart. For instance, a few years later, she worked as
a research associate with the United Nations Development Programme in Delhi. This was
in 2014, just after the 16 December Delhi gang rape. She spent long hours, researched
gender concerns and worked with government committees to change policies on the
status of women. This meant a lot of work on the ground—talking to women, reading
mind-numbing rape statistics, and documenting all this. Government committees don’t
like editorialising either. The reports had to be dispassionate.
I wish I could tell you her experience with gender rights ended there. But it didn’t.
In 2014, Ruhi joined Tehelka.com.
Six months before that, Tarun Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka, had been arrested by the Goa
police, charged with rape and sexual harassment of one of his employees.
At Tehelka, Ruhi was a special correspondent to author stories on gender.

The thing about writing about the e-waste industry is that it’s complicated. It’s not just a
human story. It’s an ecosystem story. Back in 2010, nobody even understood how the
pieces fit together. For instance, it’s crucial to explain that the e-waste industry is
primarily driven by illegal imports. That meant figuring out what went where, how it went
there, and why it got there. Good reporters don’t just stick to the human story. They
follow all the threads, and go into the secondary market, the steel industry, the scrap
industry, and tie together strands that require analysing complicated import-export
reports, often from other countries. That’s how the dots are connected.
You can read Ruhi’s story today, and still marvel at the research. The human part of the
story is just 500 words. The ecosystem section of the story is nearly four times that. It’s
meticulous. The dots are connected.
Ruhi didn’t stay long at Tehelka. Nobody could. Least of all someone who wrote about the
stuff that she did.
She spent the next couple of years, by her own admission, figuring out what to do. She
freelanced a bit, and did something she always wanted to do. She took dance lessons.
There are two basic forms of western dance – a tighter, classical form that’s characterised
by sharp and precise body movements, and a more contemporary form which is more
free-flowing and gives the dancer more room to experiment.
Unsurprisingly, Ruhi picked the first. She took ballet lessons. On the side, she continued
to write about topics that break your heart.
But her approach to telling a story never changed.
For instance, in 2015, there’s a story she did about acute malnutrition. You can still read it
online. She spends the first sixty words of her story talking about Subhash, a severely
malnourished and dehydrated baby who nearly died. She writes about how Subhash spent
40 days in the intensive care unit being treated for malnutrition, until he was finally out of
danger.
Then for the next six paragraphs, she smoothly launches into surveys, statistics, expert
opinions and carefully analyses government programmes and public policy on
malnutrition.
A couple of years later, somebody told her about a job opening at a new startup. Ruhi,
figuring that it was high time she sorted her life out, applied for the job.
That’s how she joined The Ken.
There’s an untold story about electronic waste. Sure, it’s a tale about waste management,
about ecosystems and poverty, but there’s another grimmer, untold aspect. There’s a
public health part of the story that everybody missed. In 2015, a full five years after Ruhi
published her story, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India
published the results of a study on the health effects of e-waste. The results were
damning. The study found that over 76% of e-waste workers suffer from permanent

respiratory damage. It didn’t end there. It went on to say that children were particularly
susceptible to lead poisoning, which affected their nervous systems and their blood. The
last line of the study, is the most chilling.
‘By the time they reach 35 to 40 years of age, they are incapable of working’
I imagine healthcare journalism must be frustrating. It’s about grinding on, writing
difficult heart-wrenching human stories about sickness and death, and then spending a
lot of time and effort doing meticulous research to understand which policy led to these
set of circumstances, analysing them and gleaning insights. It probably comes at great
personal cost, only to find out that, after all this, very little changes in real life.
But sometimes, just sometimes, you find copper.
Sometimes even some gold.
In 2011, a year after Ruhi published her e-waste story, the Ministry of Environment and
Forest in India introduced the country’s first laws on e-waste. Under the new law,
producers of electronic waste had to issue information on disposal, and were forced to
make consumers aware of hazardous components present within e-waste.
At The Ken, Ruhi writes about health, at the intersection of policy and technology. She
was one of the first people to write about the Aam Aadmi Party’s mohalla clinics in Delhi,
and reported on the ground about how they were doing. It’s one of her favourite stories.
Some of her other stories are phenomenal as well. She wrote about stents, about e-
pharmacies and about Modicare. She wrote about health insurance companies and about
scary superbugs.
Her approach to telling these stories remains the same.
Around this time, she also switched from ballet to contemporary dance.
The thing about writing about healthcare is that it’s about telling a human story, and an
ecosystem story. It’s about analysing how systems work and telling agonising tales of
people who are affected when the system doesn’t work. It can’t be one or the other. It’s
both. Healthcare journalism is all about striking a balance.
The best healthcare writers are the ones who understand this balance. Your writing can
neither emerge from a place of emotion nor can it be detached from reality.
The best healthcare writers are the ones who sit on the ground.

RuPay’s loss is UPI’s gain
the-ken.com/story/upis-credit-rupay-debit
November 4, 2020
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“If we use other cards, the earnings from them go to foreign countries, but in case of
RuPay all transactions stay in India.” – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 2018
Cut to 2020. Once the poster child of the government’s ‘Digital India’ initiative, card
network service RuPay is now being discriminated against by banks. Last month, a study
by Ashish Das, a professor from India’s premier engineering college, Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Bombay, concluded that banks have no interest in issuing the Indian
alternative over American card network giants Visa and Mastercard.
Ironically, the reason also stems from the government.
In its quest to push more digital payments, the government slashed the Merchant
Discount Rate (MDR) and interchange fee for RuPay debit cards to zero earlier this year.
That was the one incentive for banks to push for RuPay adoption.
“They [the government] are shooting themselves in the foot,” said a former senior
executive at RuPay. The cost of issuing cards, card swiping machines (POS), and network
charges are all borne through MDR and interchange fees. Zero-MDR and interchange
means banks now earn nothing for processing transactions.
The quasi-government body that runs RuPay—National Payments Corporation of India

or NPCI—has been left with no choice but to comply with the new regulations.
Despite issuing about 600 million debit cards over the last decade in a country that was
largely unbanked, the Indian financial system is yet to see a decline in the usage of cash.
And RuPay, which had a high-flying decade with 58% market share as of 2019, is now
the-ken.com-RuPays loss is UPIs gain 1/2 646

having some sort of a mid-life crisis.
RuPay rode on the flagship government projects like Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana
(PMJDY) that gave about 300 million people access to bank accounts and debit cards for
the first time. This made the card network the largest in terms of the number of cards
issued in the country.
China Union Pay

Discovery
Mastercard
Narendra Modi
NPCI
Rupay
UPI
UPI 2.0
Visa
the-ken.com-RuPays loss is UPIs gain 2/2 647

Sahay, India’s fintech disruption sequel
the-ken.com/story/sahay-indias-fintech-disruption-sequel
May 8, 2020
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As plans go, it was a great one. On 21 May, roughly two months after India imposed one of
the strictest Covid-19 lockdowns the world has seen, a disruptive new fintech platform
was to be unveiled. One that would run like electricity through the country’s financial
system. “Sahay” (in Hindi, “help”), an ambitious online lending marketplace, would be
targeted at the hundreds of thousands of Indian micro, small, and medium enterprises
(MSMEs). Businesses that had probably been closed and financially decimated during the
lockdown.
Sahay would allow them to access a loan from banks in as few as five minutes. To do that,
it would invert the established order and power equations between MSMEs and banks.
Banks generally baulk at lending to MSMEs because they’re too risky and the loan tickets
are too small to be worth spending time on. So, instead of banks deciding which MSMEs
they’d lend to, Sahay would let MSMEs decide which banks they’d borrow from. From a
lender’s market, Sahay would turn it into a borrower’s one.
But inverting entire industries overnight isn’t easy. This is why, before Sahay could roll
out, a complex web of events, systems, and companies had to fall into place. That included
banks, borrowers, a data-driven GST system, and a host of regulators from India’s central
bank—the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)—to sundry industry regulators.
It would also require the creation of a brand-new class of RBI-licensed entities called
Account Aggregators (AA). These data intermediaries would act as consent brokers,
helping expose a business’ operational data in real-time to lenders.
If all of these pieces fell into place, out would emerge the concept of flow-based lending,
where a borrower’s data would become the collateral for its loans.
Sahay could do for the adoption of fintech lending what payments app Bhim did for the
adoption of digital payments in 2016.
After India demonetised over 85% of its currency notes in December 2016, it announced
the birth of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a new, free digital payments protocol. To
popularise UPI, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (then in his first term) launched a free
app built on top of it, called Bhim. Modi’s star power, combined with the desperate
economic vacuum of demonetisation, helped UPI go mainstream, eventually clocking over
a billion transactions in a month.
Sahay was meant to be Bhim’s sequel, but for lending.
the-ken.com-Sahay Indias fintech disruption sequel 1/2 648

Bhim-UPI filled the cash-starved void created by demonetisation. Sahay would do the
same to fill the credit void for MSMEs struck by the economic slowdown since August
2019, exacerbated by the Covid-induced lockdown.
UPI Redux
Conceptualised and promoted by iSpirt, the powerful behind-the-

scenes organisation run by volunteers, Sahay would enable
hundreds of thousands of Indian MSMEs to access loans in as
few as five minutes. The story of how it was built is more
important than why its 21 May launch was canned
Arundhati Ramanathan, 8 May 2020
After Aadhaar and UPI, Sahay was going to be India’s next big mass-scale tech
intervention
It had the same actors as UPI—JUSPAY, Aadhaar’s architect Nandan Nilekani, think
tank iSpirt...
...and the same issues— of conflicts of interest, early access, ownership and
accountability
In addition, the organisation meant to evangelise flow-based lending also means to

become self-regulatory
the-ken.com-Sahay Indias fintech disruption sequel 2/2 649

Saving Indian vaccine makers from Covid (pseudo)
nationalism
the-ken.com/story/saving-indian-vaccine-makers-covid-nationalism
August 27, 2020
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The numbers are staggering. At least 5.7 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been pre-
ordered globally, without a guarantee that all or any of them would pass muster in Phase
III trials. It’s akin to countries buying premium health insurance for their people, and
kick-starting their economies.
If manufacturers and heads of state wait for adequate regulatory approvals, then the
world, put on notice in January, would claim a victory against the virus. If countries jump
the gun, the way Russia did , they’d fuel vaccine-denialism of a kind that would hurt
society long after the scourge of the novel coronavirus has waned.
Last week, India’s “Covid custodian” displayed a dangerous kind of vaccine evangelism.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said India might consider emergency use
authorisation (EUA) for locally developed and manufactured vaccines. Of the handful of
vaccines that India, its Department of Biotechnology (DBT) specifically, has committed to
supporting at the development stage, three are in mid-stage trials:
1. Bharat Biotech, which is working with ICMR on a strain identified by the National
Institute of Virology, is currently testing the vaccine under Phase II study.
2. Zydus Cadila, which has developed its own DNA vaccine candidate, is in Phase II,
1000 people, placebo-controlled trial.
3. Gennova Biopharmaceuticals, which, according to sources, has received the highest
grant so far, will enter Phase 1 human trials in October.
the-ken.com-Saving Indian vaccine makers from Covid pseudo nationalism 1/2 650
Pune-based Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has no locally
developed Covid vaccine in its five-candidate arsenal, but it is conducting a 1,500-person
Phase III trial as part of its collaboration with the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine
programme. Globally, this vaccine is the furthest along in clinical testing.
With vaccine development being compressed from 10-12 years to 10-12 months for the
first time ever, serious regulators around the world, including China’s National Medical
Products Administration (NMPA) have made public their guidelines for approval.
Bharat Biotech
Biological E
CDSCO
coronavirus
Covid-19
Gavi
Gennova Biopharmaceuticals
ICMR
India
Pfizer
Sanofi
Serum Institute
vaccine
WHO
Zydus Cadila
the-ken.com-Saving Indian vaccine makers from Covid pseudo nationalism 2/2 651
Say no to Indian censorship: Netflix, Hotstar and co
form a code of honour
the-ken.com/story/video-streaming-self-regulation
January 16, 2019
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“I&B ministry won’t censor online video content, for now”
“After Amazon, Netflix said to have agreed to censor its content in India”
“Amazon opposes voluntary censorship code move mooted by industry”
These are just a handful of the headlines that video streaming services in India have
managed to make in the last few months. Will they? Will they not? The question of
censorship in online media has been a daisy oracle for over six months now. All this amid
political controversies, risk of state interventions and growing legal complaints against
the “insensitive, uncensored and explicit” content put up by online video streaming
platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hotstar in the absence of any law to
regulate them in any way since these services don’t fall under the ambit of existing laws.
Putting all the speculation of voluntary censorship to rest, the leading video streaming
companies in India have finally decided to go for self-regulation and say no to censorship.
Well, largely. All these companies have been working as part of a sub-committee under
the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) for a few months
now, to develop a best-practices code for curated online video platforms – a working copy
of which has been reviewed by The Ken.
In the code, which has nine signatories so far—Netflix, Hotstar, Voot, Times Internet,
Eros, AltBalaji, Zee, Arre and Sony—video streaming platforms have said no to
censorship. Instead, the companies have agreed to place easy filters such as content
descriptions, information on the nature of the content and creating different categories
the-ken.com-Say no to Indian censorship Netflix Hotstar and co form a code of honour 1/2 652
for consumers to be able to choose content that is appropriate for themselves and their
families. The idea is to protect consumer choice and agency, to protect “freedom of speech
and expression”. The companies are likely to release the code later this week.
32
Total number of OTT applications in India as of 2018, according to a report by Boston

Consulting Group.
“The primary objective of self-regulation is to keep the government away and do

something about the ongoing complaints before the state does,” said a person aware of the
developments at IAMAI, on the condition of anonymity. Taking into account all the recent
public interest litigations against some of the content, video streaming platforms are also
going heavy on grievance redressal mechanisms.
With the lines between telecommunications and media blurring, and urban consumers
increasingly moving onto video streaming platforms, it makes sense for the $500-million
video streaming market—expected to touch $4.5-5 billion by 2023, according to a report
of Boston Consulting Group—to regulate itself. Especially, when the demand for holding
the platforms accountable has been growing exponentially.
the-ken.com-Say no to Indian censorship Netflix Hotstar and co form a code of honour 2/2 653
Selling to those who can’t pay: human cost of modern
banking
the-ken.com/story/human-cost-of-modern-banking
December 4, 2019
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In the industrial suburb of Sarjapur in Bengaluru, 47-year-old Ram Mitra (name changed)
runs a 10X10ft carpentry workshop. The shop sits precariously on an encroached
footpath. It does not get too many visitors. There is one three-legged stool. Everything in
the shop is movable except for a fixture atop which sits a small shrine. Almost a metaphor
for the one thing he holds on to—faith. Ram Mitra was also, until recently, the owner of a
Kotak Mahindra Bank credit card.
A card he was sold with the promise of “paying later”. That Mitra was approached for a
credit card despite low savings is in itself astonishing. Even at his financial best, he earned
Rs 20,000 ($279) a month, with his household income under Rs 30,000 ($418)—not a
number banks would traditionally swoop down to offer credit cards for.
But Mitra and his family’s history with banks has been nothing short of traumatic.
Speaking about the Kotak representative, he says, “He could not even speak in Hindi, I
didn’t understand what they told me”. But he understood what the card could do. “I could
buy now, pay later.”
When the card came his way, his expenses were soaring and earnings were unpredictable.
The Mitras were ready to grasp at any option that helped them defer payments.
Except the card bled them dry.
“We kept repaying what we thought we spent, but how much ever we repaid the balance
amount did not reduce at all.” They spent nearly Rs 41,000 ($571) using the card, Mitra’s
bank statements—as of September 2019—show. But, in February 2019, they got a message
saying dues worth Rs 31,237 ($435) on credit card payments were pending. Six months
later, another message calling for dues of Rs 5,800 ($81) dropped.
“Only when we went to pay that due and close the credit card, we realised that credit cards
have an interest payment and penalty after 45 days,” says Mitra’s wife, who works as a
household help. “A friend told us we could pay back a credit card payment over one year,”
she adds. The couple paid the dues partly by borrowing money from the households they
work in and by taking money from another lender by pledging gold. (In an earlier story,
we wrote about fintechs leaning on credit cards.)
the-ken.com-Selling to those who cant pay human cost of modern banking 1/3 654
The family’s banking woes don’t stop at credit cards or even Kotak Mahindra for that
matter. While Kotak upsold products to the family—from savings to current to life
insurance, a minor account, all the way up to the credit card—each time bringing financial
losses to the Mitras, they’ve also suffered the ill-practice of misselling at the hands of
representatives of big brands such as local search platform Justdial, Vijaya Bank and
tuition app Extramarks.
Put together, the Mitras’ misfortune from misselling amounts to Rs 4.12 lakh ($5,740) in
3 years.
The financial web
From Kotak Mahindra Bank to Justdial and Extramarks, the Mitras
got caught in a web of misselling. The more they tried to break
free, the more they got sucked right in
The Mitra household has been at the centre of misselling. From one product three years
ago, they fell into a financial rabbit hole with eight different products from Kotak
Mahindra Bank, Justdial, Vijaya Bank and Extramarks
The Mitras, whose annual household income is about Rs 3 lakh, were victims of rising
aspirations, a lack of awareness and canny salesmen selling complex financial products
The RBI has only recently come around to the idea of misselling by agents. Its
Ombudsman does not have a category that even recognises misselling of different
banking products
Aggressive sales tactics along with lopsided economics of taking products to the mass
market segment make for a misselling ticking bomb
Shopclues wants out
the-ken.com/story/shopclues-wants-out
December 14, 2017
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For many months now, Shopclues has been shopping for itself.
Sometime back, it initiated informal discussions with Paytm. Also Flipkart. The deal
reached a stage where investment bankers got involved to suggest how the deal would
benefit either party. And then the trail went cold. “We are not talking anymore,” says a
senior Paytm official, who requested not to be named. “When we were, we were looking at
the merchants who sell on Shopclues and its customers. We got to a decision that we need
neither. Not at the valuation the company was asking.” According to sources, Paytm did
put a price to Shopclues sometime around July-August this year. Somewhere around
$400 million. A massive haircut considering Shopclues was last (January 2016) valued at
$1.1 billion. Needless to say, the number didn’t fly with shareholders of the company.
The Ken reached out to Shopclues for perspective. Sanjay Sethi, the co-founder and CEO
of Shopclues did not confirm or deny that these discussions took place. What he said
instead is this: “Look, Shopclues is like my daughter. I will marry her off to the best man.
That man can be an IPO, that man can be Paytm, that man can be Flipkart or even
Snapdeal.”
As open-ended statements go, this should be construed as, well, we are shopping.
As regular readers of The Ken, you must be familiar with how the e-commerce landscape
is shaping up in India, between the likes of Flipkart, Paytm and Amazon. And on the
investors’ side, between SoftBank, Alibaba and Jeffrey Bezos. In this context, it is
interesting to note how another e-commerce unicorn is almost always flying under the
radar. Shopclues is not some mom and pop set up in Gurugram. It is a company that has
the-ken.com-Shopclues wants out 1/2 657

raised around $200 million (Rs 1,200 crore) from some of the best tech investors in the
world. Like Tiger Global. The government of Singapore’s GIC. Nexus Venture Partners,
among several other investors.
Another matter altogether that its last fundraise of about $150 million happened a while
back. In January of 2016. We are almost touching January of 2018 and two years is a very
long time in the tech business. More money did come though. In May 2017, Shopclues
raised debt of $7.7 million (Rs 50 crore) from Innoven Capital. And an advertisement for
equity plus cash investment of Rs 97.5 crore from Bennett Coleman & Co (BCCL), one of
the largest media companies in India. There are more numbers to consider. As of March
2017, Shopclues had accumulated losses of Rs 871 crore, which has resulted in a complete
erosion of net worth of the company.
What the company lacks in numbers though, it makes up in guile.
Sethi refused to directly talk about the company’s financials but insisted that Shopclues
has money in its Delaware, US, entity—Clues Network Inc.
the-ken.com-Shopclues wants out 2/2 658

ShopClues
the-ken.com/story/btn-shopclues-2017
November 17, 2017
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Described as the online flea market of India, ShopClues, once upon a time focused on
catering to customers in Tier 2 and 3 cities of India. It then found the B2B business where
it sold mundane items like tyres (in large quantities).
The e-commerce segment is getting crowded as the top two e-commerce companies in
India—Flipkart and Amazon—look at entering these markets with affordable private
labels and deep discounts. ShopClues, which raised its last round of capital in early 2016,
has said that it will look to raise $50 million in a new round of capital by January 2018,
ahead of its IPO bid.
Total Funding
$281 million
ShopClues
Clues Network Pvt Ltd
As per MCA records
Sanjay Sethi
Co-founder
Gurugram
Headquarters
Read more
INVESTORS
the-ken.com-ShopClues 1/4 659

BEENEXT
Helion Venture Partners
Nexus Venture Partners
Tiger Global Management LLC
Read more
COMPETITORS
Flipkart
Amazon India
Read more
What has ShopClues been up to?
The financial year has been eventful for the company which has managed to climb to the
number three spot in the e-commerce race. This, as Snapdeal’s market share dwindles. It
has launched multiple private brands in categories like fashion, home decor and
electronics in partnership with manufacturers with zero inventory on its books. Tiding
over a bitter battle on voting rights in the company, co-founder Radhika Aggarwal said
that the company will focus on turning profitable by the first two quarters of FY 2017-18.
ShopClues’ CEO Sanjay Sethi indicated that the company will explore a merger or an IPO
by 2018.
In September 2017, the company raised money from Bennett Coleman & Company
(BCCL), one of India’s largest media companies with a venture investing arm.

Results
Rs 871.11 crore: The incurred accumulated losses by the company as on 31 March, 2017
according to the auditors. The company is relying on committed support from its holding
company in the US, Clues Network Inc.
0: Yup. Zero. Nada. Nothing. A big round zero. This is the net worth of the company
according to the statement by its auditor—BSR & Associates LLP—following the losses
accumulated by the company. Disclosure in the financial statement of the company says,
“The company has incurred accumulated losses amounting to Rs 871 crore as on 31
March, 2017 resulting in complete erosion of the net worth of the company.”
Rs 97.5 crore: How much BCCL has invested in ShopClues in an ad for equity deal in
September 2017. The BCCL deal will help ShopClues offset its advertising costs for the
year with access to various publication and broadcast networks owned by the investor.
The company also cut down its advertising and marketing spends by Rs 2.7 crore in
Financial Year 2016-17. During the festive season sale in October 2017, it went overboard
launching TV commercials and Out-of-Home advertising, backed by BCCL’s investment.
Rs 180 crore: This is how much the company made in revenues from its technology
support and advertising services for the 6 lakh sellers it has on the platform. Unlike its
competitors, ShopClues functions on a marketplace model. The number was marginally
higher than the revenues of FY 2015-16 which stood at Rs 161 crore.
Rs 163 crore: This is a curious item classified as service cost in the profit & loss
statement, filed under miscellaneous expenses. In the previous year, ShopClues spent Rs
203 crore in service cost. It is not immediately clear what this item constitutes.
Rs 50.4 crore: Was the reduction in total loss over FY 2015-16. The losses stood at Rs
332.6 crore, a 5% dip from the previous year.

Rs 45.5 crore: The jump in employee benefit expenses witnessed by the company over
the last year. This was due to an increase in the provident fund contribution by the
company and other retirement benefits offered.

The disclosure on the company’s financials makes it challenging for ShopClues to stay on
the course for profitability. Coupled with resources spent on being Goods and Service Tax
compliant for the company and to bring its sellers up to speed, the losses for FY 2017-18
are set to widen across the industry for all e-commerce companies. IPO looks like a
distant dream for ShopClues which is open to a merger route if presented with an offer.

Snapdeal has some good news. And bad
the-ken.com/story/snapdeal-some-good-news-and-bad
January 12, 2017
The e-commerce cocktail
Bad news first: revenue is down nearly a third. Growth and

market share are suffering too. And the good news: profitability is
closer than earlier
Patanjali Pahwa, 12 Jan 2017
In 2015, Snapdeal recorded a shipped revenue of anywhere between Rs 10,000-12,000
crore
Flipkart grew from Rs 10,000 crore in 2015 to Rs 15,000 crore in 2016, that too in net
revenue
Snapdeal taken a step into Shopclues’ territory, which rests on selling cheap goods at a
low margin and generating volume
The company loses just Rs 10-20 per unit after logistics and is closer to gross margin
level break even
Snapdeal, once a serious challenger to fellow unicorn, Flipkart, is now just a fraction of
its 2015 self. Two-thirds to be precise.
The Ken sent Snapdeal a detailed questionnaire last week but despite repeated
reminders, a reply was not forthcoming till the time of publishing.
the-ken.com-Snapdeal has some good news And bad 1/7 663

On January 11, Snapdeal brought in Jason Kothari from Housing. Kothari will now be
the chief strategy and investment officer in the company. This is a significant
appointment. We’ll explain why in just a bit.
Speed bump
Multiple sources confirm that the e-commerce seller recorded about 30% drop in
shipped revenue in 2016, compared to 2015
Multiple sources confirm that the e-commerce seller recorded about 30% drop in
shipped revenue in 2016, compared to 2015. For 2015, Snapdeal had recorded a shipped
revenue of anywhere between Rs 10,000-12,000 crore. But for the year ended December
2016, the numbers dropped to around Rs 8,000 crore.
Shipped revenue equals booked revenue minus bulk orders. Shipped revenue is not
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) but one step deeper than GMV.
Now, things get a little tricky. In their submissions to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs,
marketplaces do not declare their gross sales. They declare the revenue earned from
commissions. Snapdeal hasn’t completed its submissions yet. So, how shipped revenue
translates to actual revenue is not known as yet.
But Flipkart has completed its submissions. In comparison to Snapdeal, Flipkart grew
from Rs 10,000 crore in 2015 to Rs 15,000 crore in 2016, that too in net revenue.

Email circulated within Snapdeal after the Diwali sale
Additionally, the drop in Snapdeal’s revenue has come at the cost of competitiveness in
the lucrative electronics product category, and mobile phones, in particular. “There has
been a big drop in phones. Snapdeal has not been able to shift these products anymore,”
says a former employee with a competing e-commerce company. He requested
anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Another blow to Snapdeal has
been the absence of exclusive smartphone deals. The likes of Amazon and Flipkart, both,
have set up arrangements with brands like OnePlus, Motorola and Xiaomi. “If these
phones weren’t brands earlier, they have become now. The initial marketing paid off,
and now they sell themselves,” says one of the people quoted above. And this miss is
hurting Snapdeal deep. The absence of these deals means that most of India’s 50 million
e-commerce shoppers stay away.

Slippery slope
Another blow to Snapdeal has been the absence of exclusive smartphone deals. The likes
of Amazon and Flipkart, both, have set up arrangements with brands like OnePlus,
Motorola and Xiaomi
“It also stopped discounting heavily. Initially, you would see Snapdeal giving 30% or
50% discounts. It would dip into its own pocket but that’s now gone,” says a source. The
company has started focussing on products that generate repeat users with a newfound
metric called repeat transacting users. The entire website is now tuned to catering to
products that ‘create habits’.
“OnePlus and Motorola may create traffic temporarily but it is Micromax and Lava that
are bringing in the volume,” says one of the sources quoted above. And focusing on fast-
moving goods has meant that the company burns much less than usual. “There is
another reason Snapdeal did not compete with Amazon and Flipkart on these exclusive
deals. None of these deals come cheap,” he adds.
Snapdeal would have to supplement these exclusive deals with further discounts of its
own.
So, to make up for the loss in big ticket purchases, Snapdeal has started to focus on
products that can be moved quickly. So, cheap.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The email Snapdeal sent also spoke about focus on unit economics
With this, Snapdeal has also taken a step into Shopclues’ territory. The entire business
model of Shopclues rests on selling cheap goods at a low margin and generating volume.
But this is a game Shopclues has been playing for a while and knows its customers.
Snapdeal’s focus has primarily been the urban market.
“In terms of GMV, Shopclues has been eyeing the third spot for a while and the
uncertainty is helping us,” says a senior employee at Shopclues. He did not want to be
named as he wasn’t authorised to speak to the media.

The task is now cut out for Snapdeal. It will not only have to compete with Shopclues
(Flipkart and Amazon are clearly in a different league, out of its reach now) but also
maintain its premium delivery tag, which it shows off proudly. “It will realise that
playing in tier two and three markets is an entirely different kettle of fish, and it may not
be able to steamroll its way in,” says the Shopclues employee.
But, there’s a silver lining.
Snapdeal is getting closer to breaking even on a gross margin level. “The company loses
just Rs 10-20 per unit after logistics,” said a former Snapdeal official, who requested not
be to be named. Break-even is in line with what Kunal Bahl had told YourStory in an
interview last year. “Snapdeal is well positioned to turn profitable in the next two to
three years,” he said.
Yet, this path to profitability has come at a cost: Snapdeal is not only losing market share
but also growth and total revenue. “It is easy to show good numbers when you are
shrinking quickly,” said another source who is no longer with Snapdeal but has access to
Snapdeal data. He, too, requested not to be named. Even though a gross margin positive
company appears to look good in the press, this development will not impress investors.
“Now, this is troubling for Snapdeal,” added the person quoted above. “It affects the next
round of fundraising. The value of the bronze is undermined. Investors want results and
this [volume] is not vanity for them.”
Interestingly enough, Snapdeal had changed its focus to unit economics in 2016, after it
realised that it was losing the GMV game to Flipkart and Amazon. Since then, Snapdeal
has struggled to make up volume after it reduced its marketing spend for the first half of
the year. It turned up the ante just before the big Diwali sales, which pushed the
numbers up again. Snapdeal claimed that it spent Rs 200 crore in marketing just during
the big sale days.
Perhaps the best way to divine Snapdeal’s current strategy and options would be from
two statements that Bahl shared with YourStory in an interview in December, “Up till
2016, we could either grow or have good economics. In 2017, we have to be smart and
creative.”
And Softbank may just have used their creativity and parachuted Kothari from Housing.
He was SoftBank’s man at Housing, who, seemingly, steadied the ship and sold the
company. Kothari may be in for a similar task at Snapdeal. He may be Softbank’s
ultimate fixer.
Snapdeal competes with Paytm. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO, Paytm is an
investor in The Ken.
AUTHOR
Patanjali Pahwa

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Solar flair: India’s quest to supersede China
the-ken.com/story/solar-flair-indias-quest-to-supersede-china
July 10, 2020
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From watching your favourite YouTube video to emailing a friend, the internet is made
possible by a massive network of underwater cables. 1.2 million kilometres of submarine
fibre-optic cables, to be precise, which ferry data around the world.
Now, imagine electricity being similarly shipped across continents. Surplus energy
produced in one country could be bought and consumed in another nation thousands of
kilometres away. The world, or at least parts of it, would be powered by one supergrid.
If data is the new oil, electricity could be the new data.
That is the idea behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s One Sun, One World, One Grid
(OSOWOG) project. A mouthful as far as acronyms go, OSOWOG aims to first connect
India with Southeast Asia to its east and with the Middle East—and later with Africa—to
the west, before expanding to other parts of the globe.
The objective is simple: use the different time zones in tropical countries to tap the sun
for a longer period than any one country can. For instance, as India’s power demand
peaks as dusk falls, it can draw solar energy being generated in Saudi Arabia, where the
sun still hasn’t set, through this transnational grid.
Exciting as it may sound, the execution will not be straightforward. No country wants to
be dependent on another for electricity in the event of a conflict, says Kameswara Rao,
partner at consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). “It is far more complex than
building a rail or road project across countries.”
the-ken.com-Solar flair Indias quest to supersede China 1/2 670

OSOWOG is the latest, and largest, piece of India’s grand scheme to be a solar anchor for
the developing world through the International Solar Alliance (ISA). Announced in
November 2015 and operational since June 2018, the Gurugram-based ISA is an
organisation made up mostly of tropical countries. It is the first treaty-led multilateral
organisation to be headquartered in India.
ISA helps finance smaller, poorer countries to transition from coal- and gas-fired
electricity to solar energy, and, in the process, provides a counterbalance to China’s
growing influence around the world. India and China are currently locked in their worst
border dispute in decades.
India is trying to build on its own solar success story. Since 2013, it has had one of the
world’s largest interconnected grids, made up of five regional grids. It has scaled up its
solar energy capacity 9X to 35 GW in five years, according to the Central Electricity
Authority (CEA). This has seen it move up the solar power capacity leaderboard.
AUTHOR
Seetharaman G
Starting out as a business journalist in 2008, Seetharaman has written about energy,
climate change, retail, banking, and technology. He has worked with Business Today, a
fortnightly, and the Sunday edition of The Economic Times.
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-Solar flair Indias quest to supersede China 2/2 671

Spectrum, satellites, and new sheriffs in Indian
telecom’s new season
the-ken.com/story/spectrum-satellites-and-new-sheriffs-in-indian-telecoms-new-season
December 31, 2020
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If India’s telecom story was a TV series, with each year an episode, 2020 felt like a season
finale. Not just because the world seemed to be coming to an end, but because the
plotlines from the last few years finally wound down to definitive conclusions.
A new pecking order has been decisively established. Reliance Jio is at the front of the
pack, with Bharti Airtel gamely doing its best to keep pace. Vi, formerly Vodafone-Idea, is
happy to still be in business, even if it is some way off the pace. Though their rivalry
remains eternal, they have also found common ground—floor pricing and 5G spectrum
pricing—to band together on.
The tariff war that had plagued the sector, causing all telcos to bleed, is also a thing of the
past. If 2019 saw the first tariff hikes in three years, 2020 made clear that the trajectory of
mobile tariffs would continue to move steadily upwards. Sustainability is no longer a
distant dream but an eventuality.
The new season of Indian telecom looks to be fundamentally different. Apart from the
main cast that we’ve grown used to, there are new additions to the telecom wars. There’s a
new sheriff in town, with the telecom regulator getting a new head after RS Sharma, its
controversial chief, retired in September. With all operators making moves in the
direction of 5G over the coming year, fresh spectrum auctions will also be a huge part of
the coming year.
Going once, going twice… sold?
the-ken.com-Spectrum satellites and new sheriffs in Indian telecoms new season 1/2 672
This year was meant to play host to a spectrum auction. But with telecom companies still
fighting to guarantee their survival and unlikely to participate, that never materialised.
There are two sets of spectrum bands that have to be auctioned. One set is for 2G, 3G, and
4G spectrum bands—700, 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2300, 2500MHz. Much of the spectrum
private operators hold in these bands is set to expire in various regions.
The government is expected to hold auctions for this spectrum in the final quarter of the
year ended March 2021, with close to 2251MHz of spectrum, worth ~$53 billion , on the
block.
The second auction will be for the much-coveted 5G spectrum. This is where things get
interesting. Even as 5G networks are rolled out in other countries, the Indian government
still hasn’t decided which spectrum band or even what quantity of spectrum to allot for
5G.
the-ken.com-Spectrum satellites and new sheriffs in Indian telecoms new season 2/2 673
Stent price control was a short-sighted move, right?
Here’s how
the-ken.com/story/stent-price-control-short-sighted-move
March 28, 2018
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UPDATE: Another one bites the dust
By deciding to make a list of essential diagnostics, the big daddies of Indian health
policymaking have taken the first step towards a milestone. The National List of Essential
Medicines (NLEM) was just a list before it set the price of hundreds of medicines. Last
year, the list grew to include medical devices—cardiac stents and knee implants. On 12
March, the Health Ministry and NITI Aayog consulted to create another list of essential
diagnostics.
What comes next is anyone’s guess.
After three months of discussions, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has convinced
the health ministry to make certain diagnostics affordable. When the price regulator
studied hospital bills in February, it found that diagnostics constituted over 15% of the
bill, and the prices varied significantly across labs. The policymakers have begun the
process to expand the scope of price control but the path to regulating the price of a
diagnostic test is far more challenging than it was for drugs and devices.
This is primarily because there is no regulation for pathology labs in India. Only voluntary
accreditation by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration
Laboratories (NABL). Something only about 1% of the 100,000 labs possess. Unlike
medical devices, for whom the Medical Device Rules kicked in from January 2018, and, of
course, drugs, whose quality is monitored by the Drug Controller General of India.
Diagnostics sector is neither bound by law nor a regulator.
Further, the policymakers have missed the one factor they cannot control—the price of
treatment. If the health ministry fixes the price for diagnostic tests this year, it still would
not be able to ensure that the benefit reaches the patient. It appears the lessons of stent
price control haven’t reached the policymakers’ table.
To refresh public memory, we are re-publishing our earlier story and making it free.
___________________________________________________
As far as the popularity of any health policy goes, price ceiling for stents has made it right
to the top. Just before Uttar Pradesh elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modiused it at a
rally to woo the voters. The PM claimed that he was committed to providing affordable
the-ken.com-Stent price control was a short-sighted move right Heres how 1/3 674
healthcare to everyone by reprimanding and controlling the profit-motivated businesses.
Only if its simplicity and popularity made healthcare affordable.
Eight months later, the cheer from the crowds is followed by some behind-the-door
discussion in fine print. Hospitals’ message: you can control the margins of devices but
the price of medical procedures is ours to decide.
Hospitals have already recovered from the loss in revenue that followed price ceiling for
stents from about 40% patients, who pay them directly. Now they have raised their game
to begin negotiations with private health insurance companies, who pay for about 20% of
the patients.
penny-wise, pound-foolish
Eight months ago, the drug regulator cut down hospitals’ margins.
Now, the hospitals are making up for the lost revenue leaving the
patient helpless
Ruhi Kandhari, 28 Mar 2018
Hospitals have increased the price for angioplasty procedures by as much as 45% to
make up for the loss of revenue
They have also started negotiating medical procedure prices with health insurance
companies
Abbott has withdrawn two high-end stents from the Indian market and the supply of
latest stents is also limited
The patients, who have undergone angioplasty at government-funded hospitals, are not
affected by price control of stents
Surprise market winners in Indian states’ diagnostics
race
the-ken.com/story/surprise-winners-indian-states-diagnostics-race
March 29, 2018
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A little late in the game, last month, Odisha government joined the states that have
chosen to offer free diagnostics to people. Every time states say ‘free diagnostics,’ path
labs sense a big opportunity. Which is why Dr Lal, SRL and other organised large
pathology labs bid for the tender, confident in their chance to win. After all, they have the
ability to conduct thousands of tests, keep the prices low and maintain quality in labs.
Except none of the large, publicly-listed companies that dominate major Indian cities won
the bid. Instead, 10-year-old Techmed Healthcare walked away with the contract. It
impressed the Odisha government by promising to make each of the 32 government path
labs in district hospitals capable of giving out test results in three to four hours. Whereas,
larger path labs centred in cities—Bhubaneswar, in this case—would have relied on
collection centres to send samples to the lab and receive the result. A process that would
take up to three days.
Techmed earned a revenue of Rs 20 crore ($3 million) in FY17. The leading path lab chain
Dr Lal earned Rs 881.87 crore ($135 million). In an industry growing at 27.5%, it’s the
regional players that are pushing the market, which, experts estimate, will reach $13
billion in the next two years. One of the biggest growth drivers? The government.
Consider this. Under the National Health Mission (NHM), the central government had
approved Rs 649.29 crore ($99.5 million) for 24 states in 2016-17 for the free diagnostic
services initiative. Since then, many states have announced their own separate schemes.
Odisha government announced free diagnostics last year by earmarking approximately Rs
the-ken.com-Surprise market winners in Indian states diagnostics race 1/2 677

300 crore ($46 million) to be spent in the next five years under a scheme called ‘Nidaan.’
Together, central and state governments would be outsourcing lab tests worth up to Rs
7000 crore ($1 billion) annually.
The PPP opportunity
Together, central and state governments would be outsourcing lab tests worth up to Rs
7000 crore ($1 billion) annually
On 21 March, the Modi government gave a booster dose to the NHM by approving its
2017-2020 budget of Rs 85,217 crore ($13 billion). Contributing to this opportunity,
beyond centre and state missions, are unsuspected buyers like the National Aids Control
Organisation (Naco). For instance, Metropolis Labs in Mumbai won a contract from Naco
to conduct HIV viral load-testing across 525 antiretroviral therapy (ART) centres in the
country.
Further, Wipro GE Healthcare is the leading provider of radiology labs to the government.
It runs 150 centres across 15 states which are operated by clinical partners. The state
budgets, in return, contribute to approximately a quarter of Wipro GE’s Rs 4,031 crore
($621 million) revenue (FY16), said Rajat Ghai, director at GE Healthcare who is
responsible for government sales and public-private partnerships (PPP).
the-ken.com-Surprise market winners in Indian states diagnostics race 2/2 678

Swayam’s missed opportunity to be a Covid-19 remedy
for higher education
the-ken.com/story/swayam-covid-online-learning
July 14, 2020
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It took a 14-member committee 50 days to come up with a name: Study Webs of Active
Learning for Young Aspiring Minds.
The name is a mouthful; the committee had to work backwards from ‘Swayam’, a phrase
coined by India’s then-Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani in
2016. Swayam, Hindi for self, is India’s first, national Massive Open Online Course
(MOOC) platform.
Like its name, Swayam’s purpose was also decided in advance. It was meant to be a one-
stop national melting pot of courses from grade nine physics to university level robotics.
With nine national coordinators spread out across technical and non-technical
disciplines, and over 3,800 local chapters, Swayam is a sprawl.
The idea, says Manpreet Manna, was to improve access to good quality education online,
especially for students who couldn’t attend elite, urban colleges. Manna was the head of
Swayam’s launch committee, and instrumental in bringing the nine national academies
under one wing. Manna and his team were also clear that Swayam needed to be different
and bigger in scope to its intellectual predecessor—the National Programme on
Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).
NPTEL, launched in 2003, was a joint effort between the seven Indian Institutes of
Technology, like IIT Madras , Bombay and Kanpur, and the Indian Institute of Science.
NPTEL was a platform for recorded lectures, which were hosted on Youtube and the
NPTEL website. By no means a modest operation, NPTEL’s coordinator Andrew
Thangaraj claims that the platform already had “hundreds of millions of hits” by 2014.
When it came to launching a nation-wide MOOC platform though, the HRD Ministry
decided to start afresh.
With its “learn anytime, anywhere” MOOC approach, the disruption caused by the
ongoing coronavirus pandemic is a tailor-made opportunity for Swayam to be a composite
solution for teaching and assessing. The pandemic led to the indefinite closure of over
1,000 universities, shutting out roughly 38 million students. Colleges scrambled to put
together a patchwork of tools—Google Classroom, Webex, and Zoom—to bring college
education online.
Swayam was supposed to address this variable quality of teaching and learning across
universities, but it is conspicuously absent from the long list of tools and websites being
used to teach online right now. Instead, it’s plagued by the same problems it set out to
the-ken.com-Swayams missed opportunity to be a Covid-19 remedy for higher education 1/2 679
address.
Even a cursory glance through Swayam reveals that quality, format, and assessment
patterns are inconsistent. Some teachers use a creative mix of presentations and quizzes
to teach, while others are monotonous lectures in front of a green screen. The Ken spoke
to 25 students and teachers across 10 cities in June about their experience with online
classes.
new game, old rules
India’s first MOOC platform was supposed to be a crutch for

higher education institutes. But instead of blending in, Swayam
sticks out with its outdated content and boring lectures
Olina Banerji, 14 Jul 2020
Post-Covid, colleges’ hasty DIY online solutions are plagued with problems such as
accessibility and quality of teaching
Swayam, the central government's MOOC portal, could've stepped in as a quality

alternative. But it's plagued with much the same problems
Revised twice already, Swayam's structure doesn't line up with its goals. Teachers aren't
incentivised; lectures seem outmoded
A third revamp with a more federated structure could shape Swayam into a real tool
against future academic disruptions
the-ken.com-Swayams missed opportunity to be a Covid-19 remedy for higher education 2/2 680
Swiggy
the-ken.com/story/btn-swiggy-2017
November 14, 2017
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What’s the best way to describe Swiggy? Owner of in-house restaurant brands, one of
India’s major foodtech companies, and the largest in delivery. In terms of valuation and
quantum of money raised, Zomato, its Delhi-NCR-based rival, is bigger. But Swiggy has a
larger fleet for delivery—a game the Bengaluru-based company is trying hard to win. And
that’s where the money seems to be. The company is present in eight cities and has
announced that it delivers 4 million orders a month.
Total Funding
$155.5 million
SWIGGY
Bundl Technologies Private Limited
As per MCA records
Sriharsha Majety
Co-founder
Bengaluru
Headquarters
Read more
INVESTORS
Naspers
Accel Partners
the-ken.com-Swiggy 1/3 681

SAIF Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners
Read more
COMPETITORS
Zomato
Foodpanda
Read more
What has Swiggy been up to, in the last year?

This was a year when Swiggy raised $80 million from Naspers. This added another
marquee investor to the company’s cap table. It has been an eventful year for the foodtech
company. Swiggy realised in FY17 that it has to increase margins to stay relevant. Its
pressure on the delivery personnel (to decrease their commision) and the restaurants (to
increase the commission given to Swiggy) was met with swift resistance. It has also
entered the market as a supplier and has started The Bowl Company, which caters to
Koramangala—an upmarket suburb in Bengaluru. This “dark restaurant” delivered 270
orders a day in July 2017, according to a blog post by Swiggy, and took 7% of the market
share in the area.

Results
Rs 132.2 crore: The revenue Swiggy made from its operations in the year ending March
2017. The figure grew 6.5-times over last year. The fact that the company claims it
reached 4 million orders a month reflects on the steep climb in revenue.
Rs 100 crore: The revenue made by Swiggy from restaurants as service income.
6X: The multiple by which Swiggy increased its revenue from both, restaurants as service
fee, and customers as delivery fee
Rs 135.4 crore: How much Swiggy spent on delivering the food ordered on the
platform. The cost shot up three times over last year, in correspondence with the ramp up
in the number of orders.
Rs 205.1 crore: The loss Swiggy clocked in for the year. This includes employee benefits
and expenses as well as the cost of operations.
Rs 7.7 lakh: This was Swiggy’s revenue from its cloud kitchen brand, The Bowl
Company, operational in select areas in Bengaluru earlier this year.
Rs 52.2 crore: Spent by Swiggy in FY17 in marketing and advertising expenses. The
number is up over two times year-on-year.
4: The number of revenue streams Swiggy has opened up: service income, delivery fee,
advertising income and charging for food as a product.
Its biggest rival Zomato has raised another round of funding from Ant Financial and
acquired last-mile delivery company Runnr to ramp up its food delivery. Swiggy will have
to match Zomato blow for blow and build more depth in its supply, partly by adding
restaurants and starting more house brands just like The Bowl Company. In the first half
of 2018, Deliveroo is expected to make its foray into India. Expect big discounts from
Swiggy in the next year.
Clarification: A previous version of the copy said that the share of The Bowl Company was
at 70% in the areas it was launched in. It has been updated to 7%. We regret the error.

TeamIndus and Isro call off their GLXP launch contract
the-ken.com/story/teamindus-isro-call-off-glxp
January 9, 2018
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As far as long shots go, this was truly a moonshot—both literally and otherwise. A true
leap of faith which rallied nationalistic sentiments and tens of millions of dollars in angel
funds. But in the end, this moonshot seems to have fizzled out. The launch contract that
TeamIndus signed with Antrix Corporation—the commercial arm of the Indian Space
Research Organisation (Isro)—in December 2016, in pursuit of its $30-million Google
Lunar XPRIZE goal, has been cancelled. Multiple sources within Isro confirmed the news.
One of the five finalists in the private race to the moon, TeamIndus has been aiming to
land on the lunar surface before 31 March 2018, the cutoff date in the Google Lunar
XPRIZE (GLXP). Now that the contract, which was for a chartered launch on Isro’s rocket
Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), has been called off, it’s virtually impossible for
TeamIndus to secure another contract on any other rocket and launch before the
deadline. So it’s curtains down on GLXP, but it’s not immediately known if TeamIndus
would try to land on the moon on its own in 2018 or later.
The odds are stacked against it, for the foreseeable future.
As much as the private moon race is about technology and its smart deployment, it’s also
about money. Conservatively speaking, the price tag for the PSLV chartered launch alone
is said to be upwards of $20 million; the cost of building and testing the moon rover is
several million more. It’s learnt TeamIndus couldn’t pony up funds to pay Antrix beyond
the initial signing amount. “Isro has cancelled the contract for a lack of compliances and
payment issues,” says a person who is close to these developments. He says, “Rahul
[Narayan, co-founder TeamIndus] has spoken to all on the floor recently and informed all
the-ken.com-TeamIndus and Isro call off their GLXP launch contract 1/2 684
of Isro’s decision of pulling out of the mission”. TeamIndus did not respond to questions
sent by email. Without denying the news, a spokesperson for the company said, “As a
company, we’d not comment on this”.
Antrix, too, did not respond to questions sent in an email on Monday.
In July, The Ken wrote about how the space startup was late in reaching its technical
milestones. While it put up a confident face and blamed nearly everything on scarce
funding, it was evident to a few people, both inside and outside the company, that even if
it had managed to raise funds, meeting the 31 March mission completion deadline would
be nearly impossible from a technical and logistical perspective.
At the GLXP review meeting in early October, while addressing the press the judges said
that TeamIndus was on step 1 of a 10-step countdown, and in the right direction. Later on,
senior employees say, “[the judges] told us on the floor that while TeamIndus was in the
right direction, the moon mission launch may not happen soon”.
the-ken.com-TeamIndus and Isro call off their GLXP launch contract 2/2 685
Technology hurtles forward; can we handle it?
the-ken.com/story/technology-hurtles-forward
December 28, 2017
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On top of my list of new year resolutions (they are resolutions as they are broken so often)
for 2017 was to start investing money and get my finances in order. But I let that pass. The
last few months have taken me by surprise as younger colleagues and cousins tell me
about how someone they know (or themselves) have been investing in cryptocurrency.
But an ending year is a good time to accept that the younger ones are better with rapidly
changing technology anyway.
The power of blockchain is here for all to see and it has been a revelation to some, like me.
Global banking giant Goldman plans to start trading in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
by June 2018. The Indian government though is cracking down on the cryptocurrency
exchanges and is beginning to take cognizance of how popular the investment instrument
is. Rs 4000 crore have already been lost in the multiple Ponzi schemes spawned by the
wave in India alone. What next? Linking Aadhaar for Bitcoin purchases? I hope not.
Aadhaar was at the centre of one of the most important technology stories we published
this year. The unique identification system was the proverbial treasure which was
supposed to lift iSpirt beyond a non-profit industry body. The story unravelled quickly for
the self-appointed gatekeepers of the ‘India Stack’ technology.
Technology’s Catch-22 are the regulations which govern it. The loosely defined
regulations on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones have held the sector captive
for too long. Then there’s the Indian Space Research Organisation, which has recognised
the need to outsource some of its work to companies in the private sector for increasing
the number of satellite launches and encourage Indian aerospace companies to mature.
the-ken.com-Technology hurtles forward can we handle it 1/2 686

On our must-read list this year, there is an interesting tale of one of the most promising
Indian private aerospace companies which seems to have veered off the path too late in
the day.
And before I wish you a happy new year ahead, I would like to share one new year
resolution I hope to stick to this time—that of keeping good health. Health technology
companies like Cure.fit and Healthifyme who want to help you manage your life and well-
being better will hopefully make sticking to the resolution easier.
Here is a quick recap of the deeply-researched technology stories we have written about
during the year. The holiday season is the perfect reason to catch up on some intensive
reading we believe.
First on the list is the two-part series on iSpirt and how it morphed into a
gatekeeper for all services which use Aadhaar, enough to favour companies
willing to buy into India Stack
‘Bharat’ transacting online is a million dollar opportunity. 1. Make the

internet speak your language. 2. Bring all your trusted stores and businesses
online for ease of transaction
Financial data stolen from Indians—in a process called astroturfing—is being

used to buy Facebook ads. And 2018 could be worse, says Zuckerberg
The first electric scooter is awaited from Ather Energy which took the hard
call on building everything from scratch
The drag on Team Indus, however, is a different story as India’s contender

for Google Lunar XPRIZE seems to be floundering close to take-off
The last on your reading list should be the mad rush which started it all in the
startup space. The Tiger Global story in India is almost over…
And the hustle of 2015 looks like a phase (much like some bad fashion choices we made
when we were younger) in the more restrained times of 2017.
On that note, we hope you have a great new year!
the-ken.com-Technology hurtles forward can we handle it 2/2 687

Telecom networks teeter as India’s lockdown spikes
data traffic
the-ken.com/story/telecom-networks-teeter-as-indias-lockdown-spikes-data-traffic
April 2, 2020
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As India enters the second week of a nationwide lockdown that began on 23 March, data
is fast becoming the lifeblood of the country. Even as the nation’s roads are eerily empty,
traffic online is only ramping up. With businesses and schools shuttered as the country
tries desperately to diffuse the ticking Covid-19 timebomb, moving operations online is
imperative.
Consequently, video conferencing apps have surged in popularity. Zoom, for example,
quickly became the most-downloaded app in the country, racing past the likes of social
media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
But in a country that already has the highest data usage per smartphone globally, this
increase in online activity simply isn’t sustainable. Only 19 million subscribers access the
internet through wired broadband, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India (Trai). As a result, the overwhelming majority of traffic is on mobile wireless
networks, which are creaking under the strain.
Executives at leading telecom operators and telecom equipment firms told The Ken that
the traffic load across the board has increased by 35-40%. This is a considerable jump
from the 5-8% increase in the immediate aftermath of the lockdown, as per industry body
Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). Crucially, say those in the space, data
usage is still growing.
To put this in perspective, as of December 2019, India’s three remaining private telecom
operators—Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea—reported cumulative daily
traffic of approximately 250 petabytes . Today, that figure is around 360-380 petabytes a
day, said a senior executive working closely with Jio’s network.
And with the populace stuck at home, peak hours, have gone from 8:30AM-10AM and
7PM-11PM to all day, every day.
“Initially, we believed that data usage will flatten by the end of the week, but that hasn’t
happened,” said an executive with a global telecom tech company with extensive
operations in India.
Compounding this chaos, most of this traffic is coming from residential areas, which have
lower network capacity.
Traffic jams
the-ken.com-Telecom networks teeter as Indias lockdown spikes data traffic 1/2 688
In only the second of a three-week lockdown, India’s telecom
networks are running at almost 100% capacity. Telcos must either
increase capacity or brace for bad service
Pratap Vikram Singh, 2 Apr 2020
There's a ticking time bomb in India's telecom sector
Ever since the country went into lockdown because of Covid-19, data usage has spiked
With only 2-3% of internet users using wired broadband, the strain is largely on mobile
wireless networks
Many parts of the country now need augmented capacity or risk seeing a steep drop in
network quality
the-ken.com-Telecom networks teeter as Indias lockdown spikes data traffic 2/2 689
Telecom regulator’s 5-year legacy: unforgettable and
unforgivable
the-ken.com/story/trai-telecom-five-year-legacy
August 11, 2020
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In August, India’s telecom regulator is all set for a change of guard. Never in its 23-year
history has the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) been accused of playing by
the rules of a zero-sum game. A game that has soiled the shiniest story of liberalisation in
the country.
Two of India’s three private telecom operators, which together account for 56% of mobile
subscribers, reported Rs 40,393 crore ($5.4 billion) in quarterly losses last week. In the
five years to December, India’s wireless and wireline subscriber base grew by 12%,
industry revenue grew by 2.4% and, importantly, the government’s earnings from this
sector fell by 18.8%.
Not all the blame for this cratering can be laid at Trai’s door. Yet, there’s no escaping that
the regulator failed at its vital duty under the Trai Act: ensuring the viability of the sector
with a transparent, predictable, and equitable policy framework.
Needling of the two incumbents, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL), on their
services had started in October 2015, and continues to date. Trai blocked the two telcos
from providing premium services last month. However, the Telecom Disputes
Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) struck down the move.
“Trai was fine with VIL launching [premium services] in November 2019, but when
Airtel launched it, Reliance Jio filed a complaint,” says a telecom industry veteran who
doesn’t work for any telco.
the-ken.com-Telecom regulators 5-year legacy unforgettable and unforgivable 1/2 690

The new entrant, Reliance Jio, has had a bull run since it launched its 4G pan-India
services in September 2016. Trai allowed it to launch promotional plans with free voice
calls for far too long—nine months. Its rivals complained, and even went to the
Competition Commission of India calling out Jio’s predatory pricing, but no one budged.
Meanwhile, Jio, which had its free voice and near-free data services “factored into the
elasticity models” run by its consultants, knew exactly how long it needed its services to
be free, and what regulatory gaps could be leveraged.
(Subsequently, Trai notified a new order on predatory pricing in February 2018, which,
in a nutshell, prevents any telco from doing what Jio did in the first year of its launch.)
The yin and yang of Trai’s regulatory powers, control and recommendation, have been
telling under its current chairman, Ram Sewak Sharma.
AUTHOR
Seema Singh
View Full Profile
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Tenancy troubles hang over Brookfield’s $3.5 billion Jio
tower bet
the-ken.com/story/tenancy-troubles-hang-over-brookfields-3-5-billion-jio-tower-bet
January 15, 2020
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India’s telecom tower industry is set to get a new top dog. Having already pipped its older
rivals—Vodafone Idea Ltd (VIL) and Bharti Airtel—to become the largest Indian telecom
operator by number of subscribers, Reliance Jio is set to replicate that feat in towers.
Reliance Jio Infratel—Jio’s tower asset venture—aims to add another 45,000 towers to its
130,000-strong portfolio over the coming year. This would beat the combined might of
Bharti Infratel and Indus Towers, which hold around 163,000 towers. The two have been
in merger talks since late 2018. Once these plans come to fruition, Jio Infratel’s portfolio
will be the second largest in the world, bested only by China Tower, which has a whopping
1.95 million towers in its home country.
Jio Infratel’s surge comes on the back of its new ownership. It was recently acquired by
Canadian asset management firm Brookfield Infrastructure and its institutional partners,
with a committed investment of over $3.7 billion.
As part of the deal, RIL’s subsidiary Reliance Industrial Investments and Holding Limited
(RIIHL) signed a master services agreement with Brookfield for 30 years. For Brookfield,
Jio’s long-term tenancy assures it a meaningful, predictable stream of revenue. A single-
tenant arrangement—something that Jio Infratel has previously had with Reliance Jio—
however, makes Brookfield’s investment something of an oddity.
Conventional wisdom in the telecom industry holds that multi-tenancy, where a single
tower hosts the equipment of more than one telco, is the only viable model. Without it,
turning a profit is improbable, if not impossible, many in the industry believe.
The current state of the industry makes this clear. Indus Towers is a joint venture between
Airtel, VIL, and UK-based Vodafone Group. Indus and Bharti Infratel, which is solely
owned by Airtel, have two anchor tenants—Airtel and VIL. Even American Tower
Corporation (ATC), the other major tower company in the country, has multiple tenants
across 70% of its tower assets, said a senior tower industry executive. He requested
anonymity as he is not allowed to comment on specific telcos.
Even as the Jio-Brookfield deal awaits regulatory approval, Brookfield CEO Sam Pollock
has already weighed in on the tenancy issue. In a statement, Pollock spoke of “meaningful
upside” through multi-tenancy. Bucking Jio’s captive towers arrangement, while
appealing in theory, may be difficult to put into practice though.
the-ken.com-Tenancy troubles hang over Brookfields 35 billion Jio tower bet 1/3 692
Since Jio’s entry into telecom in 2016, the market has seen rapid consolidation. While
there were many telcos and few tower providers earlier, something that naturally lent
itself to multi-tenancy, that is no longer the case. There are, in essence, three tower
operators on the supply side—Indus-Bharti Infratel, ATC, Jio Infratel. On the demand
side, there are three telecom operators—Jio, Airtel, and VIL. Acquiring a second tenant,
therefore, could be easier said than done.
Even as telecom remains a three player market, none of the tower companies will have
two plus tenancies-- they will have between 1.6 and 1.8.
Annuity
In a space where multi-tenancy is critical but increasingly difficult

to manage, asset management giant Brookfield must convince
Reliance Jio’s rivals to come to the telecom tower table
Pratap Vikram Singh, 15 Jan 2020
With its acquisition of Jio Infratel, Brookfield finally made good on its long-standing
desire to acquire Indian telecom assets
Jio Infratel, however, is a single-tenant tower provider in an industry where multi-

tenancy is key to profitability
The consolidation in the Indian telecom space, though, means multi-tenancy will be an
uphill struggle for Brookfield
Having taken the lead in the $3.5 billion acquisition, what does Brookfield know that
others don’t?
That went by quickly
the-ken.com/story/that-went-by-quickly
December 25, 2017
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Can you believe it? 2017 is almost done. Time is a sneaky little thing. It flies by without
you realising, and now, it is that time of the year again. The time when you look at your
pants and wonder why they don’t fit anymore. It is time to make new resolutions; maybe a
gym membership to get fit, maybe travel by public transport to save money for those
excellent vacations in countries you really want to visit but can’t because you spent too
much in August. You know, August was just a good month. Where did it all go wrong?
There will be a few companies thinking about it too. What were those missteps that
ultimately led them to wonder: now what? In 2016, companies were still riding the wave
of funding from 2015 and had cash to spend. But in 2017, that money slowed down and
everyone had to rationalise. Snapdeal thought that too, and we detailed a lot of how that
played out. We looked at it carefully and did a post-mortem of the unicorpse. It was
almost done, ready to be acquired by its one-time arch rival, Flipkart. That deal never
happened. And like every bad film, it rose like a zombie by preparing to sell everything it
had. But if you really think about it, not all was right with some of its assets, especially
Unicommerce. But what about Flipkart, the company that was supposed to buy it? It
raised a tonne of money, and I am serious when I say a tonne of it. The question now is: Is
this a new beginning or a false dawn? We don’t know yet, but what we do know is that it is
interested in buying smaller e-commerce companies to get a larger share of the market,
something we called its Zugzwang moment. While we are talking about excess, everyone’s
favourite edtech company, Byju’s, raised a lot of cash. What’s behind the hype that has
followed the company? Edtech is a difficult market and one of the companies Byju’s
acquired, TutorVista, is a good example of that.
the-ken.com-That went by quickly 1/2 695

The other end of the market is Shopclues. But that company has troubles of its own. It
wants to sell, both itself and its products, but there don’t seem to be too many buyers. Yet.
And to solve the problem of buyers, companies are going offline. It works against the
entire thesis they started out on. But the champion of offline to online companies,
AppsDaily, couldn’t make it. It shuttered. There is a lesson here somewhere.
Enough of the doom and gloom though. The new year is almost here. It means the battles
that took shape in 2017 will intensify in 2018. One of them was between Uber and Ola.
The Indian ride-hailing unicorn reached a crossroads, it was ceding ground to Uber in all
its major battlegrounds, it had to up its game to stay relevant. It did try, until the chaos at
Uber. Just like ride-hailing, grocery too has found itself in a battle. BigBasket and Amazon
are trading blows and Kishore Biyani is trying to get in on the action too. This one is going
to get tasty. Talking about tasty, Zomato vs Swiggy is going to get fierce in 2018. They
have been battling on cloud kitchens, and the fight will spill over into deliveries soon. And
now they have a new competitor, Foodpanda, powered by Ola. Speaking of fights spilling
into 2018, Oyo, which is now looking at South East Asia as a new market, is seeing two
upstarts willing to take it on, in the form of Treebo and Fab Hotels.
We, at The Ken, are not always about conflict. And like every Christopher Nolan film, we
also care about love. Finding it online and making money doing it. We also wondered why
Paytm found value in ticket booking website Insider.in. I could probably go on, but then
you’d be reading this in 2019.
There are others we loved, our highlights. Check them out.
Ola is going international and it is starting with the subcontinent
Oyo has found a new lease of life and Townhouse may be its new flagship
product
Snapdeal made one big acquisition: Freecharge. And when time came,
Snapdeal sold it.
Do you wonder why Paytm paid a premium to get a piece of the BigBasket
pie?
Zomato started its Amazon Prime lookalike—Gold. It was a huge hit, but it is
a ticking time bomb.
I hope you had fun reading our stories, we had fun writing them. See you in 2018.
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The 32-year-old who wants to bring down the edifice of
India’s fintech revolution
the-ken.com/story/abhijit-mishra-rbi-google-pay
August 6, 2020
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On the morning of 21 July, a virtual courtroom drama played out. In the video
conference dock was 32-year-old Abhijit Mishra, a former IT consultant, and self-
anointed “financial economist” whose barrage of Public Interest Litigations (PILs) have
created a stir in recent times. PILs that question the intent of various institutions, from
the Reserve Bank of India, and the National Housing Bank, to digital payments services
such as Google Pay, PayPal, and payments banks like Paytm Payments Bank*.
This time, the shoe was on the other foot. Mishra’s intentions were under scrutiny.
Mishra averages one PIL a month—filing over 20 since late 2018. These range from
alleging illegal lending, to asking for the formulation of welfare schemes for the
unorganised workers in Delhi, and the inclusion of advocates under professions that can
avail benefits under the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006.
The PILs give the impression that Mishra is on a mission to clean up institutions like RBI
and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for being arbitrary and not taking
swift action. But the Delhi High Court, which has been knee-deep in PILs, especially
during the lockdown, wasn’t impressed. In fact, it doubted his motivations.
In 2019, the court asked Mishra how he could spend so much time on PILs and be in
court almost every day. It even asked him if his employer at the time, IT services major
Wipro, was encouraging him to file these PILs. “In my two decades I have not seen this
kind of litigant; it is very unusual,” said Sanjay Ghose, a senior counsel, who was directed
by the court to investigate Mishra.
the-ken.com-The 32-year-old who wants to bring down the edifice of Indias fintech revolution 1/2 697
Eventually, the police issued him a notice asking for more details on 15 July. They
wanted to verify the personal information he had provided in an affidavit submitted to
the court as proof of character. Mishra, however, labelled it as harassment and, in turn,
filed more litigation a day later. This time, a criminal complaint against the Delhi
government on 16 July.
His complaint stated that the Delhi Police, at the behest of the state government, has
been “harassing, arm twisting and threatening” him to submit and “kneel before its
illegal demands”. At the 21 July hearing, Mishra pleaded with the court to stop the
investigations against him. The matter will next be heard on 31 August.
While Ghose denies any harassment, Mishra is in no mood to relent. He has taken on all
comers, including his former employer, Wipro. In a complaint filed on 22 May in the
Punjab and Haryana High Court, Mishra said that Wipro was threatening him and
exerting psychological pressure. The company was concerned about the reputational
damage his PILs were causing.
AUTHOR
View Full Profile
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The 2021 toolbox for India’s clean energy targets
the-ken.com/story/the-2021-toolbox-for-indias-clean-energy-targets
December 29, 2020
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India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been on a renewable energy road trip of sorts.
One of his first stops was the G20 Summit in November, where he categorically stated
that India would not only meet its target of generating 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable
energy, but surpass it.
A few days later, at a government-sponsored summit, he (virtually) threw open India’s

doors to investors. He promised them that renewable energy generation was an annual,
US$20 billion opportunity. His third stop was the inauguration of Asia’s largest solar and
wind energy farm in the western Indian state of Gujarat, on 15 December. From
international to domestic pulpits, the prime minister’s itinerary leaves no doubt about the
government’s intention to put India firmly on the global renewables map.
The PM’s renewables road trip also comes at the tail end of a pandemic-battered 2020.
Traditional industries such as automobiles and power generation—pillars that hold up
India’s economy—suffered body blows with regards to both production and output.
The automobile industry, for instance, was already reeling from a 19-year low in sales in
2019 when the pandemic hit. As offices and public spaces shuttered due to the lockdown,
coal-generated power fell from 70% of India’s electricity mix to a historic low of 60%. Coal
is back on the map now, though, with the economy going through several stages of
“unlock”.
In many ways, 2020 has been a watershed moment for alternative forms of energy.
the-ken.com-The 2021 toolbox for Indias clean energy targets 1/2 699
In segments such as electric vehicles (EV), companies found that the ownership model of
leasing, instead of buying, fit them better. And smart, Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled
electric two-wheelers are more amenable to flexible, customised rental and insurance
plans. Battery usage data, for instance, can indicate how well or poorly an EV is being run.
At a more macro level, renewable energy companies such as the Gurugram-based ReNew
Power Limited, the Ahmedabad-based Adani Green Power Limited, and the Hyderabad-
based Greenko Group won tenders to set up more solar power generation capacity, in line
with India’s internal target to grow solar power generation 8X by 2022. The price of
renewable power fell to a historic Rs 2/unit ($0.02/unit), as compared to the older, dirtier
fuel coal (Rs 3-4 ($0.04-0.05/unit).
The celebration, though, is tempered by the fact that almost 18.5 GW of tenders given out
by the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), for solar power generation, are still
unclaimed. And these are figures from just 2020.
Stripped down, what can really propel India into a clean, green, renewable future is
simple.
the-ken.com-The 2021 toolbox for Indias clean energy targets 2/2 700
The Aadhaar angle to National Health Authority’s
leadership shuffle
the-ken.com/story/a-change-of-guard-and-priorities-at-indias-national-health-authority
February 11, 2021
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Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of January, began like every other day at the National
Health Authority (NHA) office in central Delhi. By 9AM, the 200-odd employees of the
agency began filing into the premises, readying for another day of work. The NHA, which
falls under the Indian health ministry, is tasked with running the world’s largest public
health insurance scheme—the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY).
Even as the office began to buzz with activity, a phone call from the Prime Minister’s
Office would soon change the mood. The contract of Indu Bhushan, the founding chief
executive officer (CEO) of the NHA, would not be renewed once his three-year term ended
on 31 January. He would be replaced by Ram Sewak Sharma, a retired bureaucrat who
most recently served an often-controversial stint as head of the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (Trai).
For the team he had built from the ground up, Bhushan’s imminent departure came as a
shock. “Many believed that extending Bhushan’s term was a mere formality. The non-
renewal of his contract was a bolt out of the blue,” said one NHA official, who has worked
closely with Bhushan. They refused to be named as they are not authorised to speak with
the media.
It wasn’t just the NHA staff who were caught off guard by Bhushan’s exit. Union health
minister Harsh Vardhan admitted his own surprise at the suddenness of the decision
while speaking at Bhushan’s farewell—an intimate event held on 29 January. In the same
address, Vardhan termed Bhushan’s exit a “deep loss” to the NHA, and not without
reason.
Bhushan was uniquely qualified to helm the government’s PM-JAY efforts. A former IAS
officer, he was well-versed with navigating the corridors of India’s byzantine bureaucracy.
He was also a health economist, and had served stints at the World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank (ADB), the latter of which he eventually helmed. For a scheme as
ambitious as PM-JAY, which aimed to provide in-patient and out-patient insurance
coverage to 500 million of India’s poorest—around 40% of the Indian population—
Bhushan was considered an able captain.
Bhushan repaid that faith. He was instrumental in bringing 32 states onboard the PM-
JAY ship during his three-year stint, steering the NHA through the choppy waters of its
early days as well as the Covid-19 storm that raged for most of 2020. Still, the two-
the-ken.com-The Aadhaar angle to National Health Authoritys leadership shuffle 1/3 701
member Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC), consisting of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, decided to change course.
If we are working at a startup and the CEO exits, it is an odd kind of a feeling
Malti Jaswal, Advisor, NHA at Bhushan's farewell
Sources close to Bhushan told The Ken that he felt “disappointed” at the decision.
Change in Health
The change in leadership at NHA—from a seasoned health

economist to a career bureaucrat with close ties to Aadhaar—
indicates a shift in focus. India’s digital health ID mission may
just be superseding Ayushman Bharat, the world’s largest public
health insurance programme
Maitri Porecha, 11 Feb 2021
Many believed NHA founding CEO Indu Bhushan would receive a contract extension at
the end of his term. Three days before it expired, he was informed he was being
replaced
In his place, RS Sharma, former TRAI Chairman and one of Aadhaar’s architects, has
been chosen, seemingly to marry PM-JAY to National Digital Health Mission
Except, the former is a welfare scheme for the poor while the latter is a voluntary project
cutting across classes. It is a marriage of unequals
The government believes Sharma's the man for the job. Already, Sharma helped pave
the way for NDHM by pushing the linkage of Aadhaar and CoWIN. The health ministry
even issued a notification, permitting the voluntary use of Aadhaar across health IT
apps
The Advinus Decade: Inside the Tata Group’s
expensive drug discovery flameout
the-ken.com/story/advinus-decade-inside-tata-groups-expensive-drug-discovery-flameout
August 14, 2017
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A decade is a long enough time in any business, however risky its premise or exploratory
its process, to prove whether it’ll return value to its investors or not. This was evident last
month when the news broke that the Tata group was selling Advinus Therapeutics to
Eurofins Scientific, a contract research and manufacturing company in Luxembourg.
What seemed like a masterful strategy 10 years ago, to get into a new business of
discovering drugs and licensing out to big pharma, ended up in a messy exit.
No one has come out of this decadal quest looking great. Not Rashmi Barbhaiya, co-
founder of Advinus, who resigned in May 2016 and returned to the US, and not the
TATAs, who shut down the discovery wing in Pune in December and quietly laid off
“nearly 200 people”. People close to the development say the deal with Eurofins is
estimated to be between Rs 350 and 375 crore though the TATAs were hoping to get Rs
450 crore. It’s not immediately known how Advinus will shed its sizeable debt, which in
FY16 amounted to Rs 348 crore, according to corporate filings.
“I’ve not really spoken about Advinus since I left,” said Barbhaiya over the phone from the
US, reluctant to speak on this matter. “You know what happened to Ranbaxy [referring to
the major data fudging fraud in his previous pharma company for which it was fined $500
million]. If I turn the clock back and if I were to choose between joining Ranbaxy again
and joining hands with the TATAs, I’d choose Ranbaxy any day over the TATAs, just on
ethical grounds.”
To be emotionally unengaged in such matters is hard. Even Ratan N Tata, chairman

emeritus who was personally involved in setting up Advinus in 2005, is learnt to have
shown “fair amount of patience” until he was left with little. The group had rallied around
the idea, pooled in resources from Rallis India, ‘cleverly’ worked out a new company
structure in Advinus and hoped its cutting-edge tech and processes would invigorate a few
group companies, especially Tata Chemicals. But they cut their losses after 12 years. The
ripple effects of which are felt in the drug discovery community in India, which is small
and struggling and prone to second-guessing itself at such closures. They resemble what
the Bay Area in the US was in the ‘70s and ‘80s when it was all hard work and no money.
For the TATAs, what came out of it was perhaps learning. “Some of it was also vague. It’s
like saying what did the Indian team learn by losing the [cricket] World Cup in the years
that it lost,” says Satish Pradhan, who was associated with Advinus right from the start
and served on its board until he retired from the group in 2015.
the-ken.com-The Advinus Decade Inside the Tata Groups expensive drug discovery flameout 1/2 704
Learnings & Misgivings
Born 2005. Died 2017. Several hundred crores poorer, the Tata
Group has finally pulled the plug on its ambitious drug discovery
venture. What went wrong?
Seema Singh, 14 Aug 2017
No one has come out of this venture looking great—not Rashmi Barbhaiya, who
resigned and returned to the US, and not the TATAs who shut down the Pune unit and
laid off people
Both sides had good intentions, resources, and credentials but they couldn’t pull it off.
Did the scaled-down big pharma model fail or did people run out of patience?
Three years ago, the Piramals shut down the drug discovery unit. Every time such a
closure happens, it sends a shiver down the small community's spine. Why even do such
a risky venture in India?
Aarin Capital's Ranjan Pai thinks too much money is chasing e-commerce in India and
everyone would be better off if that money came into biotech. Will the exit he is looking
for provide a proof that it’s worth doing it in India?
the-ken.com-The Advinus Decade Inside the Tata Groups expensive drug discovery flameout 2/2 705
The BJP’s 5-year health policy check-up
the-ken.com/story/the-bjps-5-year-health-policy-check-up
April 13, 2019
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Five years ago, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made big promises with regard
to health. Specifically, it promised a reduction in out-of-pocket spending.
Very few of these promises actually came to fruition, though. For instance, a
pharmaceutical policy and a policy to curb Chinese imports from dominating the bulk
drugs market were announced, but never actually enacted. The latter is especially
interesting because in 2017, as The Ken reported, Indian pharma’s dependence on
Chinese bulk drugs was flagged as a security concern by no less than the Prime Minister’s
Office.
Meanwhile, a Bill that would check the quality of medical devices—drafted 12 years ago—
never made it in front of Parliament for approval. The Bill could prevent a repeat of what
happened between 2004-2010, when some 4,700 patients fell victim to faulty hip
implants by pharma company Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
The government even talked up a uniform ethical code—one that penalised pharma
companies for incentivising doctors to prescribe their brand. It was, however, never made
mandatory. As The Ken had reported in November 2017, the uniform ethical code for
pharma marketing practices (UCPMP) was announced but never implemented. This could
have broken the unethical relationship between doctors and pharma companies. Could
being the operative word.
E-pharmacies also remained stuck in legislative limbo. Legislation approving e-

pharmacies has been in the works for about two years now, but still hasn’t been finalised.
Meanwhile, e-pharmacies continue to battle offline chemists in courts. Most recently, in
the-ken.com-The BJPs 5-year health policy check-up 1/2 706

an affidavit to the Delhi High Court in February, the Ministry of Health requested a six-
month extension to legalise e-pharmacies.
And, if e-pharmacies remained in limbo, IHIP—the integrated health information

platform—met its end altogether. Envisaged as a platform that could bring all hospitals
under one system, it was meant to make healthcare accessible, affordable, transparent,
and help insurers get better data to control hospital treatment prices. This was in January
2017. By mid-2018, IHIP was scrapped. In its place, the government opted for an even
more ambitious scheme—Ayushman Bharat.
In fact, Ayushman Bharat, the world’s largest health insurance scheme, was one of two of
this government’s healthcare initiatives that actually took flight. The second was the use
of the Drug Price Control Order of 2013 to cap prices of essential drugs and devices.
Ayushman Bharat, meanwhile, has controlled hospital treatment prices.
Both of these are good in principle. But there’s a problem. They are at odds with each
other.
Ayushman Bharat is an insurance scheme that is predicated on large-scale insurance

providing support to 100 million underprivileged families.
the-ken.com-The BJPs 5-year health policy check-up 2/2 707

The bricks in India’s edtech wall
the-ken.com/story/the-bricks-in-indias-edtech-wall
December 30, 2019
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Earlier this month, Byju’s—the lone unicorn in Indian edtech—hit a massive milestone. In
a press release, the company announced that it had turned profitable, achieving a net
profit of Rs 20 crore ($2.8 million) on revenues of Rs 1,341 crore ($187.7 million). Over
the past decade, Byju’s, its purple and white logo, and its ever-expanding arsenal of
teaching tools have become synonymous with India’s edtech scene. Circa 2010, however,
there was a very different sheriff in town—Educomp.
Today, Educomp is a withered husk of its former self. Its market capitalisation—a grand
Rs 7,000 crore ($980 million) in 2009—has shrunk to Rs 11.63 crore ($1.6 million). It
filed for bankruptcy in 2017 as its debt ballooned into thousands of crores, and there have
even been allegations of fudging company financials.
Before its fall from grace, however, Educomp was India’s great edtech hope. Its approach
was to kit out classrooms with hardware and multimedia learning modules. And it saw
some serious traction, as The Ken’s Rohin Dharmarkumar, writing for Forbes India at the
time, pointed out:
“Educomp’s services (multimedia content, computer labs, teacher training) reach

23,000 schools and 12 million students and teachers. The company has grown at a
compounded rate of over 100 percent over the last five years, making 20 paisa of every
rupee earned as pure profit.”
Interestingly, it wasn’t a flaw with Educomp’s core proposition that would prove its
undoing. Instead, it was the company’s overreaching. As Educomp began offering
financing to schools to buy its products and began setting up educational institutions as
well, the company ended up taking on a whole load of debt.
the-ken.com-The bricks in Indias edtech wall 1/2 708

Ordinarily, one might assume that a like-for-like competitor would fill the vacuum left by
Educomp. And in a way, it did. India’s edtech space has changed tracks altogether. Where
hardware was once king, companies in the space realised that software was the big
opportunity. However, Byju’s—the heir to Educomp’s throne—bears much of its
predecessor’s aggressive traits. It, too, has aggressively acquired companies and gone the
financing route as well.
With the Indian edtech space expected to reach ~$2 billion, according to a report by
professional services firm KPMG and search giant Google, there has been an explosion of
companies in the space. According to one estimate—over 4,500 edtech companies
launched between January 2014 and September 2019. While many of these languish in
unfunded obscurity, some—such as Vedantu, Unacademy, UpGrad, and others—are
expanding the frontiers of Indian edtech. And a lot of this goes back to Byju’s.
A paradigm shift in Indian edtech

Byju’s was born in the first decade of the current millennium.
the-ken.com-The bricks in Indias edtech wall 2/2 709

The bubble that never was
the-ken.com/story/the-bubble-that-never-was
November 9, 2016
Ek tha Tiger
Sometime during the second half of 2009, three 29-year-old men were meeting in a three-
room residential apartment in Koramangala, Bengaluru. Sitting on the floor of their
unfinished office, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, the founders of Flipkart, discussed an
investment with Lee Fixel of Tiger Global, the New York-based investment firm.
Soon after, Tiger wrote a $9 million-cheque to Flipkart.
If you believe the experts, that seminal moment represented the inception of India’s
startup bubble.
Why so? Well, until that point, a traditional Series A investment in an Indian startup
would involve the investor putting in Rs 4 crore or so for a 25% stake, effectively valuing
the company at Rs 16 crore. Indeed, Flipkart itself had just concluded a funding deal on
those exact terms just before Tiger arrived. Out of this Rs 4 crore, Flipkart had only yet
received a Rs 2-crore tranche when Tiger invested approximately Rs 40 crore at a
valuation of Rs 220 crore. A quantum leap beyond what was considered the norm at that
point in time.
Of course, what happened next was the stuff of history.
Flipkart itself went from strength-to-strength raising over $3 billion in capital over the
next six years and this totemic growth triggered a funding boom into India.
Global investors of all shapes and colors, from private equity and hedge funds like
Steadview and Falcon Edge to marquee leaders such as SoftBank, Naspers and Alibaba
swooped on India with fat cheque books and created several “unicorns” overnight.
the-ken.com-The bubble that never was 1/4 710

On the back of paper mark-ups and contrived acquisitions, every single Indian VC raised
huge follow-on funds.
All the frenzy reached a crescendo in 2015 – the smell of FOMO hung darkly in the air as
investors chasing the “next Flipkart” competed to invest larger amounts earlier than each
other.
Until it all came crashing down?
“Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”

The likes of CNN say that “India’s startup bubble has already burst“
This is a sentiment echoed by many others.
“I think India is going through its first bubble,” says Kashyap Deorah, a former Silicon
Valley entrepreneur who now runs a startup in Delhi. “It is a bubble and it is normal.”
“The unwinding of the e-commerce bubble is the biggest ecosystem question that we are
facing” says Sharad Sharma, laying the blame for this squarely at Tiger: “unfortunately,
due to just one individual, Lee Fixel of Tiger Global, Flipkart has gone from being a poster
child to being the single biggest risk to the technology ecosystem”
According to CNN and other experts, India’s tech sector experienced a classic bubble,
similar to the one that rocked Silicon Valley when it burst in 1999.
“I don’t want to burst your bubble but…”

While it is tempting to get seduced by this narrative, some facts merit attention.
Firstly, was there a startup bubble in India in the first place?
While many folks believe that high valuations and huge amounts of funding constitute a
bubble, this is largely a misconception.
A bubble is characterized by a few key ingredients.
A bubble occurs when stories of a few initial financial victories draw in speculators as
capital providers. These folks have no deep expertise or insights into the market or the
industry and are drawn in primarily with the intent of making a fast buck. This sets off a
vicious circle in motion, where several “bad actor” founders start dummy companies that
can get funded and turned over soon thereafter. This, in turn, attracts more “tourist”
investors who want to buy stock simply because they anticipate further increase in prices.
Now, how does the Indian startup funding scene in 2015 measure up against this
definition of a bubble?

Firstly, the investors who came into the scene were not unsophisticated retail investors
looking to make a fast buck. These folks were some of the savviest and most reputed
investors in the world. While it is true that their entry led to a situation where there was
more money than opportunities thus driving up prices, this was largely a natural function
of supply and demand market mechanics. One could easily argue that until this point in
time, the Indian VC market was constrained by a small set of cartelized investors who
kept prices artificially low.
Secondly, these investors didn’t cash out at the first available opportunity, indicating that
they were in this for the long run. While almost every single large Indian startup raised
follow-on rounds at significant valuation markups to the previous round, these investors
doubled down on their initial investments rather than choose to exit.
Thirdly, while there were admittedly some bad actor founders who entered the market to
cash in on the boom, by and large, the founders and startups who received funding were
the ones who had an authentic interest in the spaces they were operating in. The simplest
test to validate this is to see how many of these large startups are still in operation after
the bubble has allegedly burst – it is easy to see that all of these companies are still
fighting the good fight. The bet in most of these cases is on India as the next big global
market and while it is moot as to how big this will eventually become, there is no doubt
that the bet itself is one based on rational assumptions rather than blind greed.
But what of the “bubble burst”?

So how does one reconcile this with the claims that are flying around that the Indian
startup bubble has burst?
The first sign that a bubble has burst is that there is panic in the market. At this point,
prices fall as quickly as they rose and often much faster. This leads to a situation where
there is a massive gap between supply and demand, which causes a free-fall in prices as all
the speculators want to exit the market. While there is no doubt that funding in 2016 is
more tempered than in 2015, does anyone see any panic in the market? Not remotely.
While funding rounds are taking longer to close and valuations are lower than earlier,
deals are still happening.
In 2000, the NASDAQ (which at the time was mainly tech and internet companies) lost
close to 40% of its value, another 21% in 2001 and a further 31.5% in 2002. In fact, the
number of deals at the early stage, where the signs of a bubble are usually visible first, is
on the upswing. In the first three-quarters of 2016, there have been 571 seed or angel
investments compared to 575 deals for the whole of 2015.
According to Venture Intelligence, compared with the $1.6 billion invested in the first
nine months of 2015—January to September—venture capitalists invested a little more
than $1 billion in the same period this year. While this 35% drop is material, it is a sign
that the market is efficient and self-regulating. The year 2015 was one where the
“accepted normal” was reset to a new level – as with most major market resets, there were

occasional overreaches with companies getting funded more than they deserved and at
higher valuations than they merited, the lower figures this year represent an organic
rationalization instead of a “bubble burst”.
Also, keep in mind that when a bubble bursts, there is nothing left – this is the reason why
it is referred to as a bubble and not, say, as a balloon. So, moves such as startups cutting
down on burn rates by lowering growth targets and laying off excess workforces, are again
healthy market-determined rationalization steps rather than panic reactions.
The twist in the tale

While it makes sense to conclude that there was probably never an Indian startup bubble
in the first place, much less, one that has now burst, there is a twist in the tale.
The Tiger might have had its meal and the eye of the Tiger might no longer be on India
but make no mistake about it – there is a vast array of new creatures who are waiting to
pounce onto the Indian market.
Not only have all the major Indian VCs raised huge follow-on funds that are now available
for deployment, there are many new entrants into the arena – ranging from large pension
and endowment funds who are now investing into India directly to Chinese behemoths
now looking to conquer India to a wide assortment of newly-minted funds set up by VCs
who have broken off from their motherships and successful founders who now want to
begin a second inning on the other side of the fence. In addition, there are a large number
of Rs 100-crore angel funds that have either just begun operations or are in the final
stages of fund closing. By some estimates, the total capital that is scheduled to come into
India over the next two years is a whopping $16.5 billion.
The question now is whether the Indian startup ecosystem is mature and deep enough to
absorb such a large corpus or whether this will lead to the inception of a funding bubble…
for real this time.
Bubble
Flipkart
venture capital

The charge of India’s unicorn brigade
the-ken.com/story/charge-of-indias-unicorn-brigade
December 31, 2019
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Six years ago, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn”—to define the
extreme rarity of startups valued north of $1 billion—there were just 39 in the US and
only three Indian unicorns. Today, the US and China are home to over 200 each, while
India has roughly 30!
Since mobile advertising company InMobi became the country’s first unicorn in 2011,
there had been only the odd spotting. But in the past two years, Indian unicorns have
smashed through the barn door—10 in 2018, while the class of 2019 has:
1. Eyewear retailer Lenskart

2. E-grocer BigBasket
3. Fantasy gaming platform Dream11
4. Cab aggregator Ola’s EV company Mission: Electric
5. Logistics startup Rivigo
6. Logistics startup Delhivery
7. Cloud data protection firm Druva
8. Enterprise contract management firm Icertis
9. Healthcare analytics company CitiusTech
UniCount
The unicorn count varies, with exclusions including companies not based in India, or if
the $1 billion tag came in an IPO, Or an acquisition, like CitiusTech. Baring Private Equity
Asia bought CitiusTech in July 2019 in a deal that valued the healthcare analytics
company at a little over $1 billion
the-ken.com-The charge of Indias unicorn brigade 1/3 714

Indian unicorns, such as now-household names Flipkart and Ola, benefited from the
spread of internet-connected smartphones and cheap cloud computing. They built
empires by bringing existing businesses like shopping, taxis, food delivery, hotels, etc.,
online. Of course, there was also a stream of investors ready, willing, and able to fund
startup dreams.
It takes two to tango. So, too, the disruptors of the decade: Ola and Uber in ride-hailing,
Flipkart and Amazon in e-commerce, Swiggy and Zomato in food tech, OYO and SoftBank
in hotels… oh wait!
Amidst all this brouhaha now, it is easy to forget that things weren’t always like this. As
we recapped earlier this year:
“Just ten years back, there were a handful of startups and a far smaller bunch of
investors. A $100,000 funding round was considered respectable and VC decisions took
months to move from interest to mandate.
So how and why did things change?
If one were to look back and connect the dots, it wouldn’t be farfetched to conclude that if
there was one event that catalysed this revolution, it would be when Lee Fixel, then head
of Tiger Global, invested $10 million into a then largely unknown online bookseller
called Flipkart.”

That was in mid-2010. Tiger Global made nearly 50 early-stage bets in the early part of
the decade and irrevocably changed the three Vs of venture investing in India.

The Chinese eclipse over India, Adani’s solar
manufacturing dreams
the-ken.com/story/the-chinese-eclipse-over-india-adanis-solar-manufacturing-dreams
September 16, 2020
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Indian billionaire Gautam Shantilal Adani couldn’t have asked for a better start to
September.
After closing August by buying a majority stake in India’s second-busiest airport—

Mumbai—he had yet another reason to celebrate. On 1 September, Adani Green Energy
Ltd (AGEL) was anointed the world’s largest solar energy company by Mercom Capital
Group, a clean energy research firm. AGEL is the most valuable company, worth nearly Rs
1,05,000 crore ($14.3 billion), in Adani’s sprawling infrastructure empire.
With a portfolio of 12.3 gigawatt (GW), AGEL rose to the top by winning one of the
biggest solar tenders in the world. In January, AGEL bagged an 8 GW project from the
Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), a government body. The project is
accompanied by a commitment to set up 2 GW of photovoltaic (PV) cell and module
manufacturing capacity. As part of the same tender, AGEL’s rival Azure Power Global won
a 4 GW project, with 1 GW of module and cell production capacity. Azure has 7.1 GW of
operational and under-development solar farms.
The SECI tender’s total manufacturing requirement of 3 GW will double India’s current
cell capacity and increase its module capacity by a third. The Adani Group, which
currently operates a 1.3 GW cell and module plant in Mundra in the western state of
Gujarat, will see a 3X growth in its capacity.
However, even as India has made great strides in setting up solar power plants, its
perfunctory stabs at becoming a solar manufacturing base have yielded little success. In
2018, it tried to make cell and module imports dearer by imposing a two-year safeguard
the-ken.com-The Chinese eclipse over India Adanis solar manufacturing dreams 1/2 717
duty of 25%, which eventually fell to 15%. But Indian module makers were not enthused
either by the duration of the levy or its tapering nature.
India still depends on imports for 85% of its cell and module requirements, out of which
China’s contribution alone is 80%.
30-day challenge
Adani
Adani Green Energy
Azure Power
clean energy
Make in India
ReNew Power
renewable energy
solar energy
the-ken.com-The Chinese eclipse over India Adanis solar manufacturing dreams 2/2 718
The collateral damage of regulatory roulette
the-ken.com/story/regulatory-roulette
August 8, 2018
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Picture this. You set up shop and toil for years to gain a customer base. You’ve pumped in
millions of dollars of capital to compete with players both domestic and foreign. It’s been
years, and your efforts are paying off. You have millions of customers but have posted
losses year after year. Then, one day, you get a notice from the tax officials. It not only
claims that you are you profitable, but that you owe close to Rs 140 crore ($20.4 million)
in taxes. This isn’t some random hypothetical scenario. It’s what happened to Flipkart on
22 December 2017. An early Christmas present from tax authorities to themselves, if you
will.
Tax authorities had looked at Flipkart, wondered how a loss-making entity was valued at a
premium, and then got to work turning Flipkart into a profitable and taxable business. It
added the money Flipkart spent on discounts and marketing, creating a fiction called a
marketing intangible asset. According to this theory, profits were to be calculated after
excluding these expenses from the profit and loss account. Why? Because the benefit of
these expenses extends beyond one accounting period. So let’s add that back based on a
standard margin for a wholesaler.
And voila, Flipkart becomes a profitable business on which the income tax department
can levy tax and penalty. And levy tax and penalty it did. Flipkart had filed a loss of Rs 796
crore ($116 million). The revenue authorities claimed it had made a profit to the tune of
Rs 408 crore ($59.5 million). And a tax demand of Rs 137 crore ($20 million) was placed
on Flipkart.
Flipkart fought the order, after which the tax demand was reduced to Rs 110 crore ($16
million). Both the income tax department and Flipkart made subsequent appeals against
the order to the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, which eventually threw out the income
tax department’s case, saying that its theory of a marketing intangible asset and Flipkart’s
profitability were “without any basis”.
Even as Flipkart and rivals like Amazon who would have been similarly affected heaved a
sigh of relief, e-commerce players were in for another shocker. In late July, in response to
a Right To Information (RTI) query, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) decreed that e-
commerce players were not allowed to collect cash through their logistics partners.
Curiously, the law granting RBI this power has been on the books for nearly a decade. It
took an RTI for the RBI to wake up to this and interpret it. With seemingly little concern
for businesses and the market, especially given that cash on delivery forms a huge part of
payments for e-commerce companies.
the-ken.com-The collateral damage of regulatory roulette 1/2 719

The e-commerce market in India is exploding, with a 2015 UBS projection claiming it
would be worth $50 billion by 2020.
Reflex Action
Trigger-happy and whimsical, Indian regulators pose a threat to

the very industries, businesses and consumers they’re meant to
protect
Vivek Ananth, 8 Aug 2018
27 years after liberalisation, Indian regulators continue to use obscure legal provisions
to shock the system
It's an old habit of a bygone era that regulators can't seem to let go of
Sometimes these diktats by government authorities and regulators have a chilling effect
on business
Even the consumers, whose interests regulators are meant to protect, are often left
counting the cost
the-ken.com-The collateral damage of regulatory roulette 2/2 720

The everything year
the-ken.com/story/the-everything-year
January 2, 2019
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As we take our first steps into 2019, the most common question in the venture capital
business in India—one which induces awe, delight, and relief in equal measure—goes
something like this: “What’s the status of the SoftBank Vision Fund II?”
It is a question that is equally illuminating and frustrating.
Illuminating because it shows how like in most parts of the world, SoftBank has emerged
as the epicentre of funding conversations in India too. Depending on the position of your
seat at the table, SoftBank is either the giant red star around which all other funding
vehicles and players dutifully revolve while paying guarded obeisance or the giant black
hole inexorably swallowing and subsuming all funding activity within itself.
It is a well-deserved reputation. If you glance at the list of heavily-funded startups in

India, other than Swiggy and Byju’s, every name on the list is backed by SoftBank—the
likes of Paytm*, Ola, OYO, Snapdeal. Equally important is the name that is no longer in
SoftBank’s portfolio—Flipkart, which recently provided a big-bang exit to SoftBank and a
host of other marquee investors.
But the question is frustrating as well because SoftBank promises a quasi-IPO type of
accelerated exit that many startups and investors might find irresistible. While this might
look like a good outcome on the surface, it can easily lead to perverse incentives where
short-term tactical thinking replaces ambitious long-term plans. A fund manager who is
out fundraising for his nascent fund says the LPs (Limited Partners—investors in a VC
fund) bring this up often. “The LPs are clear that SoftBank cannot be an exit outcome,” he
says. The fund manager requested not to be named so he could share his views candidly.
the-ken.com-The everything year 1/2 721

“And after that, the discussion moves to the lack of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in
India. That is the outcome that is best for everyone but one that has been sorely missing,
and as a fund manager, you’ve promised that at some stage this will happen.”
The conversation obviously does not stop there. “The other conversation is with late stage
investors,” adds the fund manager. “Their simple metric is dollars in, dollars out. Not
some fancy valuation. If you look at late 2017 and 2018, there are a lot of highly valued
private companies that have been created. In the same time, the public technology
companies are down some 25%. So I am not expecting 2019 to be any different, but I am
expecting that in the next twenty-four months, some of this crazy funding environment
should subside. Then again, a lot is dependent on Masayoshi Son (founder and CEO of
SoftBank) and SoftBank Vision Fund II.”
For a moment, you might think the fund manager is hedging.
He is. No doubt. But that’s because India, for most parts, has been unpredictable. For
every Flipkart-Walmart, there is a Snapdeal and Shopclues.
the-ken.com-The everything year 2/2 722

The Fast and the Furious world of Fintech
the-ken.com/story/fast-furious-world-fintech
December 29, 2017
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This year has been one hell of a tease for fintech companies. Much like the time when
Warren Beatty handed that Oscar for Best Picture to La La Land only to discover that
Moonlight had won. (Yes, that happened this year. Also, have you watched both the
movies yet?) When demonetisation was announced, fintechs waltzed into the limelight
and they got a glimpse of what the promised land will look like as the note ban dangled a
digital future in front of them. The wrong envelope moment happened a few months later.
The regulator overnight threw wallets into a tizzy by introducing mandatory Know Your
Customer (KYC) norms, and suddenly, companies had to re-evaluate their futures.
Right from demonetisation to most recently, the government saying that merchants don’t
have to pay the banks a merchant discount rate for transactions up to Rs 2000, the
fintech conversation was dominated by payments. That was mostly because 2017 has been
the year when Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the fast-as-an-email-way to pay, became
a mascot for digital payments. And we saw a long line of companies saying they want to
adopt UPI. From WhatsApp to Google to Hike to Truecaller, everyone wanted to get on
board.
While it is tempting to say that fintechs raised the highest ever round of money in 2017
with $2.1 billion, according to data provider Tracxn’s estimates. One company raised
more than half of it. You know, the one which we always put an asterisk* on.
It was not all about payments though. It was also the year when we saw cross-border
payments companies, trading startups and financial marketplaces jostle for space and
market share. Meanwhile, banks who saw themselves as custodians of all things related to
money acknowledged that fintechs have something going for them. Almost all banks now
the-ken.com-The Fast and the Furious world of Fintech 1/2 723

have a working relationship with fintechs. But will that relationship turn into something
more? Would cryptocurrency be banks’ arch nemesis? You will have to stick it out with us
if you want to find out more.
Here is what you would have missed if you didn’t stick with us this year:
RBI with its prepaid instruments guidelines changed life for wallets
overnight and companies were lining up at the start line all over again
Small and medium businesses are a large market but are they big enough?
We tell you how two nimble fintechs Instamojo and Razorpay are looking to
address that segment
Is it a payment network, is it a product owner, is it an app publisher, is it a

quasi-regulator? Just what on earth is NPCI and what does it do? We solve
the mystery.
The Ken broke both news snippets on WhatsApp and Google adopting UPI
and why that was going to pretty much rock the payments world
The buzz about UPI began when the Prime Minister launched BHIM. We
bring you the backstory of how that happened
Banks saying they want to become like Amazon Web Services is downright
bizarre. Like AWS selling its infrastructure to companies, two banks in India
are willing to let fintechs user their core infrastructure
The year 2018 looks poised to be more interesting for fintechs. Tell us what you would like
to read about in the coming year, and we will put our noses to the grindstone. On that
note, have a fintastic year ahead!
*You know what this means by now. Paytm’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor
in The Ken.
the-ken.com-The Fast and the Furious world of Fintech 2/2 724

The final step—and the first
the-ken.com/story/the-final-step-and-the-first
March 2, 2019
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“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
—Lao Tzu
The world is an incredibly complex place. As supposedly powerful and knowledgeable

human beings, we tell ourselves that we can make perfect sense of everything—but the
reality is that we can’t. Given this constraint of a flawed mind, how can we lead better
lives? By keeping things simple.
At its core, that is what our Simplicity Paradigm is. Over the past six months, we have laid
out a sequence of ideas building upon this fundamental premise.
We started our journey in September when we wrote the first column, “Tsundoku: the
burden of the unread book”. Our thesis was that our minds are inherently susceptible to
and tripped up by biases. The solution? While each of us copes in different ways, what
works for us are: a) developing one skill deeply; b) set thumb rules to avoid the traps of
biases; c) think differently by detaching ourselves from inane noise and chatter from
social media and other sources.
From there, we went deeper into the biases and prejudices that colour human thought,
examined the specifics of simplicity and explored how improved memory, original
thinking and even spirituality all tie into it.
We believe that our ideas are works-in-progress that should be revisited every once in a
while, with new ideas and beliefs. As writers, we believe in these ideas and have shared
deeply personal details from our lives in the hope that our experiences are useful to the
the-ken.com-The final stepand the first 1/2 725

readers. In this final column, we wrap up the series and provide some final thoughts on
the way forward.
But first…
A note of humility
First, neither of the authors of this series are professional psychologists. Neither are we
self-help gurus. (If we were, the first people we would help is ourselves.) We aren’t the
richest or the most successful people on the street. In the past six months, we have shared
our collective learnings from what we have seen, read and personally lived.
Our idea of simplicity was born from living in a complex world with easy access to lots of
information. For us, this complex world increased the confusion in our heads, leading us
to make suboptimal decisions and lead unnecessarily cluttered lives.
It was time to break free and the process, even for us, has just begun
Second, our knowledge and the way we perceive the world is continually evolving, with
many previously held beliefs being seriously tested (for example, in nutrition the idea of
intermittent fasting is contrary to the belief of having many small meals during the day—
and yet, both ideas apparently hold true).
the-ken.com-The final stepand the first 2/2 726

The funereal pace of India’s anti-TB drug acquisition
efforts
the-ken.com/story/the-funereal-pace-of-indias-anti-tb-drug-acquisition-efforts
April 13, 2021
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Even as the pandemic raged, 31-year-old Meera Yadav, shunned by her family and
separated from her eight-year-old child, fought a different battle in 2020. Yadav, a
tuberculosis (TB) survivor, filed a public interest litigation in the Bombay High Court,
taking the Indian government to task for failing to provide crucial TB drugs to patients.
In 2018, when Yadav was struggling with end-stage TB, the only thing that helped her was
a combination of two drugs, bedaquiline and delamanid. But getting your hands on them
is a near-impossible feat; India’s central government tightly controls their distribution.
The drugs are the first of their kind in 40 years that could cure patients with life-
threatening drug resistant TB. And both drugs’ production is monopolised by big pharma.
Janssen Pharmaceuticals, owned by Johnson & Johnson, makes bedaquiline, and
Japanese drugmaker Otsuka makes delamanid. And they’re priced at levels beyond the
reach of the Indian government—bedaquiline, for instance, was once sold for $30,000 in
high-income countries, $3,000 in middle-income countries and $900 in low-income
countries. Their patents expire only in 2023.
That’s why the Indian government had been getting by on donations of the two drugs.
Between 2015 and 2019, Janssen donated a total of 20,600 courses of bedaquiline, while
India got 400 courses of delamanid from Otsuka. And then in 2019, the donation
programme ended. Countries had to actually buy the drugs.
Despite prices coming down since then, the two drugs are still unaffordable in India. The
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) has been paying up to $360 (Rs
26,604) for a six-month course of bedaquiline and $1,237 (Rs 91,414) for each course of
delamanid for the same period.
A slew of Right to Information (RTI) replies accessed by The Ken reveal that procuring
these drugs has been a Sisyphean exercise for the Indian government. Between the order
and delivery of bedaquiline, there’s a whole year’s worth of failed negotiations. Efforts to
boost local production of delamanid haven’t borne fruit either. Janssen, Otsuka, and the
government have been at loggerheads, trying to arrive at a cheaper selling price, but to no
avail.
Consequently, India has been ‘rationing’ these drugs, carefully tailoring treatment
guidelines according to availability, with patients forced to suffer the consequences.
Deadly bacteria
the-ken.com-The funereal pace of Indias anti-TB drug acquisition efforts 1/2 727
Between 2017 and 2020, India recorded 11,427 multi-drug resistant TB deaths.
Drug Wars
India has been forced to shell out sky-high prices for two life-
saving anti-TB drugs, bedaquiline and delamanid, in an effort to
combat its over 60,000 registered cases a year of drug-resistant
TB. But negotiations with pharma companies have stalled,
leading to a dangerous decline in drug supply
Maitri Porecha, 13 Apr 2021
Desperate patients have filed PILs in the Bombay High Court, seeking access to
expensive, life-saving anti-TB drugs
The drugs, bedaquiline and delamanid, are still under patent from foreign makers, and
are too expensive for the Indian government
The government depended on donations from drug makers till 2019, but has been forced
to purchase them after the donation programme shut
Supply of these drugs has finally started to trickle in, but there isn’t nearly enough to go
around and patients are hoping that the courts intervene
the-ken.com-The funereal pace of Indias anti-TB drug acquisition efforts 2/2 728
The gap you can’t ignore
the-ken.com/story/gap-cant-ignore
March 8, 2017
We asked, and you answered. 1200 of you. And only about 29% of you were women.
That’s not many women, but it is eerily similar to the proportion of women in the
workforce. While this is not a representative sample size by any stretch of the
imagination, here is what you told us:
the-ken.com-The gap you cant ignore 1/5 729

Highlights of the Ken Pay Gap survey
At The Ken, we all know how much our colleagues earn. No, we didn’t lose a round of
Truth or Dare. It was only to assess if the gender pay gap is real.
Inspired by what Erica Baker did while at Google, we sought to explore what happens if
we talk about our salaries in the open. And we asked you to talk about it as well, through
the survey. Can transparency about salaries clear the air about why employees earn what
they do? Can it help address the sticky issues around women’s pay?
Report after report claims that the gender pay gap is real. Just earlier this week, the
Monster Salary Index said that men in corporate India made 25% more than women.
Even our limited sample data points to that.
But at the same time, consultants we spoke to point out that there is no conscious bias
that companies have when it comes to employees’ salaries. Undeniably, though, a slew of
factors from a maternity break to fewer jobs changes, all drive a wedge between the
salaries of the sexes. And then there is the question of negotiation skills, which many
women grudgingly admit, they lack.
Transparent pay
A pay gap is introduced by the choices women make. But knowing why it exists can make
a world of a difference when it comes to judging whether one is fairly paid
“I was happy when I joined as an assistant manager at a salary of Rs 45,000 per month.
But a month later, my friend (male) from the same business school with similar
experience joined as a manager at nearly double my salary. When I raised the issue with
HR, I was told that the decision was made, and there was nothing they could do. The HR
tried to justify with some explanation about the relevance of experience, which was not
justified as we had similar experience. It was much later that I found out that he had
negotiated far more forcefully than me and ended up with a much better position and
salary,” says a Delhi-based 31-year-old marketing manager at an Indian retail company.
While it is true that a pay gap is introduced by the choices women make, knowing why it
exists can make a world of a difference when it comes to judging whether women or for
that matter even men, feel fairly paid.
Our survey showed that 55% women and 44% men felt that they were underpaid. And that
feeling kicks in mostly after spending four to eight years in an organisation. Over 40% of
those who felt that they were underpaid worked in mid-management.
For the HR fraternity reading this, this is an early warning sign of low engagement.
“This means that there has been no clear communication of how the company has
rewarded its employees. It also shows that the employees and managers are
benchmarking their salary in very different ways,” says Sandeep Chaudhary, chief
executive officer of Aon Hewitt, an HR consultancy firm.
If employees have an idea of what their peers and colleagues earn, they would be better
placed to assess their own salaries. And this brings us back to the point of transparency.
Indian companies are becoming more transparent thanks to mandated corporate

governance norms. The remuneration details of the CEOs are known, and details of
individuals who earn more than a crore are disclosed. So how can more transparency
hurt?
As Chaudhary says, “Transparency [in salary] is good for both men and women.
Depending on the maturity of the workforce, transparency can help bust the myth of the
gender disparity in pay.”
And bust it does. As this piece in the New York Times points out, companies like
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Britain have tried being transparent about the
difference in wages. And it revealed what caused the gap.
It found a 15.1% pay disparity, which was a result of fewer women being in senior
positions. Having uncovered the problem, it dug deeper and evaluated its promotion
policies. What it saw was telling. In 2013, even though PwC had 30% women in the grade
just below that of a partner, only about half of them were promoted.

Not just that, there also seemed to be a pattern wherein men received more bonuses than
women. While the men who were not promoted were given retention bonuses, women
weren’t offered any. The men who threatened to leave got one, whereas the women made
no such demands.
Similarly, in the US, a tech startup called Buffer created a list of the salaries of all its
employees and put it out for everyone to see. It uses that information to identify areas
where it can improve.
Kaushik Ghosh, people head at ThoughtWorks
Open salaries is difficult to implement in larger firms because the salary is seen as
confidential and sensitive personal information by many
But companies in India may still not be ready for total transparency.
“Open salaries is difficult to implement in larger firms because the salary is seen as
confidential and sensitive personal information by many,” says Kaushik Ghosh, people
head at ThoughtWorks Technologies India, a technology consultancy firm.
However, he believes that measures like including women in the pay review group help
keep conscious and unconscious gender biases at bay to a large extent. “We run gender
pay parity checks on our salary data at the time of appraisals and come up with matrices
that allow us to compare salaries of men and women playing similar roles at similar levels.
If we find any disparity, we proactively make the necessary changes,” he said.
Besides, employees anyway chat among themselves. So a transparent ecosystem can not
only help identify the gaps but also fix them. But will Indian companies bite that bullet?

The growing digital economy of the Indian election
machine
the-ken.com/story/2019-elections-technology
April 6, 2019
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The 2019 Indian elections, which begin in less than a week, loom large in Diggaj Mogra’s
life. It’s all he has time for. “If you were to register as a candidate today, by tomorrow you
would have 50 different companies calling you saying, ‘We’ll do SMS for you, give you
databases, etc.’,” says Mogra, a director at Jarvis Consulting. A Mumbai-based election
strategy and tech company, Jarvis (like the AI in the Iron Man films) was founded by two
former executives at cab aggregator Ola—Piyush Jalan and Piyush Gupta—in December
2016.
“Digital”, “technology” and “social” have dominated the Indian electoral lexicon ever since
the 2014 race—dubbed India’s first “social media election”—courtesy the campaign of the
now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. In the five years since, having a social media
or digital presence has gone from being cutting edge to the baseline for India’s political
parties.
But for Mogra—in his late 20s now; a computer engineer by training and an election
strategy specialist for the past five years or so—that’s all blasé. “We don’t do things like
social media campaigning now,” he says when we meet for a quick cup of tea at a cafe near
his New Delhi office.
Jarvis focuses on data analytics—voter trends, microtargeting, the whole package—as well
as developing tech to help parties coordinate internally. Think tracking and monitoring
the supply of resources and funds across states, districts and blocks.
the-ken.com-The growing digital economy of the Indian election machine 1/2 734
The company, adds Mogra, is working on analytics for this year’s election for its clients.
He declined to identify them (or reveal much in the way of details about his work) but did
mention that they work with both individual leaders and political parties as a whole.
Rs 3,426 crore
The amount it cost the government to run the last general elections, in 2014
Indian politicians are expected to spend anywhere from Rs 600 crore ($86.7 million) to
Rs 5,000 crore ($722.9 million) to Rs 12,000 crore ($1.73 billion) on digital campaigns in
the upcoming national elections. Depending on whom you ask. Election spending is a
notoriously difficult metric to measure in India, given the vast amounts of off-the-books
expenditure.
But everyone is in agreement that digital expenditure has been rising, even as a
proportion of total spending. “Political parties’ digital media spending is up from 5% [in
2014] to 25% now,” says Vineet Sodhani, CEO of marketing and media advisory firm
Spatial Access.
And everyone wants a piece of the pie.
In an interplay of democracy and capitalism in the world’s biggest (and perhaps most
expensive) elections, analytics and digital marketing companies are seeing a burgeoning
political market.
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The hidden, second epidemic of ‘Long Covid’
the-ken.com/story/the-hidden-second-epidemic-of-long-covid
December 8, 2020
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On a sullen day in August, Hyderabad-based entrepreneur Priya (34) sensed her heart
violently pounding in her chest. “It felt like I was running a marathon while sitting on the
sofa,” said Priya. She later blacked out, collapsing after a grocery run. Her heart rate hit
the roof and her blood pressure fluctuated dangerously.
It has been close to eight months since her brush with Covid-19, but her symptoms linger
on.
When the pandemic began, doctors had little idea of how Covid-19 affected patients over
the long term. Priya’s cardiologist even ran an ECG after the incident in August; the test
seemingly appeared normal. “The doctor dismissed my condition as anxiety. She did not
prescribe any medication at that point,” she said.
But Priya was not convinced. She insisted on a Holter Test, which involved strapping
wires to her chest for a continuous 24-hour ECG. The wires were linked to a smartphone
that the doctor monitored remotely. “My heart rate spiked 163 times during the day at
different points. It went as high as 183 at least thrice. The normal heart rate is 60 to 100
beats per minute. The doctor who was monitoring called me to inquire if I was exercising
at that point. I wasn’t,” she says.
The cardiologist, who had observed a slight swelling around her heart muscles, later put
her on beta-blocker drugs to regulate her heart rate. But she hadn’t addressed the root
cause yet.
In September, Priya consulted an internist who advised her to take a urine test to check
her adrenaline levels. The result: abnormally high adrenaline. “The lab doctor asked me if
I was on any performance enhancing steroids, the sort used by athletes, before signing off
on my report,” she says.
Her internist later confirmed that her symptoms were a post-Covid effect. Her immune
system had been stuck in a flight or fight response for a long time, months after the virus
had subsided. This caused her adrenaline levels to shoot up, spiking her heart rate and
triggering panic attacks and severe insomnia.
Priya is part of a growing tribe of Covid patients living with ‘long Covid syndrome.’ The
strange patterns of symptoms they exhibit—chronic fatigue, brain fog, inability to sleep
for days—have left doctors baffled.
Ripple effect
the-ken.com-The hidden second epidemic of Long Covid 1/2 736

For Covid survivors, the end of the infection is just the beginning
of a long-drawn battle with lingering, but devastating, symptoms.
Post-Covid OPDs have sprung up across India, but without solid
data and regular follow-ups, dealing with it is an arduous task for
healthcare providers
Covid survivors across the world are reporting a bevy of mysterious, lingering
symptoms post their “recovery” from the infection
Patients have reported palpitations, memory loss, and chronic fatigue. In one hospital,
50% reported lingering symptoms
A National Clinical Registry has been set up by ICMR to track symptoms of Long Covid;
15 mentor institutes have opened up “post-Covid OPDs”
These OPDs can’t just rely on self-reporting though. The fear of stigma and re-infection
keep patients away and the data sets incomplete
the-ken.com-The hidden second epidemic of Long Covid 2/2 737

The holes in India’s Covid immunisation arsenal
the-ken.com/story/the-holes-in-indias-covid-immunisation-arsenal
October 19, 2020
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Mornings begin early on the 200-acre campus of the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences (AIIMS), located in the heart of the national capital of Delhi. Even as the rest of
the city shakes off its slumber, there’s visible hustle at the hospital’s Department of
Pulmonology. Phase II of clinical trials for a Covid-19 vaccine candidate is underway.
With no separate waiting area, the fifty-odd healthy volunteers—ranging from 18-65 years
—sit outside in the open. The benches they occupy abut the hospital’s tuberculosis
department, with a constant stream of infected patients flitting past them.
The volunteers are called in batches to receive the second dose of Bharat Biotech’s
Covaxin. Each assigned a serial number, they enter a designated 10×10 sq ft room to
receive their injection from a doctor. The initial results of the Covaxin trials have been
promising, indicating it is safe.
The volunteers constitute a small sliver of the thousands of applications AIIMS received
after it advertised the ongoing trial in a leading daily. “We needed close to a hundred
volunteers, whereas we received up to 4,500 emails in three to four days,” says Sanjay
Rai, a professor at the department of Community Medicine, and the principal investigator
for the trials.
Rai has had to turn down most of the applications. “I have been a co-investigator earlier
in global influenza and rotavirus trials, but the interest in this Covid-19 vaccine trial is
unprecedented,” he says. However, for the next stage—Phase III—even this level of
volunteer enthusiasm may not suffice.
Phase III clinical trials require tens of thousands of volunteers. The final hurdle before the
vaccine enters the market, they are conducted in diverse populations to be doubly sure
that the vaccine is safe and effective.
Vaccine Stash
On 18 May, the Indian health ministry, through a notification, allowed vaccine companies
to manufacture and stock vaccines at their own risk, even while they are yet to pass
clinical trials.
S P Kalantri, director of Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (MGIMS) in rural

Maharashtra, is understandably concerned. The pandemic has made inroads into even
remote villages now, with Maharashtra the worst-affected state.
the-ken.com-The holes in Indias Covid immunisation arsenal 1/3 738

“Over the past few weeks, we have had close to a thousand Covid-19 patients admitted
with us, of which over a hundred have died. That is a mortality of 10%. It’s higher in this
hospital because this is the only tertiary care centre in the district,” says Kalantri. MGIMS
is also one of the 17 sites for the Phase II and III trials spearheaded by Pune-based Serum
Institute of India—the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer—for the Oxford University-
AstraZeneca vaccine candidate ChAdOx1 nCoV-19.
Firing Blanks
India needs to vaccinate at least 60% of its population to attain

herd immunity. But India’s health minister and its vaccine
regulator don’t see eye-to-eye, and there’s little information on
who will fund the Phase III trials. Meanwhile, those on the field are
facing thornier issues such as lack of cold storage facilities and
shortage of healthcare staff
Maitri Porecha, 19 Oct 2020
Vaccinating 60% of India’s population could cost as much as the country’s entire
healthcare budget of ~$9 billion
Both the government and vaccine companies are wary about footing the bill; if the
vaccine doesn’t work, the money is forever lost
The government hasn’t inspired confidence either; expert groups have been formed and
disbanded, checks on clinical trial sites are nearly nonexistent
Caught in between are enthusiastic clinical trial volunteers who are optimistic about the
vaccine’s chances

The holes in India’s plan to become a drug ingredient
hotspot
the-ken.com/story/the-holes-in-indias-plan-to-become-a-drug-ingredient-hotspot
March 2, 2021
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India is putting serious money into getting China off its back. On 24 February, the
government promised Rs 15,000 crore ($2 billion) into a production linked incentive
(PLI) scheme for pharmaceuticals. This comes after it initially announced Rs 10,000 crore
($1.3 billion) in July 2020, when the scheme was declared.
The scheme, in essence, is supposed to bait pharma companies into producing raw
materials domestically, so India can cut down on active pharmaceutical ingredients (API)
being imported from China. Three Indian pharma companies—privately-run Aurobindo
Pharma, PSU Karnataka Antibiotics and Pharmaceuticals, and a newly floated Kinvan Pvt
Ltd—were mandated by the government to produce key APIs in 2020. These include
penicillin G, 7-ACA, erythromycin thiocyanate, and clavulanic acid, which are key raw
materials for making crucial antibiotics to treat everything from severe pneumonia to a
simple throat infection.
Still, India remains extremely dependent on China for a large chunk of these essential
ingredients. China accounted for 68% of India’s API imports in the year ending March
2020, according to data sourced from the Ministry of Commerce.
Increasing Imports
India, “the pharmacy bowl of the world”, imports almost 70% of its raw material
requirement. India imported around Rs. 249 billion worth of bulk drugs in FY 2018-19
with a year-on-year increase of around 30% over FY 2017- 18
Of late, China has been upping its raw material prices , inconveniencing India, but India,
too, has been pushing for an atma nirbhar (self-reliant) drugs market. The government
also allocated Rs 6,490 crore ($900 million) of the Rs 10,000 crore in subsidies for
companies to put up new greenfield plants to produce raw materials. (Greenfield—
production unit set-up from scratch—and brownfield—units built on existing plants—are
the two types of production units.)
Covid was the wake-up call that brought about this push for independence.
In February and March of last year, the Chinese markets were shut due to the pandemic.
Bulk API consignments of Indian pharma companies and MNCs were stuck in Chinese
ports due to travel restrictions.
New Independence Movement
the-ken.com-The holes in Indias plan to become a drug ingredient hotspot 1/2 741
With a Rs 15,000 crore scheme, the Indian government is pushing
Indian pharma companies to set up raw material plants from
scratch. But why would companies do that when they can’t use
existing plants?
Maitri Porecha, 2 Mar 2021
Most pharma companies are shying away from the government's incentivised PLI
scheme in its current form
Covid may have been a wake-up call for India to deal with its drug insecurities, but Indian
companies love cheap Chinese imports
Besides, the scheme does little to nothing in addressing the domestic industry's pain
points—cheap land, tax exemptions and easy logistics
Domestic companies are still waiting on details on the scheme. Would they now be able
to use existing production units?
the-ken.com-The holes in Indias plan to become a drug ingredient hotspot 2/2 742
The IIM franchise is denting the IIM brand
the-ken.com/story/iim-franchise-dents-iim-brand
March 11, 2021
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First, the helpers came to take the washing machines away from the hostels. Things were
changing at the Indian Institute of Management in Tiruchirappalli (IIM-T).
Then, there was a series of arbitrary diktats that drastically altered the way IIM-T is
governed, claims a recent graduate, requesting anonymity as they didn’t want to publicly
speak against the institute. “It’s not about the washing machines. It was the way decisions
were being taken.”
The directorship of the institute had just changed hands in 2017, from the founding
director Prafulla Agnihotri to a newcomer in the IIM system, Bhimaraya Metri. The
institute, by its sixth year, had built up a decent reputation for itself. Its strategy
department, in particular, was considered one of the best in the country—good enough to
contend with legacy IIMs .
And yet, by late-2017, the rules were nothing like legacy IIMs.
Female students, all of a sudden, needed permission to leave their hostels after an
imposed “curfew” hour. Students found they had no redressal mechanisms—student body
meetings with the administration were suspended. The hostel curfew meant female
candidates could only sit for placement interviews in the afternoon. “That was
embarrassing for us in front of recruiters. They aren’t going to understand why women
can’t sit for placements after dark,” says the student. IIM placement interviews, famously,
run late.
Also, Faculty Council meetings went from 30 a year to four, says a current staff member of
the institute. While student strength rose from 360 to 492 during Metri’s term, faculty
numbers went down from 35 to 32. Members of the IIM-T faculty shot off an anonymous
16-page complaint to the Board of Governors (BOG) accusing Metri of financial
impropriety, nepotism, and opaque decision-making, among other complaints. In an
email to The Ken, Metri rubbished these allegations as “biased” and “factually incorrect”.
"In the new [IIM-T] campus, a separate laundry facility building provision is there to
provide laundry services to the students...washing machines are not needed in hostels.
You would appreciate the fact that IIM-T has a world-class infrastructure including hostel
facilities where all the rooms are single occupancy with AC"
Bhimaraya Metri, ex-director, IIM-T
the-ken.com-The IIM franchise is denting the IIM brand 1/2 743

Over the last decade, the IIM brand has experienced a massive growth spurt. The first set
of eight “first-generation” institutes were developed between 1960 and 2000 (with the
exception of IIM Shillong, which was set up in 2007). In comparison, 12 second- and
third-generation IIMs were built at a furious pace, between 2011 and 2015.
Talking ‘bout my generation
Stretching the Indian Institute of Management brand was an

audacious experiment. Now a decade old, Gen-Z IIMs are torn
between the twin requirements of scale and quality
Olina Banerji, 11 Mar 2021
The IIM brand branched out in 2010. A decade later, it's expanded to 12 new IIMs, even
in remote, tier-3 cities
Setting up a new IIM is a careful balancing act between choosing the right location,
faculty, and director
There's pressure to perform, be financially independent, pump out quality placements.

Impossible without getting the balance right
New, private management schools now rival younger IIMs in terms of quality and
ranking
the-ken.com-The IIM franchise is denting the IIM brand 2/2 744

The Indian Nurse: Demanding her due and finally being
heard
the-ken.com/story/the-indian-nurse-demanding-her-due-and-finally-being-heard
July 3, 2018
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Coming home is a journey. It begins with a dream. And Ila dreamt it on 23 April.
A nurse at the 250-bed Max Hospital in north Delhi, Ila has been away from her home in
Kerala for eight long years. Exhausted after spending two hours handing over her patients
at the end of her eight-hour shift, she still manages a smile. She has missed lunchtime at
the hostel she shares with other nurses, all of whom are living away from their families. So
we grab a bite at a McDonald’s nearby. The food isn’t what she’s used to, but she’s learnt
to live with it. “I have adapted to Delhi,” she says in heavily accented Hindi. She is happy
because the food and the cramped living space may soon be in the past. Because she can
finally go home. Sooner than later.
At midnight on 23 April, Kerala became the first Indian state to fix a minimum wage for
nurses. With a base rate of Rs 20,000 ($292) per month, it established that nurses like Ila
were dignified professionals whose value needed to be acknowledged. This sentiment will
only grow and spread across the country, Ila believes. And she is not alone.
Around 2.1 million Indian nurses, the majority of whom work across the country and a
minority who are either employed overseas or retired, are hoping for better salaries and
working conditions. Importantly, they also want more authority in the private healthcare
sector.
Since the late 19th century, nursing in India has been associated with serving and
training. This is largely down to British social reformer and statistician Florence
Nightingale, known as the founder of modern nursing, who spent some time in India.
the-ken.com-The Indian Nurse Demanding her due and finally being heard 1/2 745
However, since the turn of the century, the growth in privately-funded hospitals in the
country has given birth to a new idea—nurses’ right to appropriate wages.
Traditionally, doctors have viewed nurses as mere assistants. Hospitals saw them as
cheap labour. Patients considered them customer care employees. The lack of
appreciation took its toll. For an Indian nurse, the first priority is a job overseas; the
second, a government job. Only in the absence of these two do nurses want to work with
private hospitals. This has resulted in an attrition rate as high as 60% at private hospitals.
In 2011, the Delhi-based Trained Nurses Association of India (TNAI) moved the Supreme
Court seeking better working conditions and improved pay. The apex court ordered the
government to form a committee to determine ideal wages for nurses. The committee was
unequivocal in its view—private and government hospitals must pay nurses a minimum
wage of Rs 20,000 a month. This was a huge relief, given that nursing wages used to be as
little as Rs 2,500 ($36) to as high as Rs 17,000 ($248).
the-ken.com-The Indian Nurse Demanding her due and finally being heard 2/2 746
The Indian spice in GitHub’s recipe for enterprise
success
the-ken.com/story/indian-spice-github
March 6, 2020
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It doesn’t matter what kind of company you work at. If you’re a software engineer, you’re
probably using code that’s hosted on source code hosting platform GitHub.
Take Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. On their account on GitHub, they make use of
open source frameworks and tools developed by others, and also share some of their own.
They use popular data processing utility Hadoop , for example, while making Swifty—
which makes networking in iOS apps a tad easier—open source for anyone to use.
In India, where more than a million engineers graduate every year, GitHub’s usefulness
cannot be overstated.
Applying for a job? Make sure your projects are up and on display on GitHub. Beginning a
software engineering job? Your organisation likely uses GitHub to host its code. The
platform’s popularity is such that its stars are the engineer’s new currency.
Last month, San Francisco-based GitHub announced that they were opening a subsidiary
in India. Along with opening two offices, it also plans to hire 200 people in India across
engineering, sales, support, and marketing teams. This is sizable for a company that
presently has just upwards of 1,000 employees—more than half of whom work remotely—
and four offices globally, including two in the US.
The focus on India, though, shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2019, according to numbers
released by GitHub, India formed the third-largest group of active developers in the
world, after the US and China. Yet, until late last year, GitHub had no employees in the
country.
the-ken.com-The Indian spice in GitHubs recipe for enterprise success 1/3 747
GitHub’s approach seems to have changed in June 2018, when Microsoft acquired the 10-
year-old company for $7.5 billion in stock. Microsoft’s move was surprising because open
source has always been anathema to Microsoft, says Arpit Bhayani, technical architect at
edtech startup Unacademy. Microsoft has traditionally made its money through
proprietary software such as Windows and Office. This clash of cultures caused many
developers to flee to GitHub’s biggest competitor, GitLab.
GOT CODE?
GitHub’s DNA is open source. Its Indian expansion, though,

indicates that—just like its parent Microsoft—its future will hinge
on its enterprise business
Shreedhar Manek, 6 Mar 2020
Microsoft-owned GitHub just announced the launch of an Indian subsidiary
They plan to set up two offices and hire 200 employees in the country
The target in India, though, will not be open source—GitHub’s traditional bastion. It’s to
target enterprise customers
Microsoft may also consolidate its cloud offering to make its fastest growing product
Azure more lucrative
The inside story of 500 Startups’ India adventure
the-ken.com/story/500-startups-india-adventure
February 7, 2017
Shalini Prakash is the only member of 500 Startups left in India. Pankaj Jain, partner and
India operations head, quit at the end of December 2016. Soaib Grewal resigned a few
weeks before Jain. And the $25 million 500 Kulfi fund failed to set.
A spokesperson told Economic Times in January 2017, “Due to recent moves by the India
government regarding tax and regulatory environment, our India fund is on hold
temporarily, until we have more clarity.”
Was that it?
The Ken sent a detailed questionnaire to Prakash and 500 Startups’ managing partner
Dave McClure last week. There was no reply forthcoming from either of them.
500 Startups is one of the most popular seed fund companies globally—with investments
in the US, Southeast Asia, India and even Europe—and has some stars in its portfolio. It
has seen three of its companies go on to list in public markets, while a dozen have been
acquired for big money. And 500 Startups has been largely successful in most of its
markets. India, according to a former employee, is the second largest market for the VC
firm, after the US. And 500 Kulfi was to be a milestone move for it.
Crunch the numbers
So far, 500 Startups has invested between $10-15 million in India, according to a former
employee. This corpus was spread across 56 investments, according to Tracxn
So far, 500 Startups has invested between $10-15 million in India, according to a former
employee. This corpus was spread across 56 investments, according to Tracxn. The
verticals range from travel, edu-tech and payments to fashion, social media and video.
You name it, they made it.
the-ken.com-The inside story of 500 Startups India adventure 1/6 750

“A pie chart was drawn. What are the sectors that need a version 2.0 or even a version
1.0? Travel and edu-tech were the sectors chosen. And investments followed,” says an
investor from a rival firm with knowledge of 500 Startups’ strategy.
Depending on whom you ask, 500 Startups made between three to seven exits in the last
six years. Twitter acquiring ZipDial was the only brag-worthy exit.*
With one glowing exit, Jain and McClure decided to raise another fund directed towards
India and the subcontinent. In February 2016, 500 Startups announced its plans to raise a
$25 million fund called 500 Kulfi. Like the ice cream. But their plans apparently melted in
the heat of the tax reforms and valuation corrections.
Pankaj Jain’s spray-and-pray approach in India did not quite work as expected
“We had promises from a few LPs [Limited Partners] and had raised a part of the fund,
and we were in talks with Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) for the
rest,” says a former employee, who asked not to be identified, as he did not want to get

into trouble.
Despite the perceived enthusiasm, Jain and McClure could not crack how to set up an
Alternative Investment Fund (AIF). An AIF is a vehicle VCs need to establish before they
start investing in the country.
There are layers to setting up an AIF in the country. McClure would need to appoint
someone in India to run the fund. And Jain reportedly refused to shuttle between New
York (his base) and India. So that ruled him out.
“McClure, for some reason, did not want to be involved in the Indian AIF. Jain didn’t
mind being the advisor but did not want to run the fund,” says the former employee.
The taxes played a role, albeit small. 500 Startups started wooing Indian LPs to invest in
this fund.
Former 500 Startups employee

They tried everything. Setting up the fund in Delaware, in the Netherlands, in Singapore.
Everything. But nothing worked. The Indian tax laws made it very tricky for money to
leave the country and then return via a fund
“They tried everything. Setting up the fund in Delaware, in the Netherlands, in Singapore.
Everything. But nothing worked. The Indian tax laws made it very tricky for money to
leave the country and then return via a fund,” explains the former employee.
All this said, what 500 Startups wanted to do was doable, if not easy. There have been
numerous examples of VC firms setting up AIFs in India without tying themselves into
knots. Blume Ventures announced its second fund as did several other seed funds, which
raised capital from foreign LPs successfully.
But seemingly, 500 Startups could not manage to get around it. There have been whispers
in the market that it could not complete the fund. It could not convince enough LPs to
part with their cash.
“Let’s say 500 Startups was a little late to the party. LPs who wanted exposure had already
been wooed by the likes of Blume and Kae Capital. There were few if any who were still
interested in 500 Startups. And it was not surprising why [they were not interested], look
at the exits,” adds the rival.
But former employees insist that there was cash to be had. It was just that 500 Startups
couldn’t move forward with the fund anymore. And looking at a hurdle, which could not
be overcome, Jain and Grewal quit.
So while there could be some merit in this narrative that tax issues were the reason why
500 Startups exited India, there could be another reason.
This relates to the investing model that 500 Startups follows.

Investing in 56 startups with a total corpus of $10-15 million implies that each portfolio
company in India only got $267,000 on average. This ‘deep diversification model’ follows
the 500 Startups playbook of making a large number of relatively smaller portfolio bets
rather than focusing on a narrower set of companies. While some critics term this model
as ‘spray-and-pray’, there is no denying that 500 Startups has found meaningful success,
applying it in geographies such as the US and Southeast Asia.
Picture this: It makes small seed round funding in a promising startup. The company
starts to get traction, raises a lot of cash and raises a subsequent round. In this round, 500
Startups usually makes a small double-down bet—typically investing up to what its pro-
rata share allows it to. As the company grows bigger and raises subsequent rounds over
the next few years, 500 Startups makes a complete exit in secondary sales and has made
the money back for its LPs.
In theory, there is nothing wrong with this model. It is the go-to strategy for several early
stage VC firms such as Kae Capital. Perfecting this strategy made 500 Startups the king of
the seed round in the US.
However, in India, this model didn’t work.
For one thing, the valuation expectations completely changed in India over the last few
years. Companies were routinely raising seed rounds in the $1-2 million range. Against
this backdrop, the $100,000 seed bet that 500 Startups typically made was at a serious
competitive disadvantage. Founders who had successfully hacked early-stage funding
gravitated towards the larger funds, which not only took larger seed bets on them but also
were more easily persuaded to loosen their purse strings for subsequent rounds.
In a sense, this meant that the companies that raised money from 500 Startups were not
only at a structural disadvantage; there was additionally an element of ‘adverse selection’
at work. Not only were these companies raising smaller rounds at lower valuations
relative to their competitors but also stuck with having shorter runways to demonstrate
sufficient traction to raise a subsequent round.
While this may sound like speculation, the numbers speak for themselves. Very few of its
portfolio companies actually could raise a significant round of funding after 500 Startups’
investment. As per information disclosed in public, only four companies out of the fifty-
six investments have raised follow-on funding of $5 million or higher (what can be
considered as a meaningful Series A size). Innovaccer, a Noida-based health-tech,
company was the only one, which could raise $15 million. The highest a 500 Startups
company has raised in its India lifecycle.
The full list is below:

On the flipside, as per public data, as many as four companies shut down. This number is
interesting for two reasons—firstly, it shows that companies that raise small seed rounds
can still survive for years in India even if they are unable to raise large subsequent rounds
(whether this is a good thing or bad for the VC model is debatable) and secondly, it could
imply that 500 Startups didn’t take risks that were bold enough in the first place.
The other problem that 500 Startups faced in India was that the maths just didn’t add up.
One of Dave McClure’s core strategies was to buck the ‘power law of returns’ said to
govern VC returns. This involves making a large number of bets that would, in theory,
offer 500 Startups a better chance at finding the big winners.
The problem with this model is that it assumes that 500 Startups can find hundreds of
companies with high growth rates, for which it has a ‘requisite high degree of conviction’.
Clearly, in India, neither of these is a given.
The ZipDial exit

500 Startups is said to have invested $250,000 in ZipDial, which probably gave it a 3%
stake in the company. Which means that the $35 million exit to Twitter gave 500 Startups
a return of just $1 million
To succeed in big markets with high growth rates, companies need to be ready for the long
and deep game. To fight deep-pocketed competitors and possibly be ready to run
businesses with negative gross margins with the hope that they can alter the
fundamentals at some point in the future. This obviously requires large pools of capital
rather than the small-sized bets a fund like 500 Startups was wont to make.
Also, making a large number of bets, especially from a small pool of capital, might seem
like a hedge. But it could also be interpreted as a lack of conviction to make deeper bets
and be misconstrued as an attempt to ‘beat the house’ by dint of mathematical constructs.

An associated problem here is that if the initial bets are small, the exit sizes, especially in
terms of returns for 500 Startups, are also likely to be much smaller than what one would
expect from the typical VC model. For instance, 500 Startups is said to have invested
$250,000 in ZipDial, which probably gave it a 3% stake in the company. Which means
that the $35 million exit to Twitter gave 500 Startups a return of just $1 million—a case of
not being able to make your winners count strongly enough.
“It was a good strategy in principle but it didn’t work out. The success of these two exits
[ZipDial and Innovaccer] colours the perception of the investments but that’s where the
fault lay,” says the rival.
All said and done, while tax reforms and personal issues might have had a role to play in
the decision to drop the fund, it is quite clear that the investing model and valuation
dynamics in India could have affected 500 Startups significantly.
So what does this mean?
It now means that 500 Startups is back to square one on its India operations and down to
one member—Prakash. It could signify a scaling back in the number of investments that it
may make in this year.
But is this the end of 500 Startups in India?
Jain has publically said that he would remain as an advisor for a little while longer. (He is
an LP in the latest 500 Startups fund.) And the VC firm will continue to invest in India
through the global fund.
But can it make a comeback? Yes, it can.
“It will need to rehire and use its existing US fund to probably create interest again. But it
won’t be easy,” says the rival.
For now, though, the kulfi has been put in the freezer.
*Addendum (7 February): The copy originally stated that MyGola was a big exit for 500 Startups.
Our sources say that MyGola gave between 0.4X-0.8X return for 500 Startups.

The Long Con
the-ken.com/story/the-long-con
October 10, 2016
“When anyone offers you a chance to earn lots of money without risk, don’t listen to the rest of their
sentence.” – Charlie Munger
A cautionary advice from Munger, you’d think. But, when you call in the deputy chief
minister of Telangana, Mohammed Ali, to inaugurate a food packaging plant in 2015, and
present with him is one of the top 100 Non-Resident Indian business personalities, your
curiosity is sufficiently piqued. That’s when you notice the burkha-clad founder, Nowhera
Shaik, claiming she was awarded that title by Sushma Swaraj in Dubai, UAE.
Twenty-one months after the inauguration, the plant does not exist.
One of the offices, of this interesting company, is in a residential building in Kurla,

Mumbai. The name–Heera Fin Capital–is scribbled on the door. It claims to be a recipient
of a Good Transition Certificate – whatever that means – from ICICI Bank. That doesn’t
check out. In an emailed reply, an ICICI Bank spokesperson said: “ICICI Bank would like
to clarify that it has not given any award/certificate to Nowhera Shaik or her group.”
And then you uncover that Shaik has photoshopped herself in with Swaraj; clearly, she
was present at the event but never made it to the official photographs.
Needless to say, not much about this enterprise passes the smell test.
So, why are we talking about this?
You may have come across City Limouzines fraud, whose founder allegedly collected over
Rs 1,000 crore of public funds by floating various car rental schemes. Or you may have
heard of Pearls Group — title sponsors of first four editions of the Kabaddi World Cup –
who mopped up over Rs 45,000 crore from nearly five crore investors.
the-ken.com-The Long Con 1/12 756

Usually, the skeletons come tumbling out when promoters decamp with the cash and
investor complaints start piling up. But what if you could talk about them when they are
in their honeymoon phase, handing out too-good-to-be-true returns?
This is that story. More importantly, this is the story on a subject that isn’t particularly
well understood in India. Islamic finance. India is a country with a 15% Muslim
population, highest in a non-Islamic country and second highest in the world. About 180
million Muslims. But for years on end, Islamic finance has been regulated by the Reserve
Bank of India (RBI) and has also attracted a lot of controversy. As a result, a large chunk
of India’s population has remained financially excluded. This means, they have had to
look elsewhere to invest their money. End result: a dubious world of unregulated
investment schemes.
Now you see her

Now you don’t (Image credit: Gray Matter)
The Deal
Say you are a Muslim with Rs 1 lakh to invest. You come across Heera Business Group
with its many companies and investment schemes claiming to operate Islamic, interest-
free, shariah-compliant halal businesses led by founder, Shaik. The investment schemes
are meant for Muslim depositors only.
What are the businesses and how do they make money? Let’s count. They claim to
purchase raw gold dust from mines in Ghana, process it and sell refined gold bars in
Dubai and India. Plus, other forms of gold trading. They also operate at least three
jewellery showrooms. And a packaged food business under which they sell, branded food
products like rice, pulses, spices, milk powder. And a domestic bottled-water business.
The list goes on.
If you invest Rs 1 lakh in their gold scheme, you start receiving profits. About Rs 3,200
per month. That’s an annual return of 38%. Many investors claim that they’ve even
received Rs 4,000-5,000 per month on Rs 1 lakh until a few years ago, making it a
whopping 60-70% return on investment per annum.
But wait, there’s more. The group claims it retains share of profits for itself in a 60:40 or
50:50 ratio before it is disbursed to investors. So investor returns are only roughly half the
story. Essentially, the company seems to be clearing anywhere between 75-95% per
annum. And that’s before factoring in dividend distribution tax (15%) and corporate taxes.
In order to give even a 40% return, Heera needs to have anywhere between 120-150%
profit margins.

That’s unheard of in a commodity trading business.
After a one year lock-in period, you are free to withdraw your original investment. No
hiccups there. Many investors withdraw their initial investments in a year just to test the
waters. Having undertaken this excuse of a due diligence, they reinvest higher amounts
with more conviction – also of their friends and relatives, now that their faith in the
company is reinforced.
Due to the potent mix of religious advocacy and easy money, some keep bringing outside
funds and turn into agents and sub-agents working on commissions. A doctor who
shuttered his practice, now runs the Kurla office. Another, put his pharmacy on rent and
runs the Bhiwandi office. One lady, along with her husband not only sold her house and
invested her life savings, but also convinced her brother-in-law to sell his shop and invest.
Her entire family is now into this. Umpteen such testimonials exist – all recorded on
video, published on YouTube account: heeragold1234.
Very quickly, some essential background: Few years ago, at a social gathering, I (Suhail)
received a pitch like this from a relative who was an investor herself. I let it slip. Since
then, every few moons, someone would mention it in passing and I would ignore it like
one ignores persistent email offers of $10 million from various Nigerian billionaires. But
after almost six years, as recently as June, someone brought it up again, forcing me to ask
the dreaded what-if question.
Here’s a good deal. What if I can finally stop complaining about the size of my portfolio?
What if I can kiss goodbye to my plain Jane demat account?
What. If. Allah. Has. Plans. For. Me?
Hence, this deep dive into infinite riches.
Once you are convinced, you get a few brochures and a membership application form.
Logo, serial number, applicant details, space for photo, alphabet codes to pick the right
investment scheme, T&Cs in fine print legalese, ‘For Office Use Only’. You also provide
details of your bank account in which you want your profits to be remitted. On submitting
your application you get a signed, stamped receipt. Within a few days your application is
processed and Heera’s Hyderabad office sends you a ‘Unit Purchase Receipt’ or
‘Shareholder Agreement’ or similar sounding documents which have many barcodes and
membership numbers printed on colourful bond paper with watermarks. In about 30
days, your deposit gets rolled over into the business and your monthly profits start rolling
in.
Ka-ching!

Membership card given to investors
Investment receipt
A business of the Muslims, by the Muslims, for the Muslims?

Let’s clear this Muslim business first. What is halal and why is it so important for
Muslims? Simply put, in Islam most acts neatly fall into two main buckets: Halal
(permitted) or Haram (prohibited). This is a guiding philosophy in most matters of life.
Marriage, divorce, inheritance, business, contracts, almost everything.
Goat butchered in a specific way? Halal. Pork? Haram. Rooh Afza? Halal. Alcohol?
Haram. Alok Nath? Halal. Prem Chopra? Haram.
In finance and investment matters usury, interest or other instrument like debt funds,
corporate bonds – anything that promises a fixed rate of return is Haram. An equity
investment with an exposure to both profits and losses resulting from such business
activity is halal. Of course the business itself should be halal. So, investment in an alcohol
manufacturer like United Breweries? Haram. Investment in auto (Maruti Suzuki) or
paints (Asian Paints) manufacturers? Halal.

This is germane because many Muslims, even those who are not overly pious, do observe
this code. Many Muslims donate interest received in their bank’s savings accounts to
charities. That leaves a large slice of the community’s investable-income pie waiting on
the sidelines; constantly on the hunt for such ‘halal businesses’ with lucrative returns.
Trading in gold, silver and other commodities? Halal, of course.
Enter Heera Gold Exim Ltd.
Or Heera Gold Exports & Imports.
Or Heera Gold Exports & Imports Pvt. Ltd.
Or Heera Group of Companies.
There are a whole host of names of companies and it is not quite clear what would be apt
to call this shape shifting entity. For narrative simplicity, let’s call it Heera Gold.
What is Heera Gold?

There are no easy answers. It is a maze. Let’s start with the flagship: Heera Gold Exim Pvt
Ltd which was incorporated in September, 2010. On 11 August, 2011, it was converted into
a public company and its name changed to Heera Gold Exim Ltd, with its headquarters in
Hyderabad. This is the entity that exists today.
Heera Gold Exports & Imports (note the missing ‘Ltd’) is a firm registered in Andhra
Pradesh, with a Tirupati address. It is most likely a partnership firm. And since it’s not a
company, there are no public filings. We don’t know if Shaik is even the owner or partner
in this firm. This shroud of mystery is important because at least some investors in 2010,
have deposited their cheques in this firm. On paper, nothing connects Heera Exim Ltd to
Heera Gold Exports & Imports.
What about Heera Group of Companies and Heera Gold Exports & Imports Pvt Ltd, then?
These are not companies or firms as far as we looked up. We care about them because
there are receipts and stamps on some documents with these names. Again, there’s no
explanation about their formation or any relation to the registered entities.
The financials of HGEL – Heera Gold Exim Ltd, the public limited company are not much
to look at:
FY ending 31st Mar ’11 – Loss of Rs 39,257
FY ending 31st Mar ’12 – Profit of Rs 1,951,914 (Rs 19.51 lacs)
FY ending 31st Mar ’13 – Profit of Rs 40,41366 (Rs 40.41 lacs)
FY ending 31st Mar ’14 – Profit of Rs 59,57,609 (Rs 59.57 lacs)
Let’s just look at FY11. Despite the loss, all investors claim of receiving their monthly
profits. Shaik never explained how. Even in subsequent years as the company seems to be
making a steady Rs 20 lakh jump in profits, it’s still a fraction of the claims made by

agents and Shaik, of thousands of investors with crores of investments. These numbers
don’t jive together with the story on the ground.
Heera Gold's registered office in Masab Tank, Hyderabad.
On the ground
Earlier last month, in September 2016, I set out for Hyderabad. To Heera Group’s head
office located at Masab Tank, to find out more. With ten companies, thousands of
investors and crores of funds, I had a certain picture of their group head office. What I
saw was a small commercial building, various businesses running operations on the
ground floor – a private cab operator, a Haj & Umrah travels company, a Hero Motors
showroom and a men’s parlour. One of these shops belonged to Heera Textiles; the entire
first floor occupied by Heera Group companies. But right at the entrance, there was a
notice from a Debt Recovery Tribunal on a case between Indian Overseas Bank and Shaik,
putting a stay on recovery of property until 8 September, 2016.
Shutters were drawn down on three of the five stores, which were branded as Heera Fancy
World. There was a working jewellery showroom. I was welcomed in the office and I met
the lady manning the front desk who refused to disclose anything about the company and
asked me to send queries to heeragolds@gmail.com – an address reportedly accessed by
both Shaik and her personal assistant, Molly Thomas.
Multiple emails, with a detailed questionnaire sent to this address went unanswered.

I did meet Thomas though; only after showing up uninvited at their second operational
office. This office was more well put up than their head office. Thomas too didn’t reveal
much. She was not authorised to speak on behalf of the company, and she added that she
was a mere employee who kept her head down, clocked in her hours and did what she was
told to do. A little puzzling though, that a mere employee had access to tens of CCTV
cameras streaming from various locations at her desk. She wouldn’t confirm if Shaik was
in town and also expressed inability to initiate any meeting with her, until directly
authorised.
In search of answers, I spent time in Hyderabad visiting the offices of Food, Safety &
Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and the white
collar offences team of the crime branch, Hyderabad police. I also spoke to agents, sub-
agents, ex-employees, and investors for this story – few were willing to go on record.
Apart from being a hobby photoshopper, who is Shaik? She is a director in at least ten
companies in India — running the gamut from gold exports and imports, jewellery,
financial services, packaged foods, bottled water plant, Haj & Umrah tours, trading
blankets and bedsheets from China. All co-founded and co-owned by her, Mubarak Jan
Shaik and Khamar Jan Shaik (perhaps sisters going by most accounts, but The Ken
couldn’t independently confirm this). Shaik is a self-professed pious Muslim from
Tirupati. The group also operates from satellite offices in Mumbai and Dubai. They have
retail jewellery shops in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai and claims warehouses and offices in
Dubai and other parts of UAE.
Depending on which way the wind is

blowing, she is referred to as Dr,
Aalima (gendered title for Islamic
scholar), CEO, chairman, director,
MD, CMD or Aapa. Aapa is commonly
used in Urdu-speaking and Muslim
circles to address any lady with
respect, especially one who’s pious or
religious.
All public functions and all her

speeches come with a generous dose
of:
Nowhera Shaik, CEO of Heera Business Group. Image
credit: Company website
–Bismillah (In the name of God)
–InshaAllah (God willing)
–Alhamdulillah (All Praise Due to God)
-Sermons of Quranic verses, Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, Islamic history
– Religious chants and songs (naaths) filling up the background

Heera Group’s brochures exhort readers to participate in this special opportunity of
handsome profits and contribute to the cause of an interest-free society.
“Heera Group – Towards an interest-free world” – their tagline.
Lest you forget, Shaik and and her followers dutifully remind you that part of the profits
retained by the promoters is used to run an Islamic school for girls and other avenues to
empower and work towards upliftment of the financially weaker sections within the
community.
But back to business. Gold trading of course, is just one. The flagship one. And then there
are others: blankets imported from China into Dubai and India under “Diamond” mark.
File it under Heera Textiles Limited. A bottled-water business under the brand “Heera
Pure Drops”. File it under Heera Ice Drop Pvt Ltd? No, because all water business is
conducted under Heera Retail (Hyderabad) Pvt Ltd, a different company, also cofounded
by same set of promoters.
To a packed auditorium in various Annual General Meetings of shareholders, at

Shanmukhananda Hall, Matunga (March ’13), at Y.B.Chavan Center, Khar (November
’12), at Bandra-Kurla Complex grounds (May ’11) or any other large venue, all in Mumbai,
depositors line up like sheep for their share of profits.
On prodding, the refrain from all and sundry is a variant of: “Suhail bhai, company ke
licences, kaagzaat woh sab lawyer aur CA log jaane. Lekin company munafa karti hogi
tabhi tau barabar itne saalon se returns toh de rahi hai na?”. Translation: Lawyers and
CA’s know the legalese. Unlike other fly-by-night operators this group has never skipped a
beat for the last so many years. So everything must be in order.
Let me be upfront about this. During my reporting, I didn’t come across a single investor,
who has lost money. There might have been some delays in profits or final withdrawal,
but everybody has got their ‘due share of profits’ and principal. People have made money.
The problem then? Almost everything. Let’s go through them one by one.
Nothing checks out

None of the Heera Group companies have approvals to solicit public funds. In an emailed
response, a spokesperson at Sebi said: “Deposit collection by NBFCs/Companies do not
come under the regulatory purview of Sebi and they are exempted from the definition of
CIS under Section 11(AA) of the Sebi Act. Only one entity Gift Collective Investment
Management Company Limited is registered with Sebi as a Collective Investment
Management Company. However, no scheme has been launched so far by Gift Collective
Investment Management Company Limited. Heera Gold Exports & Imports is not
registered with Sebi.”
RBI’s list of NBFC companies that are authorized to solicit public funds under strict
regulatory norms didn’t throw up any Heera Group firms either.
That’s a big, red flag.

How about other licenses? Food, BIS/ISI, Health & Safety.
Heera Foodex Pvt Ltd is registered at same address as HGEL and other group companies.
The manufacturing/packaging unit is situated at:
Heera Foodex Largescale Manufacturing & Packing Industry, Etharpally Village,

Nakkalapalli Panchayat, Moinabad Mandal, Ranga Reddy District, Telangana – 501504
This is the same plant which was inaugurated by deputy chief minister of Telangana in
January ’15. And yet no company or plant by that name exists at that address. Nor is there
any intimation of a change in location. Foodex continues to use the above address in their
packaging and is selling these products in Hyderabad and Mumbai. They seem to fly
under the radar by processing home-deliveries for orders over the phone. You wouldn’t
know if you visit their website – heerafoodex.com or heerafoodbazar.com. The site lists
three delivery locations – Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Mumbai. And two currency options
INR and USD with the default set to USD.
Deeper still.
Back in Hyderabad, after doing rounds of various offices at Commissioner of Food Safety,
Health & Family Welfare at DMHS campus Sultan Bazaar, Koti, I was finally directed to
food safety office located at IPM campus, Narayanaguda, Hyderabad. I met an officer,
Niranjan, manning the Ranga Reddy district office who couldn’t locate Heera’s FSSAI
licence in his records. In an emailed response, MA Khaleel, food safety officer, Ranga
Reddy (R.R) District said:
“During investigation, I enquired the above said licence details, found that there is no
such name/adress in Etherpally Village, Moinabad Mandal, Rangareddy District, and the
above Licence number is not related to R.R District.”
Back in August ’12 based on a complaint by Member of Parliament, Asaduddin Owaisi, the
Central Crime Station at Hyderabad Police had filed a First Information Report (FIR)
against Shaik u/s 420 (cheating) and 406 R/w 34 IPC (criminal breach of trust). Earlier
this year, in August, Shaik released a video clarifying this. She said this crime was
thoroughly investigated by WCO (White Collar Offences) team of Hyderabad crime
branch and closed due to “Lack of Evidence” and “Un occurred: False” information. Then
in her own signature style, which I’ve come to identify only too well, with an air of
righteous indignation she flashed copies of both the FIR and closure copy.

FIR closure as claimed by Shaik in a YouTube video addressed to the press
On my last day in Hyderabad, I visited crime branch and met investigating officer
Harinath Babu of WCO, Team VI who is now handling this case. I then contacted and sent
a query to the office of Avinash Mohanty, deputy commissioner of police, CCS, detective
department. In an emailed reply, the department said that the “case is under investigation
at present.”
In September, I visited one of their outlets in Mumbai and bought a jar of milk powder.
Not only did it have an invalid address and a missing FSSAI mark, but it did not have a
batch number, manufacturing date or an expiry date. Absurd as this may sound, the neck
of the jar had the words “MILKODAY” moulded on its plastic. Perhaps a brand, but
whose? Certainly not of Heera Foodex. Similarly, underside of the jar had “Sri Lakshmi
Hyd Foods” moulded on it. I couldn’t find any current company with such a brand of milk
powder. Though there seems to be an abandoned trademark application.
There is some good news when it comes to the water business, Heera Pure Drops,
conducted under Heera Retail (Hyderabad) Pvt Ltd. Vijay Kumar, district officer,
Sangareddy, district in which the bottling plant is situated, told me over the phone that
the FSSAI licence is valid until Oct’16 and that they’ve also applied for a renewal.
How about ISI licenses issued by Bureau of Indian Standards? Both water and milk
powder fall under the category of mandatory certification. I visited Mr. Ameeruzzamaan
in BIS office at Moula Ali, Hyderabad.
Good news: Heera Pure Drops has a valid ISI Licence.
Bad News: Heera Foodex Pvt Ltd hasn’t been issued any ISI licence for milk powder.

This fact is confirmed from the sample jar I’d purchased from their outlet too. It had no
ISI numbers or any other BIS marking.
So, a company that claims to make at least 80% return on investments, tells you to pledge
your Islamic values and your life’s savings to it doesn’t have any license to do most of the
businesses that it claims to do.
None of it makes sense. Perhaps, only a matter of time till the house of cards comes
tumbling down.
(Edit note: A sentence was changed in this copy for more clarity on Nowhera Shaik
photoshopping herself in with Sushma Swaraj.)

The masala in MX Player’s OTT formula
the-ken.com/story/the-masala-in-mx-players-ott-formula
February 26, 2021
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It isn’t often that a web series drops its debut season and then follows up with a second
season barely two and a half months later. Then again, Aashram isn’t your average series.
Its story, about a criminal godman’s exploits in a fictional Indian town, clearly struck a
chord with India’s masses. In December, barely three months since it first graced video
streaming platform MX Player, it crossed one billion views.
Aashram’s formula—a salacious mix of sex, violence, and crime, set in India’s hinterland
—has proven a winning combination for MX Player, and one that repeats across many of
its original series. Others, such as Ek Thi Begum and Raktanchal, play out on similar
lines. When MX Player isn’t attempting to titillate or scandalise, it reverts to romantic
comedies and edgy thrillers to keep viewers hooked.
The target audience for the platform is fairly clear—young Indian males, more often than
not from tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns, in search of edgy, local fare they wouldn’t
anywhere else. MX Player’s business model complements this demographic perfectly.
Understanding that its audience is still new to the concept of subscriptions, the Times
Internet and Tencent-backed platform is one of the few OTT players that is advertising
rather than subscription-based.
The results are there for everyone to see. Apart from the individual success of shows like
Aashram, MX Player has established itself as a bonafide contender in India’s hyper-
competitive OTT space. Today, the platform boasts around 200 million monthly active
users (MAUs) who come for its video content, both original and syndicated, as well as its
the-ken.com-The masala in MX Players OTT formula 1/2 768

other offerings like gaming and music streaming. In the latter, MX Player benefits from a
tie-up with music streaming app Gaana, which also counts Times Internet and Tencent as
investors.
Beyond having music, video, gaming and live TV, MX player is also integrated with Times
Internet’s wildly successful TikTok clone, MX TakaTak. Since the Indian government
banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in 2020 on the pretext of security concerns,
TakaTak has emerged as the dominant short-format video app in the country. According
to a report by global app analytics tracker App Annie, MX TakaTak currently controls over
50% of India’s short-format video market.
Good sources
MX Player syndicates a lot of content from several different partners, including Voot,
Hungama, Shemaroo, and Sony Entertainment
With such a diverse array of offerings, the App Annie report shows that MX Player is the
top video streaming app in the country in terms of time spent by users.
MX Player
OTT
Times Internet
video streaming
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The miseducation of Pearson (Byju’s TutorVista
acquisition explained)
the-ken.com/story/byjus-tutorvista-edurite
July 19, 2017
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The thing about information, information that results from a hyped, successful outcome is
that it sticks in your mind. Like a good story, it doesn’t age. In the world of hagiographic
corporate history, the kind practised in India fairly often, a shred of information,
repeated, again and again, becomes a fact. And as time goes by, that distant, misplaced
fact gets passed around as legend. Needless to say, legends of successful exits make for
good stories.
This is not that story.
On the contrary, this is a story, which sheds more light on the success saga. Sort of puts it
under the lens. This is the story of the unravelling of one of the biggest, most celebrated
deals in the Indian education technology space. A story, which yet again should make you
sit up and think, that there’s a lot of froth in the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Because if you believe everything that’s being said or written about Byju’s acquisition of
TutorVista and Edurite, you might almost believe that Byju’s has acquired a promising set
of companies for a song. This bit of information is public—over a period of four years,
from 2009 to 2013, Pearson Education, the UK-based publishing and education company,
acquired TutorVista after shelling out a total of about $150 million. That’s about Rs 900
crore; a lot of money. Now depending on who you believe, in 2017, just four years in,
Pearson has sold both TutorVista and Edurite to Byju’s for less than $3 million. That’s less
than Rs 20 crore; a pittance.
If you are in Byju’s shoes, calling this deal a steal would be an understatement.
the-ken.com-The miseducation of Pearson Byjus TutorVista acquisition explained 1/2 770

And that’s precisely what the company would have you to believe.
TutorVista is one of the largest and best-known online tutoring brands catering to school
and college students in the US
Byju's
It has been said that “TutorVista gets millions of visitors every month on its website from
across the globe (70% from the USA).” It has also been said that the coming together of
Byju’s, TutorVista and Edurite will help Byju’s “expand international reach.”
We, of course, must not take these statements at face value. We must dig deeper.
To understand Byju’s acquisition of TutorVista and Edurite, a set of four questions must
be asked. One, what has Byju’s actually bought for $3 million? Two, why? Three, what
does the company hope to do with it? And four, how is that going to play out? To answer
these questions and put together this story, The Ken reached out to a host of people;
current and former employees of Pearson Education and several players in the education
technology business in India and the US. Few wanted to speak on record but they had a
lot to say in private.
the-ken.com-The miseducation of Pearson Byjus TutorVista acquisition explained 2/2 771

The MoneyOnMobile heist
the-ken.com/story/the-moneyonmobile-heist
December 12, 2018
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Heading into 2018, mobile payment platform MoneyOnMobile was in a good place.
While the company’s forward march was briefly halted by the dark, cashless cloud of
demonetisation, it was now firmly in the ascendancy again. On the path to profitability,
even.
In the third quarter of FY18, MoneyOnMobile posted revenues of $2.84 million, a year-
on-year growth of 193%. The company’s net loss for the quarter stood at $0.42 million, a
significant improvement from a loss of $1.11 million in the same quarter the previous
year.
the-ken.com-The MoneyOnMobile heist 1/4 772

By all accounts, 2018 should have been a watershed year for the company. And indeed, it
was shaping up to be just that. In January, the company raised $7.6 million through a
Series F share issue, and two weeks later, in February, they raised a further $5 million
from a Russia-based private aviation and aerospace holding company S7 Group. With
money in the bank, the company had plans to uplist to the Nasdaq by summer; a move
that would bring both visibility and liquidity.
By the third quarter of 2018, the company had enrolled over 3,50,000 merchants in 700
cities across India. It had over 350 employees on its payroll. Offices in Mumbai, Delhi,
Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore. It had processed over $2 billion and claims to have
served over 200 million Indian mobile phone users since its inception.
But come August, the company was in turmoil. Harold Montgomery, Chairman and CEO
of MoneyOnMobile, claims his company has been hijacked. An irate Montgomery—a US
national—says that his Indian partners have betrayed the company. “The Indian partners
betrayed our trust and broke our agreement,” says a livid Montgomery.
Since then, the company has filed an arbitration petition in the Bombay High Court, a
lawsuit seeking $27 million in damages in the London Court of International Arbitration
and a criminal case with the Mumbai Police against some of the company’s Indian
partners, charging them with various cyber crimes.
MoneyOnMobile held great promise. It was a company that wanted to redefine financial
inclusion. But it has become entangled in a web of deceit, greed and now, litigation. All
of this, even as the company seemed on the verge of breaking even and going on to

bigger and better things.
MoneyOnMobile's office in Malad
A visit to the company’s headquarters in Mumbai—a five-storey building in Malad, a

prominent commercial business suburb—belies all this chaos. Employees sporting
“MoneyOnMobile” ID tags were smoking outside the premises. Couriers filed in and out

of the building. Nothing untoward, it would seem. The company’s VP of corporate
communications, Navaz Damania, did her best to further this facade. “We have new
investors on board and the company is going through a restructuring,” said Damania,
attempting to dispel notions that anything was awry.
But it isn’t business as usual at MoneyOnMobile.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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The NITI Aayog’s midlife identity crisis
the-ken.com/story/niti-aayog-midlife-identity-crisis
July 6, 2017
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In May 2017, Bengaluru-based cab aggregator Ola launched a pilot of its electric vehicles
project in Nagpur. The launch was important, not only because of the ambitions of the
government but also the people present there. Union minister Nitin Gadkari and the chief
minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis were both representing their individual
constituencies in Nagpur.
Ola’s approach to solving the public transport problem in India has been different from its
rival, Uber. So are its policy pitches to the government. For example, Ola’s entry into the
electric vehicle (EV) segment. In contrast, Uber believes that peer-to-peer ride-sharing is
the way forward. It took the lead when the draft of the cab aggregators policy was being
discussed last year. The NITI Aayog, while in principle, endorsed Uber’s view in its
recommendations, has been slightly conservative about its implementation, citing issues
like employment and altering the definition of a commercial vehicle.
Typically, companies present their policy proposals to the NITI Aayog, in the hope that
they get pushed and implemented. However, Ola bypassed the NITI Aayog to approach
the ministry directly and take its EV mandate forward. What this demonstrated was that
the NITI Aayog, beyond a point, does not have much clout. “Even though the NITI Aayog
CEO Amitabh Kant is personally powerful, people are realising that it doesn’t have the
powers to move the needle, in terms of execution,” says a New Delhi-based public policy
professional, who did not want to be named because he deals with the think-tank. “At
best, it can push policy agendas through the body.”
He adds, “Uber can try what it wants, but Ola knows that the real power, politically
speaking, lies in Nagpur. It’s no coincidence that it was able to push this through with
minimum fuss and maximum publicity, even as the minister is from that region, while
Uber is still trying to turn its peer-to-peer ride-sharing into reality.”
There is a growing belief among stakeholders that the NITI Aayog, in its two-and-a-half
year existence, hasn’t exactly lived up to expectations. Others reckon that it’s too early to
have a clear, defined verdict on the Aayog because its role is constantly evolving. Then
there are those who believe that it isn’t getting due credit for some of the non-headline-
making, behind-the-scenes reforms it has been pushing. And that it has made policy sexy
again.
Mission creep
the-ken.com-The NITI Aayogs midlife identity crisis 1/3 776

Many in the government and bureaucracy believe that the Aayog, in its present form, may
be suffering from an underlying mission creep. There is inherent confusion about what its
role is.
First, the NITI Aayog has been extending itself far beyond the role it was originally
conceived for. In the aftermath of the government’s demonetisation drive in November
2016, it emerged as a key player in the propagation of digital payments. Initially, it was
tasked with developing an action plan on advocacy, awareness and coordination.
Think Tank?
It began as a policy sounding board for the government and a

facilitator between the Centre and the states. But during its two-
and-a-half year tenure, the NITI Aayog became something else: A
marketer and a bit-part executor
Venkat Ananth, 6 Jul 2017
There is a growing belief among stakeholders that the NITI Aayog hasn't exactly lived
up to its expectations so far
The think-tank has been extending itself to roles beyond what it was conceived for, as
observed during the government's digital payments push
There's a view emerging within the bureaucracy that the Aayog is "slacking" and isn't
proactive enough unless tasked by the PMO
The government is considering giving the NITI Aayog executive powers, to improve its
decision-making and authority

The ping pong of 5G telecoms lobbying, from Geneva
to Delhi and back
the-ken.com/story/5g-slugfest
February 4, 2020
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If the 5G in telecommunications was a five-act play, the first act unfolded two years ago
when US President Donald Trump rallied the developed world around banning Huawei
Technologies, especially its 5G tech.
The second act is being enacted now as countries permit, one by one, the Chinese
telecoms vendor to supply its 5G gear for the new network roll-out, pilot or otherwise. In
December 2019, India allowed Huawei to participate in 5G trials, too.
However, this act has a sub-plot to it. And it’s playing out within the closed doors of the
Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in Delhi.
Around this time last year, the Indian standards body, Telecommunications Standards
Development Society, India, or TSDSI, proposed a radio interface technology (RIT) to the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU). (We wrote about it here.)
Later in the year, in December, the ITU accepted it as a candidate RIT—proposals under
consideration for additional features to telecom standards. The TSDSI tech is a new
modification to the radio signal—the information carrier in telecommunications—which
can enhance the signal transmission range of a base station. India wants to apply this
technology for wider coverage at low speeds. This is ideal for rural India, which certainly
needs high-speed broadband but not necessarily in high-speed vehicles. The term for this
is Low Mobility Large Cell (LMLC).
Starting February, the remaining steps for including the Indian RIT as part of the 5G
global standards—International Mobile Telecommunications-2020— will begin.
Independent groups will now evaluate this technology. As an Indian official says,
“Quarterfinals are over, semi-finals will begin in Geneva this month.”
The so-called match is between global telecoms vendors. Specifically, Nokia, Ericsson,
Qualcomm on one side, and TSDSI on the other, alone at the negotiating table because
there’s no Indian equipment company big enough to wield commercial clout
internationally. The Indian proposal makes use of the 3rd Generation Partnership
Product (3GPP) framework, a global standardisation body for wireless standards that is
dominated by telecoms vendors. Consequently, TSDSI has asked it to reserve certain bits
so that the RIT is harmonised.
the-ken.com-The ping pong of 5G telecoms lobbying from Geneva to Delhi and back 1/3 779
In other words, make the Indian tech interoperable with 3GPP specifications, which all
equipment makers use to build their products, be it chipsets, smartphones, base stations,
or modems.
Soon after the RIT was accepted, causing much “drama” on the ITU floor, a 3GPP group
headed by Balazs Bertenyi of Nokia shot a letter to TSDSI saying it wasn’t possible for
3GPP to “retroactively ensure compatibility with modifications which were done outside
of 3GPP.”
It was followed by another missive last month, on 23 January.
Pipe cleaning
The semi-finals for Indian 5G standards begin next week in

Geneva. Lobbying is on to delay its inclusion as vendors fear a
mandatory implementation in India without a good business case.
Chip makers like MediaTek, Qualcomm, Huawei may have hedged
their bets though
Seema Singh, 4 Feb 2020
For the last 2-3 years, India is trying to include its regional 5G standard into the global
standards, IMT-2020, which roll out later this year
Like a ping pong ball it is being pushed from international body to another. It’s last and
final chance before the window closes is later this month
Vendors, ready with their 5G offerings, don’t want any additional standard to follow,
claiming it makes no business case
Still some of them have incorporated the Indian tech. Question is, will they get a chance
to activate it?
The post-spectrum phase of Indian telecom
the-ken.com/story/telecom-spectrum-auctions-delayed
September 19, 2018
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Before 2015, the Indian telecom industry was rife with players—nine in all. Then
Reliance Jio happened, and as data tariffs plummeted, a wave of consolidation ensued.
The latest example being the merger of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular to form
Vodafone Idea which concluded on 31 August. Now, the Indian telecom industry has just
three major players—Reliance Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone Idea. And as the dust of
consolidation settles, a curious new reality has emerged. Spectrum, once the object of
bidding wars, is no longer a rare commodity. In fact, thanks to consolidation, the
remaining players have it in abundance.
“We have now reached a situation where there is a spectrum surplus for the next 24-36
months,” says P Balaji, chief regulatory & corporate affairs officer at Vodafone Idea. A
senior source in the telecom industry says that the newly-merged entity is expected to
generate annual savings of Rs 8,400 crore ($1.26 billion) on the capex and opex side
over the next four years. Importantly, the company feels it doesn’t need to invest in more
spectrum to run its operations.
The same goes for Airtel, which similarly has no appetite for more spectrum. After its
acquisition of Telenor in May—a deal which gave it 43.4 MHz of paired spectrum in 1800
MHz band across seven circles—Airtel’s CEO Gopal Vittal told analysts that Airtel had no
need to invest in radio waves. This notion will only strengthen once the approvals for
Airtel’s acquisition of Tata Teleservices are cleared.
Jio, on the other hand, has acquired spectrum from Anil Ambani-led Reliance
Communications, 122 units of MHz across the 850, 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz bands. All
told, the source mentioned above estimates that Airtel holds over 1,600 MHz of
the-ken.com-The post-spectrum phase of Indian telecom 1/3 782

spectrum, while Jio is in possession of over 1,400 MHz. Vodafone Idea, meanwhile, has
1,850 MHz.
While this surfeit bodes well for the telcos, it throws a wrench in TRAI’s plans. TRAI
wants another spectrum auction, which will include airwaves for fifth-generation mobile
technologies—more commonly known as 5G—which can offer up to data speeds of up to
100 Mbps. TRAI has even recommended base prices for the same. But according to
executives and analysts The Ken spoke to, the spectrum up for grabs is unlikely to find
takers. Telcos are unwilling to participate in the auction, not only due to their ample
spectrum holdings but because of what they perceive to be exorbitant spectrum prices—
industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) observed that South
Korea’s 5G spectrum auction was considerably cheaper. This, coupled with the debt
levels of telcos, make any additional spending for spectrum unwise.
This disinterest stands in stark contrast to the situation in 2014.
Airtel
Idea Cellular
Jio
spectrum
Spectrum Auctions
TRAI
Vodafone
Vodafone Idea

AUTHOR
Shashidhar KJ
Shashidhar has been a journalist for over six years and has worked with The Times of
India, The Financial Express and MediaNama, his last assignment. He is a fine bloke,
and by that, I mean unusually quiet. Over the years, Shashidhar has written on several
subjects. Banking, startups and technology, media, and also financial technology. He
started his career on the desk at the old lady of Boribunder. At The Ken, Shashidhar
works out of Mumbai and writes on telecom and financial technology. What he really
wants to talk about though is his vinyl collection.
View Full Profile

The Refrigerator Construct of Life
the-ken.com/story/the-refrigerator-construct-of-life
August 19, 2018
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What’s in your fridge?
Fruits, juices, beef, leftovers from yesterday’s party (the only time you find time to cook),
coffee that went cold waiting for someone, the pumpkin salad that’s been waiting to be
loved again… the answer to this simple question can be quite revealing.
The average Indian household’s disposable income has more than doubled since 1985.
Our consumption patterns have changed. And a new, affluent middle class has emerged,
forecast to match Australia’s population by the year 2025. Today, a larger share of our
GDP is spent on consumption than investment—and spending on food is at the top. But
what is the Indian middle-class eating?
Many trends seem obvious—rural areas tend to feature more home-cooked meals and
fewer restaurant visits; families away from big cities tend to have fridges stocked more
heavily than those with regular access to markets; meat appears more frequently on the
table than it did a few decades ago; and millennials tend to gravitate toward organic
and/or artisanal brands that cater to a more conscious consumer palate.
Interestingly, though, there is an almost universal shift away from processed and canned
foods, with growing emphasis on fresh ingredients at each meal. This is in keeping with
most newly middle-class societies that are still in the first cycle of prosperity, eventually
coming full circle to realise the value of fresh foods again, as packaged and fast foods
begin to lose their sheen.
the-ken.com-The Refrigerator Construct of Life 1/2 785

The condiments that dominate the processed foods section in pantries are now sauces and
spice pastes (reflecting a more global choice of recipes). Exotic cheeses, coffees and the
like are ubiquitous souvenirs from travels abroad. Significant shelf space goes to healthy
or homemade snacks instead of store-bought options (unless there are young children in
the home, in which case all health concerns go out the window).
But did you know that a little less than 30% of Indian homes have a refrigerator?
This is from a survey done in 2016. A paper by Sowmya Dhanaraj, Vidya Mahambare and
Poonam Munjal, called From Income to Household Welfare: Lessons from Refrigerator
Ownership in India. It makes for interesting reading.
Households that have the capacity to make larger purchases, like two-wheelers, often
don’t have a refrigerator, which means that cost isn’t the only factor. According to the
paper, “Females in households tend to derive greater utility from the refrigerator usage
due to its impact on lowering household burden of work.” In other words, because the
kitchen in most Indian households is still the woman’s domain, a fridge is not considered
a priority. The higher the woman’s power and agency in the household, the more likely it
is to have a fridge.
Strange, isn’t it? The refrigerator not only offers insight into various consumer patterns
across classes, age groups and geographies, it also serves as a canvas for gender roles and
politics.
the-ken.com-The Refrigerator Construct of Life 2/2 786

The rehabilitation of Nitin Mangal
the-ken.com/story/rehabilitation-nitin-mangal
October 24, 2017
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PART 1: HOPING FOR THE END

Mangal was worried. Not for himself. But his family back home.
He had left in a hurry. Within hours of the report being published on 8 August, 2012,
there were murmurs of trouble. Of reprimand. So he left for his hometown in Indore. Far
away from Mumbai. He stayed put at home for a couple of weeks but it didn’t look like the
situation would get any better. Another matter altogether that he had been planning on
visiting Singapore. On work. So he thought to himself, ‘Now is the best time, let’s just go’.
He packed furiously. Throwing in unironed, even once worn clothes, stuffed in a large,
black suitcase. Some documents, and his laptop bag. He hugged his wife and two-year-old
daughter goodbye, and late in the evening–the evening of 26th August 2012, he left for
Bengaluru. [The cheapest flight to Singapore was from Bengaluru] The next morning,
with a one-way ticket, he boarded a flight to Singapore.
It had been a month since that night.
Back in India, all hell had broken loose. The company had alleged that Mangal had
wanted money in exchange for quashing the report. That he had made wrongful gains
from trading in the stock. The police of two jurisdictions, Mumbai and Gurugram, were
looking for him.
So now, biding his time in Singapore, Mangal was worried. For the safety of his family.
‘I must call someone.’ he thought to himself. ‘Someone in Mumbai. So that they can go
and check if my family is okay. If they need anything, and if they are worried, to just
console them. To tell them that things will be alright, it is just a matter of time.’ With
these thoughts running through his head, he looked at his phone, his list of contacts.
‘Him? No. Maybe too much of a favour to ask. Him? No. Him? Yes. He is my friend. He’ll
know how to take care of this’. So he dialled the number.
“Hello. Hi sir, it is Nitin.”
“Oh. Hi Nitin. Where are you? Where are you calling from?”
“I’m in Singapore.”
“Oh okay. See Nitin…”
the-ken.com-The rehabilitation of Nitin Mangal 1/2 787

“Boss, I needed a small favour from you. Can you go home and just check on my family? If
they need anything, if they are doing…”
“Nitin. Why are you calling me? I don’t want to be involved with you. Please keep me out
of this. You know my phone could be tapped and I will get into trouble because I am
talking to you.”
“You are joking, right? What do you mean tapped and that you will get into trouble
because of me?”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Nitin.
Do not go gentle into that good night
He was a respected analyst. Living a respectable life in Mumbai.

Until one day, when his life was uprooted, taken away from him.
Just because he’d co-authored a critical report—on a company, a
large real estate company in India. After more than five years of
living in ignominy, Mangal is back in Mumbai, and for now, he just
wants his old life back
Ashish K. Mishra, 24 Oct 2017
the-ken.com-The rehabilitation of Nitin Mangal 2/2 788

The reinvention of IIT-Madras
the-ken.com/story/the-reinvention-of-iit-madras
September 2, 2016
For a middle class home, it may seem a shot from afar.
“You can run two bulbs, one fan, one tubelight, one television, and one cell phone charger.
You can’t run your grinder, cooler or refrigerator yet but we are getting there,” says Ashok
Jhunjhunwala professorially, adjusting his trousers over worn, open-toe sandals. Inside a
model home at the Research Park, he gives a demo.
In his small audience is Tarun Mehta, founder of the two-year-old electric two-wheeler
company Ather Energy, who, until recently, was building his e-scooter in the incubation
cell a few floors up. The two exchange murmurs about a new battery engineering centre
which is a hushed affair until the minister for power, Piyush Goyal, visits later in July.
The 125-watt solar panel outside and the energy load of appliances hooked-up to the
micro-grid inside the model home don’t add up. But that’s where the ingenuity sits – in
the Inverterless. Cleverly branded as Inverterless, it is a solar unit where the power
generation, storage and distribution happen in direct current (DC), without any
conversion to alternating current (AC) on which the world’s grids run.
Most electronics devices today are DC but since the grid operates on AC, DC to AC
conversion is the norm, as is the gross energy loss, sometimes as much as 50%.
By mid July when Goyal would visit, Jhunjhunwala would be ready to demonstrate how
large buildings can run on DC. Most offices are already on DC load – hundreds of lights,
laptops, variable air volume systems, sensors, exhaust, and so on – but convert them to
AC at huge inefficiencies.
Readying the model units for Goyal was mere formality, especially after how
Jhunjhunwala got the minister to back his idea of large scale solar micro-grids.
the-ken.com-The reinvention of IIT-Madras 1/16 789

Soon after Goyal took charge in 2014, the professor wanted to present his idea but was
unable to get ‘quality’ time with the jet-setting politician. So Jhunjhunwala worked out
with his office, flew to Mumbai just so he could find a seat next to the politician on his
return to Delhi. In the flight, he unspooled his project plan, catching a return flight to
Chennai from Delhi the same day.
“When we made a formal presentation in Delhi, people nitpicked and ranted. Piyush’s
remark was, ‘I know Jhunjhunwala. He doesn’t give up; one day he’ll show’ and he backed
this project,” recounts Jhunjhunwala.
Today, solar-DC deployments are underway in multiple locations in at least half a dozen
states.
If 25 years ago, he and Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT-M, attempted to bring

telephones in millions of households, today they are saying – “grid-free power in every
home”.
With or without a game-changing idea, many at IIT-M, certainly more than other IITs,
have pursued technologies that solve societal or industrial problems. Among other things,
it was this engineering itch to ‘build’ that hurled it into the top rank of engineering schools
this year in India’s first ever national ranking.
When the results were announced in April many were surprised, including some IITs
which even set up committees to parse the data. Thankfully, the process has been
transparent and quantitative.
In the last few years, international ranking agencies have ranked IITs but none captured
sponsored research or industry collaboration of these institutes. Until about two-three
years ago, the agencies didn’t even ask for data, instead used publications, patents and
perception to rank them.
For all its worth (and some annual rabble-rousing), these rankings never saw IITs
perched high up there. Not in the top 50, not even in top 100.
Behind ranks
In the last few years, international ranking agencies have ranked IITs but none captured
sponsored research or industry collaboration of these institutes. Until about two-three
years ago, the agencies didn’t even ask for data, instead used publications, patents and
perception to rank them
“There was a strong feeling among institutions and the government that international
rankings do not do justice to our institutions and their parameters [like internalization]
are driven by factors which may or may not be important to us,” says Surendra Prasad,
chairman of National Board of Accreditation, who led India’s first National Institutional
Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranking.

“We need a national ranking because only handful Indian institutions are eligible for
international rankings. We have to sensitize a larger number of Indian institutions to
position them better,” says Prasad, who is a former IIT-D director.
All international rankings assign heavy weightage to perception. As much as 30% in

Times Higher Education Ranking (THE) and 25% in US News & World Report which
debuted its world university rankings in 2014. They all use large secondary databases of
academicians and employers to do reputation surveys.
However, ShanghaiRanking doesn’t use perception surveys, which is understandable

because the Chinese get hit on perception even more than Indians. Consequently,
ShanghaiRanking assigns disproportionately high weightage to publications and citations,
even transferring from other indicators when not applicable.
This is not the best way to rank smaller or engineering schools.
For this reason, the US News, which has been ranking American colleges for 30 years,
started changing its tack for domestic colleges making outcome as the most heavily
weighted factor in 2014. “What began as a reputation-based survey has turned into a
comprehensive, data-driven evaluation of more than 1,500 schools using hundreds of data
points,” said its chief data strategist Robert Morse in an email.
Perception is utterly subjective, says V Ramgopal Rao, director of IIT-Delhi, who like
many IIT professors has participated in the reputation surveys of international agencies.
“We have cows on our campuses. The overall impression is so bad that one of the
questions we are often asked is – ‘Are you really as good as you are made out to be?’ How
can you change the perception? We can never look as good as international campuses. We
don’t have international students or faculty.”
Fighting perception
Perception is utterly subjective, says V Ramgopal Rao, director of IIT-Delhi, who like
many IIT professors has participated in the reputation surveys of international agencies.
“We have cows on our campuses. The overall impression is so bad that one of the
questions we are often asked is – ‘Are you really as good as you are made out to be?’ How
can you change the perception? We can never look as good as international campuses. We
don’t have international students or faculty'
People are doing the math: If the scores are increased by 10% by removing
internationalization, a big draw for overseas universities but not for Indian, IITs catapult
into top 20-30, (and German and Japanese universities into top 5-10).
One reason IITs are wrestling with their global image is because 2017 onward they will
conduct GATE-JEE in seven countries for doctoral and masters programmes and they
desperately need a brand leg-up.
But in spite of much bellyaching about a lack of resources and unfair comparisons, all IITs
have inched up the ranks, IIT-M relatively more.

Global University Rankings
It’s been a few years in the making. Trying to come to terms with their position, the
administration prepared a Strategy Plan 2020 and has been following it in spirit even
before the letters came into force formally.
It starts with students.
Less students sleeping in classrooms

“One of the IIT directors used to say, ‘We are all race horses, 10 seconds is all that
matters…*Jo jeeta wohi Sikandar*”, said Shanthi Pavan. Soon after, much of it becomes
pointless. Year after year IITs experience losing students early on, attendance and
motivation decline in tandem.
Call it the Kota effect if you will, but it’s hard to make students unlearn the exam-cracking
code of studies.
“We decided to get rid of our own baggage,” says Ramamurthi. “When we made the
transition to a four-year [B-Tech] course from a five-year, it was only in name. All
teachers kept their courses, the curriculum became faculty driven. Now we’ve made it
student-centric.”
Since last year, there’s a cap on the number of courses and labs a student can take. “We
leave very little opportunity for students to complain based on the standard practice of
how much time you spend for one hour of instruction,” says Pavan, one of the ‘star’
professors in electrical engineering.
For far too long 17-18 year-olds have had to decide which branch of engineering they
would study, and often for the rest of their life. The decision is part parental, part
perception, and part JEE rank-driven.
The dual-degree program (five-year integrated masters program) corrected the imbalance
to some extent but it wasn’t enough. Ramamurthi says IIT-M wants to evolve to a position
where a B-Tech student can also evolve into a dual degree program out of interest as well
as choose interesting electives.
“We plan to upgrade 6-12 programmes in hot areas like data science, computational
engineering, etc. If a group of 30 students from five-six departments would like to pursue
a programme, we’d facilitate it,” he says. “If it succeeds, then we’ll cut down entry to dual

degree and take more students through B-Tech and then let them choose M-Tech. We are
trying to go in a particular path; it’ll take three-four years.”
The upgrades also attack the determinism of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ branches in engineering.
In one such experiment, IIT-M has been offering a new course in Engineering Design with
help from its industry partner Ashok Leyland. A product of the third batch, Ather’s Mehta
says it’s one-of-its kind course because the focus is on product design rather than
engineering design. More by accident than by design though, nearly half the dual-degree
holders in his batch took to entrepreneurship in 2013.
All IITs are going through a demographic shift. Post-graduate students today outnumber
undergraduates.
Just so the undergrad teaching isn’t diluted, and the students “retain the spark in their
eyes”, some limited steps started as far back as the early aughts have now been expanded.
Dean of planning, David Koilpillai, recalls coming back after 16 years in the US to find the
fun department he had left — electrical engineering – was no longer fun.
Professors were teaching but without caring whether students got an internship or a job.
“I said, ‘We’ll fix it.’ We got a set of professors from different departments who’d keep
engineering on the side and engage with students first. It was important to keep their
passion alive,” says Koilpillai. Coming from Caltech, where Nobel laureate Richard
Feynman teaching the basic physics course is folklore, he and others made sure electrical
engineering was popular again.
Over the years IIT-M went on to devise many such introductory courses.
Koilpillai’s measure of success?
“We see less students sleeping in class and more students staying back in engineering”.
And as more students stay back and take to research – in August Modi government
announced 1000 new research fellowships – the Research Park next door is just the right
place to build stuff for the truly inclined.
Reach out, be relevant

How the Research Park came about is a story of a handful professors who ostensibly
wished to go beyond their duty of teaching and research, and take their own technologies
to people. As early as 1985, when starting up was a social putdown for academics,
Jhunjhunwala founded Benchmark Systems to make cheaper fibre-optics kits for
classroom teaching. Over the years, 4000 engineering colleges in India ended up using his
kits.
The Institute had a bit of a head-start in working on real world problems. It set up its
industrial consultancy in the early 1970s, much before the last of German professors,
Hans Wagner, left the Chennai campus. It was also a rub-off of the long German

association. But what Jhunjhunwala had in mind was something different – co-location
with industry partners even as he was incubating businesses around technologies coming
out of the electrical engineering department.
An all-contained Research Park was taking shape in their minds. In mid-2000s, he lucked
out in getting 6.5 acres carved out of Jayalalitha Film City where, with 100 crores in
government grant, IIT-M built the Park. But the initial years were spent in putting bricks
and mortar when the academics wrapped their heads around how to engage with the
industry effectively.
It was IIM-Bangalore professor J Ramachandran, with whom Jhunjhunwala served on

some corporate Boards, who made him understand that if the two partners define and
agree to some credits in the contract, then auditors make sure they become part of senior
executives’ Key Result Area. A credit system was devised where for every 1000 sq ft of
area industry had to earn certain credits.
“When your variable pay is dependent on whether you achieve this or not, then you can be
assured the work will get done. With this credit system, which we keep refining, we
created a huge force in the Park,” says Jhunjhunwala.
Making research count
“When your variable pay is dependent on whether you achieve this or not, then you can be
assured the work will get done. With this credit system, which we keep refining, we
created a huge force in the Research Park,” says Ashok Jhunjhunwala.
The Park earns Rs 10 crore annually but by the time the second phase gets operational
next year, it expects manifold increase in income. In a coup of sorts, it managed to get the
French construction and materials company Saint Gobain as an anchor client. In its 350-
year history the conservative conglomerate has not gone to a place where it doesn’t own
the perimeter. Over six months, five teams came from France to evaluate if there were
enough collaborative research potential. Eventually they took one-seventh of the space.
As part of the strategic plan, by 2020 IIT-M would have 60% of its faculty working with
the industry, up from the current 45%. By then it also plans to have 20 new companies
starting up every year.
So far, 102 companies have been incubated of which 60 came up in the last two years,
around a host of new technologies, in water, renewable energy, biomedical. While it
provided Rs 8 crore in seed funding to 84 of them, 30 startups have raised Rs 320 crore in
venture funding with Ather Energy alone garnering Rs 81 crore in Series A.
Viewed objectively, it’s an impressive record by Indian institutional standards. Other IITs
want to emulate. Mumbai is building a research park close to its Powai campus, but Delhi
is fine even going to Panipat, to a new 50-acre campus, as long as it can do what IIT-M
has done. To save on lost time, it plans to start with prefabricated structures.

“Nobody realized such a Park was important. IIT-M is certainly much ahead of all other
IITs. If we can do as well as IIT-M, then we can later think of improving upon it. After we
announced 200,000 sq ft in Panipat, the industry has shown great interest; the space is
already sold out,” says Rao.
Hopefully, IIT-M experience will show others that it’s not just about creating ‘physical’
spaces.
Although a dozen odd start-ups came out of just the telecom group in Chennai, none
made a splash especially when the start-up activity elsewhere began heating up.
How does Jhunjhunwala rate his early evangelism?
“Tejas [Networks] came out of our lab, it is now reaching Rs 1000 crore. Midas
[Communications started in 1994] reached Rs 500 crore [before it imploded]. Look, you
have to allow some companies to fail. But surely enough must succeed,” he says.
“What we learnt was at this space [in Research Park] is that start-ups’ work gets over once
they reach Rs 5 to 10 crore [in revenue]. Beyond that we can’t add value, though we may
add some bit of technology here and there. In Midas we made this mistake. Once they
reached Rs 100 crore I should have recognized that a change in management or even a
change in control was needed,” says Jhunjhunwala.
However, two decades of developing telecom technologies made the IIT-M group a go-to-
resource for the government when telecom became the breakout industry and officials
had to deal with imported equipment. To understand what was inside, what to specify,
and how to buy was not trivial.
Acceleration due to proximity

Twenty years ago when the TeNeT group at IIT-M proposed Wireless in Local Loop, a new
last mile wireless technology to take telephony to masses since it was the wiring of
households which accounted for two-thirds of the telecommunications cost, it looked
difficult in plain sight. Telecom companies were laying wires everywhere and here was
Jhunjhunwala suggesting disruption. He found few backers, even in the government or
Delhi’s starchy bureaucracy.
Looking back, Ramamurthi is realistic.
“Others would have gone with us in a big way if we had access to a radio interface.
Problem was we were very strong in system design but not in wireless design. We did not
have radio frequency people. We could have done with cellular technology but we did not
know how to do it and it was a closely guarded technology those days. We didn’t foresee
what could happen with mobile systems. By the time we overcame the hurdles, mobile
telephony had arrived,” says Ramamurthi.
IIT-M Director, Bhaskar Ramamurthi

Perception-wise we have a problem. Some of
them go back 20 years. People still say we have
water problem even though we fixed it long
ago. Then the perception among undergrads is
that mumbai has better placements. Looking at
data, it is because of the few very high paying
financial consultancy jobs that go only to
mumbai because the multinationals are
headquartered there…look, south has a
perception issue, even in the us [southern
states face this]” – Bhaskar Ramamurthi
Unlike WLL, in solar-DC they are on a firm

footing. Both Ramamurthi and Jhunjhunwala
have risen in stature and have linkages in the
government. More importantly, this time they
could get industry to some make products.
Initial naysayers have come around the idea of
solar-DC; the first to blink was the power technologies giant ABB. A few others followed,
including Bluestar, Lucas-TVS, Crompton and Amararaja, India’s largest battery maker.
They have further reduced the risk by separating solar-DC from their new brown-out
technology. It’s meant to end black-outs by introducing a new low-level AC power line in
the grid to supply a minimum amount of DC power at 48 Volts to all homes on the
existing grid. Since it would require some work at the grid and sub-station level,
something which makes it akin to WLL in the scale of disruption, it requires government
support.
Even though in July Goyal said his ministry is experimenting with the brown-out
technology, professors believe its success or failure is not linked to solar-DC.
‘We are much better off this time by working on the standardization, from the beginning,”
says Ramamurthi. Along with the Bureau of Indian Standards, the international body
IEEE is keen to standardize 48 volts for solar-DC. “The world also is more willing to look
at a disruptive technology from India than what it was 20 years ago,” he says.
“Prof Jhunjhunwlala used to be a rebel; now people say you are a part of the
establishment”?
“I am still a rebel. But this time we said let’s identify who’d help you and run with them,
don’t try to convince and fight the whole system all the time. We learnt to duck,” says
Jhunjhunwala.
Systemic changes are not just few, but even fraught.
At IIT-M Ramamurthi is still debating how best to assess faculty’s work beyond
publishing. If a third of them are going to work with the industry by 2020, a clear
mechanism must be in place, just as it is for starting up which has led 30 of them to work

with start-ups, as co-founders and minority stakeholders. (Rao at IIT-D wants this
number to go up from five to 50 in about three years.)
“Very few understand the Park’s purpose, not just outside IIT-M but even within it. It’ll be
a decade before the big leap is visible to all,” said Ather’s Mehta. “The only reason IIT-M
companies are small and not branded as unicorns is that it is very hard to start, run and
succeed as a hardware start-up in India.”
Blast from the past

Far from the start-up chatter in an unassuming ground-floor Space Lab, stairs damaged
from the floods last year, Akshay Gulati and a dozen students are pegging away at their
payload – a high energy particle detector. It’d nest inside a 12-kg nano-satellite aboard an
ISRO rocket, Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Six years ago when a group of students wanted to build a satellite, the institute said they’d
back a satellite that made a difference, not just another student satellite. After some
months Gulati and others came up with the idea of an in-orbit detector that would study
charged particles in the ionosphere which, if measured, could predict earthquakes. (A few
hours before an earthquake there are perturbations on the ground but they are difficult to
measure because of their extremely low frequency.)
In one year, the detector must capture enough events – at least 60 earthquakes above 5
Richter scale – to be able to make a meaningful inference.
When they approached ISRO, the agency said it stayed away from earthquake predictions;
it even discouraged the students because the detector would require very high speed
electronics to measure the transient phenomena and few in the country could make those.

Akshay Gulati with the nano-satellite IITMSAT which carries a detector to study charged particles in
the ionosphere prior to earthquakes.
More than 300 students from six batches have worked on the detector which will be
placed in orbit later this year. After reviewing it, ISRO said it “would have been proud if
its scientists had built it”.
This satellite is one of many research projects that are now possible because the institute
is allowing undergrad students to do them as a course for credits and, no less importantly,
the alumni network is willing to fund such seemingly-crazy ideas. In Gulati’s Rs 3-crore
project, Rs 2.25 crore, came from the alumni.
At the turn of the century, it was IIT-B which first showed what a multiplier force an
alumni network could be. Culturally different from Mumbai, Chennai took its own sweet
time. And fair to say, like the institute, alumni also take the character of the city.
“If you removed IIT and just kept Mumbai and Chennai, the difference would be valid.
IIT-M has lot of successful entrepreneurs who make a lot of money but go about it very
quietly; even their families don’t know how much money they are making,” goes the tale.
What ticks Chennai

“If you removed IIT and just kept Mumbai and Chennai, the difference would be valid.
IIT-M has lot of successful entrepreneurs who make a lot of money but go about it very
quietly; even their families don’t know how much money they are making,” goes the tale

In the 23 years that R Nagarajan stayed away from the campus, he hardly ever heard
anything from the institute. In 2009, five years after his return, he took charge of alumni
affairs and three years later the institute created a Dean’s position for alumni and
international affairs, merging the two. (For perspective, IIT-B created a Dean-level
position nearly a decade earlier.)
“We focused on reaching out to our alumni, engaging them, and giving a clear
understanding of what had changed at the institute. We then tried to gauge their interest,”
said Nagarajan.
The results took two-three years to show. Prior to 2009, the average fundraising from
alumni, including the occasional spikes, was Rs 3 crore. It reached Rs 10 crore in 2011,
touched Rs 55 crore in 2015. Nagarajan estimates this year to end with Rs 100 crore. The
plan is to reach a steady state of Rs 100 crore, and then build a corpus. Almost all
contribution so far is towards projects, not endowment.
“We needed to build the trust before we built a corpus,” says Nagarajan.
Most IITs don’t have any corpus to talk about. “All IITs average just about Rs 10-15 crore
a year in fund raising,” says Rao of IIT-D. Since he took over as director in April, he’s
doubling down on bigger and better involvement with alumni. An app now connects IIT-D
alumni directly with students.
In Chennai, Nagarajan ensures it’s seamless – money comes for a project, gets deployed,
project ends and the alumnus gets a report. This process has generated confidence in the
45,000-strong network.
A few years ago, when Nagarajan wrote to this group seeking their interest in supporting a
stadium with a synthetic track, Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa asked how much they
needed and offered to fund the entire project, which cost Rs 5.5 crore.
“There’s a definite focus on getting us to contribute back [to IIT-M] in many ways,” says
Venky Harinarayan, serial entrepreneur (Junglee.com, Kosmix and others) and venture
capitalist in California. “Bhaskar and Nagarajan have been consistently building bridges
between top minds in the US and Chennai in last four-five years which is now showing.”
Design, Develop and Deploy

In one such alumni meeting in 2014, Lalit Mahajan happened to be on the campus, which
he never visited since his B-Tech in 1968, not even for his chemical engineering degree
certificate. During dinner, Ramamurthi invited Mahajan, founder of Delhi-based
diagnostics company J Mitra, to visit the new Health Technology and Innovation Centre
(HTIC) in Research Park.
Mahajan had tried working with IIT-D many years ago without much success but he
obliged Ramamurthi, and told his wife, with whom he had planned a trip to
Mahabalipuram, he’d be “out of that place in half an hour”. He stayed on for more than
six hours, of course cancelling his excursion.

What followed is an outlier. With the centre’s director Mohan Sivaprakasam, Mahajan
signed up to develop a luminescence-technology-based portable instrument for rapid
diagnosis of diseases. It cost him Rs 7 crore but in less than 18 months the device is ready;
300 of them are being tested with doctors and pathologists. Mahajan, who returned from
the annual meeting of American Association of Clinical Chemists in Philadelphia last
month, is as pleased as punch.
“No [global diagnostic company] has such a point-of-care instrument. In the lab, their
minimum cost is Rs 10-11 lakh, whereas ours would sell at one-tenth later this year,” he
says.
For Sivaprakasam and his associate J Jayaraj this is becoming routine, developing
functional medical technology that is. It wasn’t easy to pin down so many moving parts.
In 2009 when he joined the electrical engineering department IIT-M, having worked on
cutting-edge corneal and cochlear implants in the US, he realized he hadn’t quite skated
to where the puck was going. If anything, he was five years too early; people were not
ready for medtech in India, least in engineering schools which, in any case, never go all
the way up to deployment.
Jhunjhunwala introduced Sivaprakasam to Maharaj K Bhan, Secretary of the Department

of Biotechnology in Delhi. In April 2009 when Bhan visited IIT-M after a three-hour
discussion, he said, “This has a high chance of failure. But go ahead. Banao.”
Sivaprakasam wasn’t sure how to write a proposal. Ramamurthi was the dean at that time
and suggested they set up a centre to “develop and deploy technology”, “make something
which is relevant”. Mohan submitted the proposal for HTIC.
Many in Delhi bureaucracy said, “The guy is only 28 and is asking for Rs 25 crore.”
However, both DBT and IIT-M took a big chance. Even before it was inaugurated in 2012,
the mobile eye surgical unit, which HTIC built with Sankara Nethralaya, had already done
486 surgeries in villages. The unique design, built of two standard bus chassis which when
parked in parallel convert into a world class operation theatre, is letting the hospital do
more surgeries in a day than its land-based operation theatre allows.
The second unit, sponsored by Tata Sons, went functional in Jamshedpur in July.
(Not a head-to-head comparison, but IIT-B has a healthcare consortium and academics
there admit it doesn’t have much to show in the name of deployment.)
Evolution
In some sense, T Pradeep’s evolution at IIT-M is the evolution of the institute.
When he returned from Purdue University in 1993, Pradeep had job offers from the IITs
in Kanpur and Kharagpur and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. IIT-M
was the last to offer, a temporary position at that.

Chemistry, like all sciences at an engineering school, was viewed as a supporting
discipline.
“When I asked about my lab, my department said you can’t have a lab of your own. But I
consciously built my lab,” he recalls. That has become a culture; everyone either has or
wants to have a lab. The institute has allowed academics to pursue this which, in turn, has
fostered many PhDs between engineering and sciences.
Around 2003, when the then director MS Ananth was rolling out the first strategy plan
(2003-2010), Pradeep was wrestling with a personal challenge: “Should I make a
difference? Can I, as a chemist, make a difference?” were the questions he grappled with.
His research in molecular materials was throwing up immense possibilities.
But the line connecting his discoveries and various water filters in the market was
anything but straight.
Continuing his tradition of building instruments, T Pradeep built this spectrometer in his lab at a cost
of $1 million, only one of such in the world, to study the first few molecules of ice.
Today his group’s nanochemistry based filter for pesticide removal is used in many parts
of India, more than 7.5 million people use it. But even as his prolific research group – he
publishes more than 20 papers in a year and neatly catalogues them to circulate on
December 31 – churned out new findings, he understood getting all of them to the market
was nearly impossible. Even big brands like Bajaj or Tata were not willing to take up the
lab work for building new products.

“They all asked for ‘boxes’ (products), which was not possible in the lab setting,” he says.
So he too began to incubate businesses. In May, his co-founded company InnoNano
Research received $18 million from US-based energy and water investment firm
NanoHoldings.
Like a few others on the campus, Pradeep, for whom IIT-M has created a unique position
of Institute Professor, is pushing the envelope at both ends – science and technology. And
water is his chosen battleground.
Given India’s water crisis, in the long run we have to ensure there is water to purify, he
says.
“Eventually we have to get to atmospheric water capture for drinking, especially in coastal
areas which have 90% humidity. Why depend on ground water? But that requires energy
which requires new materials”, he says, pointing to several next-gen water purifiers under
development in the spanking new labs.
Water capture
“Eventually we have to get to atmospheric water capture for drinking, especially in coastal
areas which have 90% humidity. Why depend on ground water? But that requires energy
which requires new materials”, he says, pointing to several next-gen water purifiers under
development in the spanking new labs
But these are small dots in his larger scheme of things. Pradeep’s lab has water programs
with half a dozen countries and he has been organizing an international conference on
clean water for four years. Now, he wants all that to converge in a new International
Center for Water at IIT-M’s new campus in Thaiyur, 35 km from the main campus.
“We want it to be a centre where you can come with your idea on water, build your
technology and go back,” he says.
People on the campus are free to find their levels. Ramamurthi says the institute does not
expect all faculty members to do the same thing.
“Although we are yet to arrive at a mechanism to assess industrial work, saying we

brought a certain amount of money is not enough. We are also learning how to assess
failure; it’s not easy. We don’t measure by things that can be gamed, like a list of accepted
journals, but we do watch where and what we publish. Are we developing things that
matter? Our evolving assessment is very different from what even the West does [of
measuring paper citations]. Hope we get it right,” says Ramamurthi.
If Indian institutions go after publications, in a few years, going by current trends, they
will get the citations and, hence, the ranks. But in the Indian context it is equally
important that engineering schools take up societal challenges.
Work In Progress

Speaking of challenges, one that stares IIT-M is its perception in the eyes of students.
Looking at top 100 JEE rank holders, almost all of them go to IIT-B. Depending on how
many seats Mumbai has in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), 50 or 60, the
remaining toppers go to IIT-D and then to IIT-M.
One could argue 60-odd ranks in the top 100 are from Kota and the Western Zone, for
whom going to the south isn’t that attractive. But the rub lies in the choice of the
remaining 40-odd top 100 rankers who are from Andhra Pradesh. Even they choose to go
to IIT-B, nearly all of them.
Rush to IIT-B
One could argue 60-odd ranks in the top 100 are from Kota and the Western Zone, for
whom going to the south isn’t that attractive. But the rub lies in the choice of the
remaining 40-odd top 100 rankers who are from Andhra Pradesh. Even they choose to go
to IIT-B, nearly all of them
“At the end of the day, it’s a free market. If you were a startup and your customers are not
buying your product, you figure out what are the problems and fix it,” says an IIT-M CSE
alumnus, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Nearly 25 years ago, the distribution of top rankers was even. It was geographic, students
chose an IIT which was closest to their native place. But as the tech industry’s prowess
spread, as Mumbai’s CSE strength grew, as its illustrious alumni strutted the Silicon
Valley landscape, and as coaching institutes fed students with formulaic tips, it was the
‘network effect’ which set perceptions. Not just of students, but of parents as well.
Skewed as it may be — after all why should only one subject matter in engineering – just
look at the five biggest companies in the US. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and
Facebook are all software companies.
As for the course, top students going to Mumbai is a slow, trailing indicator, not a leading
indicator. While it tells us how good CSE at IIT-B is, it doesn’t say much about how bad
CSE at IIT-M is. Alumni say in the late 1980s, the preferred CSE place was IIT-Kanpur
even though some of the leading professors, V Rajaraman, HN Mahabala and S
Muthukrishnan had left Kanpur and moved to IISc and IIT-M respectively more than a
decade ago.
There’s a lag between reality and perception.
That said, IIT-B CSE has been phenomenal because the leadership in early 1990s was
open to new ideas. In 1993, Srinivasan Seshadri was returning to India, fresh after his
doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. His first choice was IIT-M, his alma mater, but it
was IIT-B which managed to woo him as an assistant professor.
“In one year, they hired three people returning to India. There was just so much
intellectual honesty, willingness to embrace new thoughts and hire people better than
themselves,” says Seshadri, now a serial entrepreneur in California, most recently of

Zettata. And the trend continued in Mumbai.
During those years, IIT-M let its CSE strength drop, to below 20 and for various reasons.
The department strength is nearly 30 now. Ramamurthi says it’d grow to 38-40 by 2020.
Several new areas have been introduced with endowed chairs from alumni support, like
Computational Brain Research funded by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and
Inter-Disciplinary Biological Systems Engineering programme by the Mehta Chair in
Biosciences. Some Visiting Chair programmes are planned as well.
But the problem has been many years in making and will take some time, even as the
institute carves out its place in other fields.
In July, when Goyal visited the Research Park, he inaugurated a Battery Engineering and
Electric Vehicle Centre. The team behind solar-DC believes its disruptive ideas in
batteries and motors for EVs can make these vehicles viable in the urban Indian market
and it “wants to see them through”.
What many IIT professors like to see, though, is: “All top five IITs are in the same league”.
But if rankings periodically push them into the Orwellian axiom, and some appear more
equal than others, it’s a good thing; even if angsty and temporarily unsettling. We’ll see
some of that later in September when Shanghai and QS rankings hit the headline.
IIT Madras

The second coming: RBI’s move on crypto assets
dubbed ‘demonetisation-2’
the-ken.com/story/rbi-crypto-assets-demonetisation
April 10, 2018
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“We haven’t received a notice from our banks; we don’t know whether we have one week
or three months.”
Shubham Yadav, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coindelta, is talking about the

grave uncertainty that is his future. On Friday, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released
a circular which notes the provisions of law under which it can prohibit banks and
financial institutions from dealing with cryptocurrency businesses. Yadav, and others
like him, are now planning ahead.
“We plan to move our office outside of India and from there we will operate in the
country. Also, we are looking for alternate ways by which people can still buy
cryptocurrency using Rupee by bypassing the RBI’s directive. There are a couple of
business models we are looking into and we are working on that,” he says.
Certain that crypto trade is no longer a lucrative option in India, Yadav explains, “There
is now a blockade for customers who would want to trade in crypto to crypto pairs.”
So, is this the end for cryptocurrency exchanges?
In its first bi-monthly monetary policy announcement for this financial year, the central
bank gave a shocker to the Indian crypto community. It stated that it will be prohibiting
banks and financial institutions regulated by it from dealing with virtual currencies.
the-ken.com-The second coming RBIs move on crypto assets dubbed demonetisation-2 1/2 805
As per the circular, RBI governed entities cannot engage in services like maintaining
accounts, registering, trading, settling, clearing, giving loans against virtual tokens,
accepting them as collateral, opening accounts of exchanges dealing with them, and the
transfer/receipt of money in accounts relating to purchase/sale of VCs.
This means that all legit modes of trading Rupee for cryptocurrencies are now shut and
all the exchanges have been completely excluded from the country’s financial system.
“In his Union Budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley clearly said that virtual
currencies are not legal tender. It is a fallout of that decision of the government that this
move has come from the Reserve Bank,” says former RBI Deputy Governor R Gandhi.
RBI has traditionally prevented banks from interacting with anything that has a volatile
valuation, he says. “For virtual currencies, because of its wild price movement, the
Reserve Bank has come to this conclusion. That’s my understanding,” he adds.
There are over two dozen cryptocurrency exchanges in India, with some that were
preparing to launch. Around 5 million people trade (or have invested) in them. And
while governments across the world are regulating businesses based on
cryptocurrencies, RBI took a measure so drastic that it could mean the end of an entire
industry. In this light, it becomes important to understand what the central bank is
trying to achieve here, what repercussions this will have, and whether this was the best
way to go about it.
Demonetisation – A sequel
Citing concerns of “consumer protection, market integrity and money laundering”, the
RBI made this move to cut off the crypto industry from India’s formal payment network.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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the-ken.com-The second coming RBIs move on crypto assets dubbed demonetisation-2 2/2 806
The ShareChat phenomenon
the-ken.com/story/the-sharechat-phenomenon
August 17, 2018
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“How are you?” That’s me.
“Hi,” comes the reply. A few seconds of pleasantries and fake names, “Please send your
picture.”
Uh-oh. Two minutes of silence and the chat has been dropped.
In another window, someone asks if I am a girl. As I answer “No,” the window closes on
me within seconds.
A third person asks me to text only in Hindi.
These are my first 10 minutes on the “Shake and Chat (with strangers)” feature of the
social network app, called ShareChat. Chat without sharing your profile, like a blind date
where you are actually blindfolded.
It’s 10 am on Independence Day and I am surfing further on ShareChat. A patriotic post

has been seen by at least 177,000 people and shared 6,000 times on WhatsApp. Another
image with the national anthem on it has been seen 103,000 times and liked by 1,100
people on my feed, which looks somewhat like Instagram.
I can post anything here—images, audio, video, GIFs or a status that is no less than 50
characters. And I can consume content through two Instagram-style scrolling feeds, one
that has posts from my friends and people I follow and another that has “Trending” posts.
Immediately below each post are buttons to share it on WhatsApp, like it, enter a
comment, flag it as inappropriate or save it to my gallery in the app for later viewing.
Everything on ShareChat is sorted into various categories and subcategories using tags,
and I can choose what I want to see by selecting the tag of my choice. ShareChat’s 35-
member team usually creates these tags, which are later taken over by the users; there is a
separate corner for user-created tags. On I-Day, under the tag “Saare jahaan se acha” are
sub-tags like “15 August Special”, “15 August Selfie” and “Agar main Pradhan Mantri
hota”.
25
The average number of tags or genres that ShareChat uses to organize content
the-ken.com-The ShareChat phenomenon 1/3 807

It’s an interesting assortment of content. While some of these tags are permanent and
broad, like jokes or lifestyle, some like the Independence Day are created for different
occasions. Everything from good-morning messages and jokes to romantic posts and
adult humour has a tag of its own. For instance, the adult humour or sexually suggestive
content is titled “Non-Veg”. “Adult content is only for adult audiences. If you can’t share it
with your family, tag it NV,” say the platform’s content and community guidelines.
Not all tags are as euphemistic though; most are pretty straightforward, like Mazedar,
News and Politics Corner, Jyotish Shastra, Fitness Mantra and Filmy Duniya.
English Vinglish
The home-grown social network—part Instagram, part Facebook,

part Twitter, all vernacular—has millions of users flocking to it.
The hard part will be retaining and monetising them
Harveen Ahluwalia, 17 Aug 2018
Bengaluru-based social network ShareChat is exclusively focused on vernacular internet
users
The application is a bunch of global social networks packed in one and claims to be
nearing 20 million users a month
So far, Mohalla Tech, which owns ShareChat, has not started monetising on the
application
However, it won't be easy for ShareChat to sustain the user base, and in the process,
make money

The startup circus is in town
the-ken.com/story/startup-circus
August 4, 2017
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The moment you hear of it, you may be forgiven for suppressing a chuckle. But I’m not
judging. I’m merely taking in everything which is being told to me. Because taking in what
people tell me is me doing my job. So, I am taking in…
Did I hear you right, a reality show on television?
Yup.
On startups?
Yup.
To do what exactly?
It is a unique new reality show. Droom.in presents MTV Dropout Pvt. Ltd. Powered by
Micromax and Maruti Suzuki, Grooming partner Gillette, which will see the birth of the
world’s first ever startup formed on television.
Wow. Why exactly is this unique reality show needed?
To form a first-of-a-kind start-up following a massive nationwide hunt to find hidden

gems; the most brilliant people outside established management and entrepreneurial
systems. These mavericks are to be groomed by industry leaders through trials-by-fire
where they solve real-world business problems in a short span of time.
Wow. For real?
the-ken.com-The startup circus is in town 1/2 810

Yup.
And what exactly will Dropout Private Limited do?
So, that’s not decided yet.
Really?
Yup.
So, Dropout Private Limited is not the eventual, proper company name…
…Yup.
How does this work, again??
So, of the contestants, there will be a few who will be selected by the judges. Once they are
selected they will be put through real life, entrepreneurship challenges. Situations. To see
how they do. At the end of the show, some three or four will be chosen to form a company.
What will be the name of this company, what it will do, we don’t know all of that at the
moment. That will be decided by the judges as the show goes.
Fascinating.
Yup. It is a unique concept. A one-of-a-kind reality TV show.
Right.
There comes a time in every person’s life, when a decision has to be made. To quote what
a wise man once said: “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You
take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want
to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the
rabbit hole goes.”
I took the red pill.
Follow the white rabbit

Every show has needs its protagonists. The centres of attention. The people at whom the
spotlight is trained. And who are they here? Contestants?
Wrong, the judges.
the-ken.com-The startup circus is in town 2/2 811

The super secretive story of India’s Rs 4500 cr
supercomputing mission
the-ken.com/story/indias-rs-4500-cr-supercomputing-mission
March 20, 2017
“We are going to install 73 supercomputers in different parts of the country and all will be
linked by a computer grid,” said a government statement on 25 March 2015, the day the
NDA government approved a Rs 4,500-crore (~ $670 million) plan towards a National
Supercomputing Mission (NSM). Rs 2,800 crore would come from the Department of
Science and Technology (DST) and Rs 1,700 crore from the Department of IT.
As goals went, it was not only audacious but also sensible. Rs 4,500 crore over seven years
to make ‘home brew supercomputers’ a reality in India. How? By taking off-the-shelf
components and making teraflop computers—computing at a trillion floating point
operations per second—that are easy to maintain. And then seed them in colleges and
universities across the country. The smallest of institutions with access to the highest
order of computing systems. In the process create a wave of High Performance
Computing (HPC), as supercomputing is also referred to. Finally, demonstrate that not
just defence, climate change or seemingly grandiose problems but everyday industrial
use-cases would need and benefit from such computing power.
The high-level process would be simple.
Decide how many of those teraflop machines will be bought and how many will be built
(read, assembled) locally. Seek expressions of intent from vendors who are milling
around. Consult the users at the planning stage and during the purchase of hardware
because different real world problems require different architecture. Call for proposals in
a transparent, phased manner, depending on what pressing problems your core team of
experts have identified and then get on with releasing money and solving those problems.
Sounds like a plan, in any given circumstance.
the-ken.com-The super secretive story of Indias Rs 4500 cr supercomputing mission 1/7 812
This is where intent and actions differ, unfortunately. Because two years later, not one
supercomputer has been installed.
It can’t possibly be because no one supposedly knows how many of these will be bought
and how many have to be assembled. “Earlier the plan was half of the supercomputers
would be bought to get the research started and then half of the systems would be
integrated,” says a technology vendor, who requested not to be named because he is still
involved in the project. “As vendors, we have given technology specifications and
roadmaps several times. An expression of intent was sought but nothing has moved
beyond that.”
There are various committees set up, for R&D, infrastructure, applications and so on. But
they are all at sea. “Committees have been meeting but have no clue how to proceed, or to
what deadline. They discuss, go back, meet again, discuss and go back,” says one
committee member in Bengaluru. He requested not to be named.
For a mission that was meant to revive India’s place in the global Top 500
supercomputers list, create a cadre of professionals and get the Indian industry hooked to
HPC, it has become an old boys’ network. A network that, two years into the project, isn’t
even articulating what it intends to do.
Supercomputing at the speed of word of mouth
Late last year, the following email from an academic at the Indian Institute of Science
(IISc) was sent to a few people. Three, to be precise.
That was the call for proposals of a priority supercomputing mission—by word of mouth.
The email writer does not say in which capacity he is soliciting the proposals. Or why it is
not being done through the NSM website? Perhaps because he realised the site was,
ironically, frozen in time (or was until the publishing of this article) with no useful
information, not even a ‘Contact us’ link.
Unlike a typical office project, calls for academic proposals are governed by data
protection acts. It would be considered a deeply unethical act for any of the reviewers of
the proposal to leak its contents.
“Why on earth would I respond to a random email, asking for a proposal, which,
essentially, is a giveaway on the kind of scientific problems I want to work on,” says a
physicist who works in this field and did not receive this email directly but stumbled onto
it through three degrees of separation.
Now, contrast this with what India’s space agency, Isro, did last August when it sought
proposals for its Mars-2 mission. An open, public call that laid down all the rules:
And remember, Mars-2 is a much smaller project than NSM. (While the Mars-2 budget is
not public yet, it can be estimated from the Mars-1 budget, which was Rs 447.39 crore or
~$67 million)
It’s not just the size, the complexity of HPC is rarely fully understood. A person leading
any of the multiple committees must know many overlapping areas: They need to know
their own science and numerical analysis. Then they need to know programming and
hardware reasonably well. Unless people understand these, it’d be hard to gauge what is
the real world problem that can be solved in 5 years, 10 years or what cannot be solved
even in 20 years. Not very many people in the country are conversant with HPC in this
context. So, it isn’t surprising to learn they are groping in the dark. Widespread HPC is
not more than 20-25 years old. It proliferated and took off when supercomputers could be
made from commodity hardware in the late 1980s.
“A lot of people in these committees have not experienced this ecosystem around HPC. I
attended one meeting in Bengaluru, where Intel was trying to sell its new chip. Before
that, I attended one meeting in Goa, which was dominated by the industry. It all sounded
very good but no one really had an idea what NSM actually wanted to do,” says an
academic, who has since distanced himself from these meetings.
And the gerontocracy continues to throw its weight around.
From a soft power to a superpower
In 2011, when the Chinese machine Tianhe-1 became the fastest supercomputer in the
world, the political class in Delhi felt that India was being left behind. Between 2012 and
2013, at the behest of the erstwhile Planning Commission, an elaborate plan was put
together for an NSM, which incidentally had a projected cost of Rs 4,500 crore. But the
UPA-II never got around to formally approving it. In March 2015, when the NDA
government approved it, the language smacked more of catch-up nationalism than of a
scientific mission. “As far as supercomputing is concerned, India is ranked at number 74
and China is number 1. There are 500 supercomputers in the world, and India has only
9,” said the minister at that time.
If China is number one, and it has been so for seven years in a row, it’s because it has
consistently invested in building an HPC community ever since it started in the 1950s. By
1986, when China announced its famous ‘863’ programme to gain parity with the US and
the rest of world in supercomputing, it was a coordinated effort to master all the related
technologies in semiconductor manufacturing, the design of integrated circuits, mining
and refining of rare earth metals, and other things. In 2016, China led the Top 500 list
with 169 machines. The US came second, with 165 machines.
Recent policies in those two countries have been aimed at boosting supercomputing
through internal investments and export controls. National security and domestic
industries are cited as the top reasons. In July 2015, President Barack Obama issued an
executive order authorising a National Strategic Computing Initiative.
Apart from the bragging rights and muscular power that come with supercomputers, the
commercial uses for HPC are increasing by the day.
“We understood that the new kid on the block is biology. The largest requirements of the
future are likely to be in biology, material science, finance and national data repositories,”
says Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, former chairman of the Supercomputer Education
and Research Centre at the IISc and one of the architects of NSM. He wouldn’t comment
on the current progress because he is given to believe that he is “no longer wanted”.
India’s supercomputing effort began in the last 1980s after it was denied the Cray
supercomputer under a technology embargo, which led to the setting up of the Centre for
Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). In 1990, when PARAM, a multiprocessor
machine, was unveiled by the C-DAC, at 5 gigaflops, it was the second fastest
supercomputer in the world at that time.
“After one mission in the 1980s, the whole of the 1990s got wasted because nobody
consolidated the early gains. It became too tactical and routine,” says S Ramakrishnan,
former C-DAC director general, who retired in 2009. “Once a government commits to
such programmes, it must go on progressively escalating the budget, delivery and use. It
shouldn’t become an accountant,” he said. By the 2000s, the technology controls were
lifted, users could buy from wherever they wanted and India’s build programme
weakened. “One or two people who had clout in Delhi and in purchase committees, they
always favoured machines from multinational companies. In the land of the blind, one-
eyed person is the king,” he added*.
The NSM hot potato
What Ramakrishnan does not admit is that the users and builders of HPC have never
really communicated with each other in India. “It has grown over the years because
people who have built these machines have not built anything that the users can use,” says
a physicist from a government institution who has not been even remotely consulted
under NSM.
(A list of the top Indian machines is here.)
The muddle continues. The appointment of Rajat Moona, who as director general of the
C-DAC was a key professional in the NSM, ends this month, and he is off to a new
assignment, as the director of IIT-Bhilai. Several emails and phone calls to his office in
Pune remained unanswered. In January 2016, when the DST and MeITY had released Rs
110 crore towards NSM, Moona had said, “What is interesting is that this time the focus
isn’t restricted to building the supercomputers but also creating applications that would
benefit from it.”
Reportedly, Alok Bhattacharya, a professor at the School of Life Sciences at the

Jawaharlal Nehru University, heads the applications committee. Emails and calls to him
did not elicit any response, either. Even the DST, which routinely makes open calls for
proposals, has nothing open about NSM. Its 2015-16 annual report began with NSM:
“The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread
over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70
high-performance computing facilities. The Mission also includes development of highly
professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting
challenges of development of these applications. Supercomputing capability would add a
great value to realize the goals of Digital India.”
But emails and calls to the DST Secretary remained unanswered. In the 2017-18 annual
budget, a sum of Rs 595 crore has been earmarked by DST and 1 out of 10 areas in which
this money would be spent is “activities envisaged for implementing the Super Computing
Mission would be pursued”. At an event in Delhi on 7 March, IT secretary, Aruna
Sundararajan, brushed aside questions on NSM from The Ken reporter saying, “I don’t
have time for all this.”
That brings us to the final authority on NSM: VK Saraswat, a member of NITI Aayog, the
think-tank in the present government, which is perceived to be a seat of power next only
to the Prime Minister’s Office. While NITI Aayog has published scores of policy briefs and
white papers, there’s no report on NSM. Emails and phone calls to Saraswat did not elicit
any response.
A former chief of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Saraswat, who
heads all NSM committees, is believed to think poorly of the Mission. “He thinks there is
no case for such a mega project because no good proposals are coming,” says an industry
expert who has participated in some discussions.
In truth, it is difficult to overstate how big a deal NSM is. These missions are not approved
every day. Nor are there gigantic military projects in missiles or fighter aircraft that would
drive supercomputing in India, as they did 10 years ago. Commercial, academic and
national security objectives are the biggest drivers. But NSM can’t proceed with the
secrecy and cost overruns of a defence deal.
Update: After the story was published, on 23 March, former C-DAC DG S Ramakrishnan
wrote saying his quote was incomplete. Here’s the remaining part of his comment:
“In the above context, the NSM initiative, with critical quantum of funding, has come not
a day too late. Given the generous government support, it can address the above lessons
learnt and fulfill today’s national aspirations.”
The tricky business of making the perfect Covid
sanitiser
the-ken.com/story/the-perfect-covid-sanitiser
May 12, 2020
Register or Login
“Categories are established in a crisis,” says Sameer Satpathy, the divisional chief
executive of the personal care division at ITC. Indeed, the biscuits-to-hotels Indian
conglomerate has committed to making 125,000 litres of its new Savlon Hexa hand
sanitiser, something that was initially meant to be a ‘niche’ product for ITC.
The Covid-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on this relatively small, Rs 60 crore ($7.9
million) vertical in India’s FMCG sector. Demand for hand sanitisers and disinfectants
has rocketed by nearly 400%. ITC’s factories are working overtime to meet this dramatic
surge in demand, says Satpathy.
ITC even had to repurpose its new perfume factory in Himachal Pradesh to do this.“The
chemical base of alcohol is common. This was the fastest way to get to market,” says
Satpathy. It has also launched a new multi-purpose disinfectant spray under the Savlon
brand.
The initial demand spike may settle, says Satpathy, but sanitisers are likely going to be a
familiar part of post-pandemic life. As the lockdown eases, and businesses and public
services begin functioning, staying sanitised may be the first—and possibly only—line of
defense against contracting the Covid-19 virus.
Every touchpoint—from pushing an elevator button to turning the door knob to sitting at
a common-purpose table—will have to be rid of potential infection. Strict government
compliances notwithstanding, safety is now a crucial selling point to get customers
through the door.
Cleaning costs, says Sanchal Ranjan, founder of ZiffyHomes, a chain of co-living spaces,
will now be 8-9% of their operational budget, up from 2-3% earlier. For his type of
business, near-constant disinfection is key to get clients.
But being the first line of defence isn’t easy.
First, it puts immense pressure on the efficacy of the product. Will it indeed kill 99.9% of
germs the way the label promises?
Second, and more urgently, there’s a sanitiser shortage. “We haven’t received any stocks
of Savlon, Dettol, or Lifebuoy sanitisers in the last two weeks,” says a chemist based in
south Delhi. The government responded to the shortage with a war-like effort, expediting
manufacturing licences for distilleries, and pressing public sector companies like BIBCOL
the-ken.com-The tricky business of making the perfect Covid sanitiser 1/2 819
Here's the rub
Disinfection during a pandemic is a rabbit hole of chemical

choices. A group of motley characters—producers, distributors,
and scientists alike—are working overtime to plug the sanitiser
shortage amid issues of dwindling raw material and quality
control
The demand for hand sanitisers and disinfectants has spiked during Covid-19. As the
lockdown eases, the need is likely to balloon
Shortage of branded names has caused a gold rush for local manufacturers. New
products, new chemistries are being tested
Regulating for consistent quality is a struggle, especially when the government has been
trigger-happy with granting licenses
Sanitisers aren’t silver bullets though. For public places to reopen, their fundamental
design must change in the long term
the-ken.com-The tricky business of making the perfect Covid sanitiser 2/2 820
The two Indian companies expanding the scope of
Covid-19 testing
the-ken.com/story/the-two-indian-companies-expanding-the-scope-of-covid-19-testing
March 19, 2020
Register or Login
More than the number of novel coronavirus cases, it’s the clamour for testing that has
grown in the past few days. The WHO’s advisory “test, test, test” may not exactly be
applicable to India since it has not seen community transmission yet, but it’s still a
guiding principle in containing the disease, Covid-19.
On Tuesday, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)—India’s apex medical

research body—made it clear that it was broadening testing for the infection. It’s a
graded response given the country’s creaking healthcare infrastructure. India is still in
Stage 2—most cases are imported with no evidence of community transmission . Adding
49 new public labs to the existing 72 testing centres, and inviting private labs to get
ready with their kits, this was ICMR’s way to signal India was readying for Stage 3, if and
when the infection spreads in the community.
In addition, the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune is testing eight antibody-
based commercial tests and eight PCR (polymerase chain reaction)-based tests.
Antibody-based tests are effective nearly a week after a person is infected, when the body
starts producing antibodies in response to the virus. However, the tests being advocated
worldwide today are real-time PCRs which check for the genetic material of the virus and
take just 6-8 hours to show whether a patient has contracted the virus.
Of the eight PCR tests being validated by the NIV, two are specially notable. Both
developed by Bengaluru-based biotech companies, nearly bootstrapped, and at their
knitting for over two decades. Both companies are uniquely poised to expand the scope
of diagnoses during the current pandemic.
the-ken.com-The two Indian companies expanding the scope of Covid-19 testing 1/2 821
Like the US FDA , the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, India’s drug
regulator, has promised the industry it’d remove bureaucratic hurdles under the
emergency response mechanism to allow for new tests.
MolBio Diagnostics, which has built the world’s first handheld, battery-operated real
time PCR, is perhaps the only field test for screening available anywhere today. It can be
used at the airport, in villages, or any other public place to give results within an hour.
Xcyton Diagnostics’ kit, meanwhile, is a confirmatory test. To be performed in a lab, like
all PCR tests today, it can tell if a person has Covid-19 or any other respiratory infection.
MolBio got a booster shot when earlier this month, India Business Excellence Fund-III, a
fund managed and advised by Motilal Oswal Private Equity, agreed to invest up to Rs
240 crore ($32 million) in the company.
coronavirus
Covid-19
lab testing
MolBio
pandemic
testing
virus
Xcyton
AUTHOR
Seema Singh
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-The two Indian companies expanding the scope of Covid-19 testing 2/2 822
The unbelievable story of a Facebook impostor
the-ken.com/story/the-unbelievable-story-of-a-facebook-impostor
September 6, 2016
Cyber Crime
It started as a sick, vulgar trick. When they were about to get

married. They thought it would stop. It didn't, only got worse. Till
it took over their lives. And became their nightmare. A 1000 days
since - no one has been able to help them - cyber crime cell,
police, courts, and Facebook
Ashish K. Mishra, 6 Sep 2016
Reader warning: this story contains explicit language reproduced verbatim.
5 NOVEMBER, 2013 – MUMBAI

It was the third time the family was getting together.
The first was soon after Sneha told her mother and her brother that she liked a boy and
would want to marry him – his name is Rahul. Ever since Sneha’s dad passed away, Alok
had taken his place. Four years elder to her, Alok, 32, was the sole breadwinner of the
family. He was surprised by his sister’s announcement; he thought she was too young for
this, that she should study further or work for some time. But then he loved her,
respected her decision. If that’s what is going to make her happy, then she would have it.
So, Rahul came home.
Tall and fair. Thick, neatly trimmed, full beard and gelled hair, combed back neatly,
every strand in place. Big, brooding eyes and an untucked shirt, the first button undone,
jeans and ankle length black boots – Rahul looked like he had walked straight out of a
the-ken.com-The unbelievable story of a Facebook impostor 1/30 823

movie poster. For Alok, a tiny, bespectacled, timid man himself, Rahul was, well,
different.
But everyone liked him. Rahul was well-spoken, had a good job as a teacher at Rizvi
College, where he was in charge of placements and public relations. But more important,
he was in love with Sneha. They both were. And they wanted to be together.
On 4 June 2013, they got engaged. Hence, this get together, the third time. Over lunch.
As the family got through the large spread, Sneha’s mother left the table and returned
with a gift-wrapped present. It was a mobile phone – a Samsung S4. For Rahul. He
beamed at the sight of it, opened the wrapping paper softly and thanked his mother in
law. Just then, his phone rang.
“Hello,” he answered the call.
“Rahul, Sneha’s account has been made,” said the caller.
“What?”
“Yes. And not just her. There’s another account of one of her friends. Log into Facebook
now and see.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Rahul stared at Sneha, sitting next to him. “I need to check Facebook,” he said. She gave
him a questioning look. The two excused themselves, went to another room and Rahul
logged into Facebook, from Sneha’s laptop. He searched for Sneha Chopra. Several
results showed up, two of them with the same picture. He clicked on the second, the one
he wasn’t friends with. As they looked at the page, both, Rahul and Sneha froze.
Just next to the name, Sneha Chopra were the words: *randi chinal vaishya* – Literal
translation: Prostitute. Hussy. Whore.
Rahul scrolled down.
About 16 hours back, Sneha had shared that she was in an open relationship. Then she
had liked ‘Kiss my Ass’ videos. Next, ‘Japanese Sexy Videos’. She had then shared ‘All
Porn Videos’s’ video, a porn clip. Then 13 hours back, she had posted a flurry of vulgar
messages, all directed at Rahul and his family. A few hours later, again, a flurry of posts:

It was one of the many posts on the page. Every post, repugnant.
Sneha let out a little scream: “Rahul, what is…” He hushed her. “You have to get out of
Facebook. Right now.”
2009
Rahul Madhyani discovered Facebook in college.
Like most young people, he wanted to make new friends, keep in touch with old friends
and just stay connected with what’s happening in the world. In 2009, he completed his
Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Rizvi college. It was a bad time to
graduate. Post the financial meltdown of 2008, there were very few jobs and as fate
would have it, Rahul didn’t land any.
So, in 2009, he was almost always at home and with nothing to do, spent a lot of his time
on Facebook.
That’s when he spotted Richa Sajnani. A friend of a friend. She was pretty – square chin,
big, expressive eyes, flowing black hair, broad smile. Rahul was smitten.
He sent her a friend request. She accepted it. He pinged her and the two got chatting.
Richa said she was an engineer and had studied in Singapore and Malaysia. She lived in
Dubai but her family also had a place in Mumbai, so she was often shuttling between the
two cities. She liked cooking and traveling – she wanted to see the world. Their chats
continued, on Facebook and Google. Soon enough, both started poking each other on the
social network and commenting on each other’s pictures and updates. Pulling each
other’s leg.
In early 2010, they exchanged numbers. It was also around this time that Rahul landed a
job at Rizvi college. On the phone, they would chat for hours: What are you upto? How
was your day? What are you cooking? That was a nice picture. You like Starbucks, is it?
How is your brother? What kind of jewellery do you like? You are going shopping today,
what are you going to buy? Your sister looks very cute. What kind dresses do you like?
How’s college? Are the students well behaved? Do they like you? I love you. I love you
too.

As it often happens with new found love, friends and family got a whiff of it. Who is she?
Who is he? Richa often chatted up Rahul’s younger sister. He spoke to her cousin, in
Dubai. Rahul’s colleague at Rizvi and a dear friend spoke to Richa: ‘You know Richa,
Rahul really likes you. Both of you are made for each other. Both of you are also Sindhis.
What’s stopping you guys?’ (Sindhis are a socio-ethnic group of people originating from
Sindh, modern day Pakistan)
Sometime in 2011, Rahul popped the question. ‘Richa, I really like you, let’s meet now. I
would like to marry you. The next time you are in Mumbai, we should surely get
together. What do you think?’ Richa seemed keen. She professed her love, too. Both
agreed, yes, “we should do this”.
Not long after, Richa firmed up a plan to be in Mumbai. For a quick visit. Rahul was
eagerly looking forward to it. As the date of her visit neared, they kept going back and
forth on the day and the time. Another matter altogether that she never committed, and
in the end didn’t show up. Rahul kept messaging and calling but no answer. He was
heart broken. Furious.
A few days later, Richa got back in touch. In Mumbai, her schedule was too tight. There
was just no time. Sorry.
Rahul was pissed. “No time? What is that even supposed to mean? We had planned this,
hadn’t we? You were supposed to come home, meet my family. If you are not committed,
then let’s not do this. Let’s call it quits. Right now.” The way Rahul tells the story, Richa
broke down. “No, it is not over. We will meet soon. We can’t end things like this.”
Over the next few days, and over several calls, the two patched up. But for Rahul, things
weren’t the same as before. He often found himself drifting. Unsure. What’s happening
here? Does she really love me? Why didn’t she want to meet?

5 NOVEMBER, 2013
Sneha immediately deactivated her Facebook account.
And then called her friend. “Get out of Facebook now,” she told her. “Someone is making
obscene fake profiles on Facebook. He is using Rahul and my name and pictures. You
have also been targeted. Please get out now. I’ll explain in some time.”

Even as all this was happening, in her head, Sneha started regretting her decision to
change her display picture – Rahul and her, leaning into each other, looking at the
camera. But it was his birthday yesterday. November 4. She was happy. She wanted to
make him happy. She wanted to express herself, let all her friends know – I’m engaged,
this is my fiancee, see, we look so happy together.
She turned to Rahul: “What do we do now?”
“We have to tell everyone what’s going on,” he said. “But it will be okay.” It wasn’t; rather
got worse. Because that’s when the emails started coming in. And nothing had prepared
the two of what was about to happen.
Roshni was all of 19.
As they read the emails, and processed the content, neither knew what to do.
Except, that this had gone too far. The families deserved to know.
A different matter altogether that Rahul’s family already did. In the last couple of
months, several obscene fake profiles had appeared on Facebook. Of Rahul’s family,
close relatives and colleagues at Rizvi college, his father, sister, mother, brother, sister in
law and several other friends. The impostor would tag them on posts and updates and
also send a friend request.

The same day, late in the evening, Rahul and his immediate family turned up at Sneha’s
house. To explain. Rahul did most of the talking.
Both Sneha’s mother and Alok were shocked when they saw the profiles and read the
emails – this was her daughter, his sister. They had never seen or heard of anything like
this. Alok didn’t know what to do. His mind was racing: The wedding was just a month
away. Relatives would be searching on Facebook for Sneha and Rahul to see who the
bride and bridegroom were. Are they seeing these fake profiles? Have they already?
What will they say? They will be here in just a few weeks, to prepare for the wedding.
What if they come to know of all this? What have we done?
After a bit, he recovered. “Rahul, have you reported this to the police?”
“Yes,” said Rahul. I filed a report with the cyber cell at Crawford Market police station a
few months back. Here is a copy.”
Alok studied the copy. Rahul had filed the complaint on 11 September. It read:
“To, officer cyber crime, I the undersigned…want to state that there is a fake Facebook
account being created in my name and which is being misused…also please find copy of
picture been spread which is harming my reputation in society.”
Alok wasn’t convinced. No, this wasn’t just about Rahul anymore. It had gone too far.
“Let’s file another complaint. At the Bandra police station and the cyber cell in Bandra
Kurla complex. Let’s go.”
As the group prepared to leave, Alok took Sneha aside.
“Sneha, did you know about this?”
“Yes,” she said. “He had told me that this happening. But this is not Rahul’s fault.”
“Are you absolutely sure about this guy? You know if you are not sure about him then
there is no pressure. Okay. We can cancel the wedding. Do you want me to cancel the
wedding?”
“No. I’m sure. Rahul hasn’t done anything wrong.”
24 AUGUST, 2016
It is important that you know this. Creating a fake Facebook profile in India is a child’s
play.
Open Rediff mail.
Pick a name: Rajeev. Pick a surname: Tandon. (Randomly)

Now, let’s pick an email ID: rajeevtandon1984
Check availability. Yes. It is there.
Password: Lalaland1984 – Retype password: Lalaland1984

Security question: What is your favourite pass time?
Answer: Stalking
Mother’s maiden name: Tandon
Alternate email address: Click ‘No’.
Mobile No: 91 – 98765 – 43125 (Random number, whatever pleases you)
Date of Birth: 3 February 1984
Country: India. City: Other. Which? Bokaro
Hurrah!
Hi rajeevtandon1984, congratulations! You have registered successfully.
Now go to your inbox. Next, go to facebook.com to create a profile.
Name: Rajeev Tandon
Email: rajeevtandon1984@reddifmail.com
Password: Lalaland1984
Birthday: 3 February 1984
Sex: Male
Hurrah! Rajeev, go to rajeevtandon1984@rediffmail.com to complete the signup
process.
So, back to inbox. You have a new message from Facebook.
Just one more step to get started on Facebook
Confirm your account. Confirmation code: 60812. Click and you are done.
Welcome to Facebook, Rajeev. Click on the Home button on the top right corner of
the page. Facebook asks: what’s on your mind?
Well, exactly this: “I am here to stalk you. I am here to harass you.”
There you have it, Rajeev Tandon. Now, go create havoc. Sit in a coffee shop, use the
public wifi and wreak havoc. Rajeev, Facebook is your stage.
What’s on your mind?
2012-13
Things weren’t really working out between Richa and Rahul.
It was in the midst of all this, in January 2012, when Rahul bumped into Sneha Chopra.
At a friend’s party. Almost immediately, the two hit it off. Within a week, he added her as
a friend on Facebook. She accepted and the two began chatting. On Google chat and
Facebook. Sneha loved food, eating out and long drives. Rahul pampered her – a big,
cuddly teddy bear during her birthday month, long drives to Marine Drive in his grey
Hyundai Santro and eating out at various restaurants across the city.
As they spent more time together, bunking college and going out for movies and chatting
about Indian television soaps and the drama in them, they got closer.
“He was caring, protective of me,” says Sneha. “That’s what I liked about him. And we
could tell each other anything. We would laugh and go out, so over time we became good
friends. We were very comfortable with each other.”

Soon enough, Rahul proposed. He had told his family about her, how much he liked her
and it would be great if she could come home and meet them. Sneha thought about it.
This was going too fast. She had just completed her post graduation degree, landed her
first job…but, what the heck. Fast forward, Sneha met Rahul’s family and they liked her.
A few weeks later, Rahul met Sneha’s family, too. Everybody was in agreement. They
make a good couple. So the two got engaged on 4 June 2013.
Even as all this was happening, Rahul and Richa were in touch. On and off. He told her
that he had met someone and was planning to get married.
Did Richa take it well? “No,” says Rahul. “She wasn’t happy about it but I told her that I
liked Sneha and she was willing to commit. So, this was pretty much in late 2012 when
our chat ended, abruptly.”
Even before Rahul and Sneha’s engagement, sometime in December 2012, is when the
first fake profile appeared on Facebook. In the name of Rahul Madhyani. The display
picture was a photoshopped image of Rahul and Richa, garland around their neck, to
suggest that they were married.
“At first, I let it be,” says Rahul. “I was like, I don’t care. But a few months later, this fake
profile started tagging my students and faculty at Rizvi college. When one of my students
approached me, congratulating me on getting married, I was like, what is all this! My
colleagues were like, you didn’t even tell us that you had gotten married, come on let’s go
out, let’s celebrate. I told them I have not married anyone.”
A bit shaken, Rahul decided to dig deeper. He found that there was not one, but multiple
fake profiles of Rahul and Rahul Richa Madhyani. And that wasn’t all. Some profiles
even had a wedding invite in them – link to a detailed wedding invite on a marriage
portal. The invite was dated 24 June 2012. Cocktails at Grand Hyatt Hotel in Dubai and
the wedding ceremony at The Club, Mumbai. Rahul was aghast. His immediate thought
– this must be Richa. Why is she doing this?
He called her, right away.
The two spoke. Except, Richa denied any knowledge of the profiles. Or the wedding
invite. The way Rahul tells the story, Richa was surprised herself. “She was like, why
would I do this?”, says Rahul. “Why would I spoil my own name? But I didn’t believe her
and told her that I am going to file a complaint. And that she should too because
someone has been using our names. Richa said, okay you go ahead. I will ask my father
to file a complaint.”
On 11 September 2013, Rahul filed a complaint at the Cyber Crime Cell, Crime Branch,
CID Mumbai.
“In my mind, I was like, I have filed a complaint, whoever is doing this will be scared.
This will end,” says Rahul.
It didn’t.

Starting October 2013, the fake profiles on Facebook took a life of their own. Profiles
started appearing in the name of Rahul’s immediate family and relatives. And then
spread to Rahul’s colleagues, the faculty at Rizvi College. Every profile, obscene. Vulgar.
Derogatory.
Shit hit the fan.
It wasn’t long before Rahul’s extended family, his cousins confronted him. With every
new profile, the family would have a major showdown. They had a barrage of questions:
‘What is all this? Why is this happening? What have you done? There is no smoke
without fire. You must have done something to deserve this. Who is this girl, Richa? Did
you marry her and leave her? Tell us the truth. Don’t lie. Tell us the truth. You have
destroyed this family’s name. What have we done to you to deserve this?’
Back at Rizvi college, word had spread of the fake profiles and the faculty being targeted.
It wasn’t long before a few of them complained to Dr. Kalim Khan, Dean and Director at
Rizvi Management Institute. “It came as a real shocker to me,” says Dr. Khan. “At first I
was like, is this some old, aggrieved student who is doing this? There were obscene
profiles of some of my students, my faculty, the wife of a senior visiting faculty. And they
were not just random profiles. They were absolutely obscene and vulgar. How do you
explain something like that?”
In all of this, the person suffering the most was Rahul’s mother. She hadn’t been keeping
well. Only last year, she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. So, she was almost
always in pain, bed ridden and under heavy medication. The fights in the family didn’t
help. But the worst was yet to come. Sometime in early November, Rahul’s extended
family said that they had had enough. They wouldn’t want to be associated with Rahul.
En-masse they decided to boycott his wedding.
Rahul’s mother was heartbroken.
He was livid and disappointed. That they had no faith in him.
December was bad. There was a profile a day, and some more such days. More vulgarity.
Pictures and posts:
Even though Rahul had filed a First Information Report (FIR) at Bandra police station
and another compliant at Cyber Cell in Bandra Kurla Complex, with every new profile of
a family member or a student or colleague, he had to report it to the authorities. It was a

two step process. First, report the profile as harassment and pornography to Facebook,
with a request that the profile be taken down. Second, copy the URL of the profile and
file a complaint with the police.
There were a lot of people affected. By now, Rahul had reported close to 50 profiles to
Facebook. For pornography and harassment. Understandably, every new person who
was targeted wanted to get to the bottom of it. This meant, Rahul had to repeat his story
again and again and accompany every person to the police station to report the account.
It was in this bleak environment that Rahul and Sneha got married. On 15 December
2013. Only a handful people attended from Rahul’s family. Everyone at the wedding was
instructed not to put up any pictures of the bride and the bridegroom on Facebook.
All in vain. The impostor knew. The exact date of the wedding. So a fake profile of Rahul
Madhyani was made on 15 December. The post was lurid…the worst:

2014
As the year began, so did the feeling of utter helplessness and constant phone calls.
The impostor was relentless. There was a profile a day. Some days, six profiles. Created
late in the night, between 9:30 PM to 12. Every phone call was a friend or a family
member, lost. Each caller had the same question – ‘why are we being targeted? What
have you done?’
The profiles had spread:
Rahul & family

Rahul’s colleagues at Rizvi college
Sneha
Sneha’s friends
Rahul’s friends extended family
For instance, on 3 Jan 2014, another colleague of Rahul, Vishal Singh’s profile was made.
The posts threatened him and other professors of Rizvi college to stop helping Rahul
Madhyani. The profile had another post, with an image of his daughter:
“papa don’t support rahul madhyani, if tomorrow i will come to rizvi for job then he will
send me also as escort then also u will support him. papa he is a liar, two faced man…
papa leave rizvi college…”

With every fresh profile, Rahul and Sneha took turns, to explain. If the profile was of a
girl, Sneha would go over to meet her, documents and police records in tow, to tell the
story. Few believed her. They were not interested in her story. All they wanted – ‘please
get us out of this. We are respectable people, how are we supposed to explain this to our
friends and family?’
“For them, it was like, make it go away,” says Sneha. “We have nothing to do with this.
Rahul and I were desperate. We were losing friends and family. My brother, Alok, knew
what the two of us were going through and wanted to help. It also helped that he was
working with a technology company so he understood the details of what we must or
could do.”
Alok took it up as a mission. To find answers.
As the days passed, both Rahul and Alok started spending a lot of time at the cyber cell.
Sometimes till late into the night. Pestering officials to find a solution, to catch the
impostor.
Every IP was from United Arab Emirates (UAE) or some other country. The officials had
a standard answer after this: ‘This is outside India. What can we do? Maybe, there is a
proxy IP that this person is using. But, what can we do?’
It was a painstaking process. Cyber crime officials cannot directly look into Facebook for
information. They must first send the URLs to Facebook seeking the IP address details of
the account and then wait for the company to respond. Also, there is no fixed deadline
for the reply to come in – sometimes Facebook can reply in flat three days, at other
times, it can take as long as six to eight months. (An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a
numerical label assigned to each device that uses the internet for communication.)
“It all depends on how much pressure you are able to put,” says Niranjan Patil, a security
consultant and co-founder of Packet Verify Technologies, an information security and
privacy consulting firm in Bengaluru. “In corporate cases, you can put a lot of pressure
on the police to work with Interpol and get activity logs. For individuals, it is very
difficult.”
What about fake profiles? Facebook can easily implement a mobile phone authentication
process. Why don’t they do it?
Facebook gains by accounts being created. They want to make it absolutely easy for an
account to get created. Genuine or not. I think more than 20 percent of the users are
improper or fake
Niranjan Patil
By that estimate, Facebook has 39 million fake accounts – 20 percent of its 195 million
users in India.
Now, let that sink in.

“Facebook without authentication is not serving the society,” says Prashant Mali, a cyber
lawyer and security expert. “They are fully aware of this, the more their user base, the
more their growth. They know that there is identity theft, fake profiles, frauds, the
Nigerian scamsters, they are all there.”
But, doesn’t Facebook claim that it is a verified platform – “a community where people
use their authentic identities.” How is that even tenable?
It will be fair to say that there were other teething issues. For instance, the cyber cell
officials had no idea what to do. “They were really nice to us,” says Alok. “So they would
entertain us, ask us for tea and all that. But when it came down to doing something
about the case, they didn’t know how to move on it. Like there wasn’t even a proper
letterhead to send an email to Facebook. I literally spent a night there drafting the letter
head and the letter.”
That wasn’t all. The way Alok tells the story, the cyber cell staff didn’t know how to check
if the URLs were active or not. “So they have this system,” says Alok. “Where they have
to put the URL and it has a character limit. Often the Facebook URLs are long and so the
system would say, ‘it exceeds character limit’. And they would just throw their hands up
in the air saying it is not working. The URL is wrong. So, I would shorten the URLs and
tell them, see, it works.”
Then again, it seemed as if almost always, the cyber crime cell was waiting to hear from
Facebook. Of course, Facebook did eventually respond, with the location of the IP
addresses.
Here, consider this: according to the National Crime Records Bureau statistics,
Maharashtra has recorded just five convictions out of 4,981 offences registered between
2013 and 2015.
Five. Three in 2014. Two in 2015. (Not that the other states in India have done
phenomenally well in solving cyber crime.)
Put two and two together.
The police have issues of their own. But this is such a mythical situation to be in.
Facebook is not helping and the police have their own problems. Someone has to pick it
up and solve it
Prashant Mali
The Ken sent the following questionnaire to Facebook India but did not get any response
in return. In response to an earlier set of questions, Facebook had declined to participate
in this story.
Given how trivial it is for someone to create multiple fake identities at will on Facebook, how
does Facebook claim it is “a community where people use their authentic identities”?
https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576

What percentage of Facebook’s userbase in India is composed of unverified, potential fake
users?
Law enforcement officials claim Facebook does not share even the email IDs used to register
fake profiles that are the subject of criminal investigations, and only provides an IP address.
And the location of the IP address. Why?
Does Facebook allow Indian law enforcement authorities access to its secure portal to request
information?https://www.facebook.com/records/x/login/ and
https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/
Is reporting a fake profile, for pornography and harassment, the end of Facebook’s liability, to
control harassment on the platform?
All major online services, like Google and Yahoo, need a mobile number at the time of signing.
A one time password. To deter spammers. Why doesn’t Facebook have such a requirement?
Considering that there is no accountability due to the above, how does Facebook help
authorities, when they seek information about crimes committed on Facebook?
How does Facebook distinguish pornography or harassment, in terms of graphic and text.
We have reasons to believe that very often, the platform refuses to acknowledge text as
harassment. Over the last three years, the protagonists in this story have reported more than
200 fake profiles, almost all of them pornographic in nature. When these protagonists reached
out to Facebook, and multiple times, through multiple channels, why didn’t Facebook actively
reach out to help them?
27 FEBRUARY, 2014
Rahul was thrilled. “They have found him,” he told Sneha.
What?
“Yes. The impostor. The police officer just called saying that they traced one of the IP
addresses to Madhya Pradesh. In Indore. The guy has been caught. His name is J P
Gour. They are bringing him to the police station today. I’m going to see him.”
Sneha’s heart skipped a beat. Thank god.
At around 11:30 AM, Rahul reached the police station. The moment he entered Jagdish
Prasad Shri Ramlal Gour recognised him.
“You are Rahul, aren’t you?” he said, pointing at Rahul.
“Yes,” said Rahul, glaring at him.
JP Gour wasn’t much to look at. The 56-year-old had a sad, depressed look about him.
Dressed shabbily in a white shirt and trousers, he cut a sorry figure. “I have done
nothing,” he confessed.
The months of pent up frustration, got the better of Rahul. He shouted, “What do you
mean you have done nothing? You are the one who has been making the Facebook
accounts. You have destroyed my life. My family’s life.”
Someone in the room, slapped Gour. “Tell the truth.”

“No, I have not done anything,” he pleaded. “I have just made a few accounts.”
That’ pretty much what Gour had been repeating since morning. That he had made
somewhere around 25 accounts of Rahul Madhyani. The material for those accounts
were also not his. He was told to make them, and use the material. By a girl, whom he
had befriended a few months ago. She passed him the material, of what to write and
post. And he blindly followed her instructions. But why did he do it? Because he wanted
to keep chatting with her. That was his confession.
The police had looked into Gour’s Facebook messages. He had indeed been chatting with
someone. Someone called Rahul Madhyani. Their conversation was surreal…
9/15, 2:18pm
Rahul Madhyani
apko ek link bheji thi
weddingwire wali
shadi ki site
•
9/15, 2:39pm
Rahul Madhyani
kina ghatia insan hai
ap socho
•
9/15, 2:55pm
Rahul Madhyani
ye id me ap log on kr sakte ho
apko is id ka passwrd de dun
•
9/15, 4:40pm
J.p. Gour
Passwrd doge to isko kon kon chalayega or kisi ko doge kya
•
9/15, 5:54pm
Rahul Madhyani
ap aur me bus
me chahti hun unhe sab fir wish kare
•
9/15, 6:05pm
J.p. Gour
Thik h Usko pta chalega to isko bhi hack ka lega
Email or PW dedena
•
September 16, 2013
9/16, 2:27pm
Rahul Madhyani

priyanka2144 password mumbai32
priyanka2144@rediffmail.com password Mumbai
https://www.facebook.com/messages/100006015218859
• Rahul madhyani ek ayiaas ,awara darinda hai.ladkiyo ko apne jhute jaal me fasata
hai aur bure kaam karwata hai.yeh ek professor ke ad me ladkiyo ki dalali karta hai
.rahul madhyani ek website bhi real talents .com ke side me chala raha hai ,rahul ki sex
website hai jaha girls put there pictures ,he selects those girls n he hunts specialy girls
from small town who need money.rahul madhyani har ladki ko apne baap ka mal
samajhta hai,iska dad prakash madhyani shayad se ladkiya manufacture karne ki
factory chalata hai aur yeh bharwa her ladki ko kapde ki tarah badalta hai.teri aukat
kya hai rahul ,randiyo se sath muh kala karne vale.teri shadi bhi ek sunil malukani
green acers vale ki rakhail se hui hai,tu dusri ladkiyo ka sauda karta hai.tujhe bhi ek
excort hi mili.chalak dhurt nich darinde junaid sir passed away why didnt u die,u go
and die rahul die rahul die ,mar ja taki tera kutta aur buddha father teri laash ka bhoj
apne kandhe per le.jo tune dusri ldkiyo ke sath kiya hai teri sister usse bhi bure din
dekhegi.usko bhi ek darinda milega,jo usko kutte ki maut marega,jhut bolta hai.apna
gunah chupane k liye jhut bolta hai jhuta hai tu.tu mar ja rahul mar ja rahul madhyani
mar ja tu dharti ka bhoj hai mar ja nich mar ja.
•
2/2, 12:21am
Facebook User
yeh copy paste kerke wall post ker do
jo bhej hain
•
2/2, 12:22am
J.p. Gour
tumhare wall pr h use karna hai
Needless to say, it wasn’t long before both the police and Rahul realised that J P Gour
wasn’t the perpetrator. He was merely a puppet. After a few days in custody, Gour was
released on bail. The police and Rahul were back to square one. In May, the police
arrested another suspect. Shahabaz Arif Memon, a 21 year old man from Pune. Same
story again. Boy meets girl on chat. The two start chatting. He does everything she asks
him too.
After a few days in custody, Shahabaz was released on bail.
But, the question remained: Who is this person?

JUNE 2014
The hunt for the impostor had become Alok’s life now.
After J P Gaur’s arrest, the stuff appearing on the profiles had become worse. More
obscene. Threatening. In his head, Alok was like, ‘Why isn’t Facebook doing anything?
Can’t they see this is happening? Can’t they see, that we have reported so many profiles
for obscenity and pornography. Hundreds of them. This is happening on their platform.
Why? Why can’t they do something?’
The police investigation was painstakingly slow – night outs and regular visits to the
BKC cyber cell hadn’t yielded any results. Only offers for tea and banter.
So, Alok got a premium LinkedIn account. And started sending letters to senior people at
Facebook. With a desperate plea for help.
He sent an email to Kirthiga Reddy. The chief of Facebook in India.

Subject: Distressed Call – Facebook Harassment Case
Dear Kirthiga,
Consider this as a distress call on behalf of my family and friends. I sincerely request you
to please get this looked into and help us in this regard in every way possible.
We have been harassed for over six months by an unknown imposter who has created
more than 100 fake Facebook accounts of immediate family members, friends and work
colleagues. All of these accounts are filled with pornographic content.
We have already reported all of these links to cyber crime and police but to no avail since

they have got very little information or leads from Facebook. We have managed to get
most of these profiles closed but the harassment is unabated and the offender is
continuing this with impunity.
The FIR, Mumbai CIR No. 17/14 is lodged with Bandra Police Station and I can share all
the details with you and your team to get this resolved. I work in an internet company
myself and understand that your team will be able to provide us with relevant
information about this offender.
Request you to sincerely help us out since we have been tormented for months.
Sincerely,
PS: Link to a recent profile has been posted below. Note that these profiles are obscene
and you can ignore them. I apologise for the same, however, I wanted to provide an
example of this issue.
There was no reply from Kirthiga. Or from anyone in her team.
Alok sent another email. To Vishwanath Sarang, computer engineer, data analyst –
strategy and operations at Facebook. Vishwanath got back immediately.
Hey,
Extremely sorry that you have been facing this. I have forwarded this case to the team
which would be able to help out here and they are looking into this matter…
Also, it would be great if you could send me a list of the profiles that are imposters so it
would be faster to get back to the bad guys. Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.
Alok replied, with specifics. Profile links – active and dead. His last line:
Please let me know can I proceed and guide me with the next steps. Note that all
accounts have been reported to the police…Thanks & Regards,
After that, the trail went cold. The fake profiles didn’t stop. It was around then that a
friend tipped them off:
“Guys, Facebook has an office in Mumbai. At Bandra Kurla Complex. They have real
people there. All you have to do is get in and tell your story. Someone will hear you and
they could help you. At the very least, it is worth a try.”
Alok jumped on it. Let’s do this. Early in July, they began scouting the tall commercial
buildings in BKC, asking for the Facebook office. Thanks to generous security guards,
they got lucky on their fourth attempt. The lady at the reception directed them to the 5th
or 6th floor. Expectedly, at the reception, the lady manning the desk wanted to know if
they had an appointment or what exactly was their business.
“We have a meeting with Kirthiga Reddy,” said Alok, confidently.
“Regarding?”
“This is about fake profiles and a harassment case. We want to meet her or anyone else
and explain what’s been happening.”

The lady asked them to wait and went inside. After a few minutes, she returned with a
set of forms. “Fill these,” she said. Alok says, he was taken aback when he looked at the
contents of the form. It had questions like – What’s your business? How did you hear
about the Facebook office?
Anyway, he filled up the forms. The lady took the forms, went inside again and returned.
“There’s no one here you can meet. Plus, you don’t have an appointment.”
Alok was desperate and started pleading saying that it was an important matter and
really critical that someone heard them out and helped them.
“I kept on repeating this,” says Alok. “I wanted to talk to someone there. After a lot of
arguments and back and forth, she went inside and came back with a phone, asking me
to speak to the person. I spoke to the person. And I can actually quote him, he said, ‘We
are mere puppets here. We only do sales and marketing here. We do not have any
information or data. All data related operations happen out of the US.’ And then he hung
up.”
Alok pestered. This can’t be all, can it?
It was. The Facebook door was shut.
Here, step away from the story. Just for a moment.
The Ken reached out to Facebook, in a detailed email, laying out the facts of the case:
How is it possible that this has gone on for so long, issues around privacy, abuse and
harassment on a platform, a platform like Facebook which now claims to have 195
million Indians on it.
In an emailed response the company said: “Facebook declined to participate in this

story.”
Alright, now back to our story.
After the dead-end at Facebook, Alok’s patience ran out. But he didn’t know what to do.
Between him and Rahul, they had tried everything – camping at the police station,
reaching out to Facebook, seeking out politicians, writing emails to the commissioner of
police. What more could anyone do? Alok was desperate. Helpless. He wanted to help his
sister but now he was failing her, miserably.
In August, tragedy struck at the Madhyani home. Rahul’s mother passed away. A few
days later, a Facebook profile in her name was made. The family was devastated.
“Sometimes I felt that if I had a magic wand, I would solve this,” says Sneha. “So when
Rahul’s mom was very sick, I have seen her in excruciating pain. She couldn’t sleep at
night and she was on medication. We’ve had days where she has just gone to bed and the
phone rings. So the landline is in her room. And she would wake up. And Rahul would
answer the call, saying a profile has been made. It was so bad, for everyone in the family.

For me, it was sheer helplessness, like, Rahul should be with his mother. He wants to.
But he has to go out. And what do I do? How do I get out of this? What do I do to help?
Who can make this go away? Why me? Why us?”
JANUARY 2015
What’s bad must only get worse.

Sometime in January, Sneha updated her LinkedIn profile. A public relations executive
at Perfect Relations, quite a few of her colleagues were moving out. Sneha too wanted to
look out for better opportunities. Hence, LinkedIn. But, it also meant putting up a profile
picture. Sneha took comfort in the fact that for almost two months, no Facebook profile
had been made. She thought, maybe the impostor was gone. Done with Rahul. And her.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Early morning, on 31 January 2015, Sneha’s team lead called her.
“Hi Sneha, I would like to discuss something with you. Can you come to the conference
room please?”
“Yes. Right away.”
Once inside, she realised, that the team lead wasn’t alone. The Account Director was with
him.
“See Sneha, we are going to show you something but please don’t freak out or get scared.
Relax. Ok. Chill.”
Sneha felt a familiar chill. “Is this about Facebook? Because I can explain…”
“No. This is an email which has come to us and has also gone to the client. Take a look at
it.”
(The client: Edelweiss)
As she read the email, Sneha went numb. It had her LinkedIn picture and text alongside
it:
Subject: THE TRUTH OF SNEHA CHOPRA
*She is sneha chopra w/o rahul madhyani. her husband rahul placement head of rizvi
coll is into call girl business.those students who came from small town to study rahul use
to exploit them and take advantage if his seat. two girls who came from dhulia to study in
mumbai were sent to hotel holiday inn by rahul madhyani.sneha is aware abt this
business of rahul and sneha chopra supports him in his wrk. couple has made huge amt
of money from this nasty business.we need yr support n cooperation to expose sneha n
rahul. both should go to jail. sneha chopra is working in reputed company n MD should
know about her.pls support us pls cooperate us. don’t go on their innocent faces. sneha
chopra where are those two innocent girls whom rahul dropped at hotel they haven’t
reached home.sneha, bitch you are a girl, how could u both do to all other girls for little
money?*
The Impostor had sent the email to two employees of Edelweiss and two others at Perfect
Relations.

Sneha was aghast. How could this even happen? She told her seniors that these were all
lies, concocted by a someone who has been harassing her and her husband, told them
about her Facebook ordeal and requested for some time to prove her story, with
documents and police complaints.
Once back at her desk, she started fretting. “I will be fired. The client has sent an email.
How did this happen? A while later, she connected the dots – the impostor could have
seen her picture on LinkedIn and then ran a search of her name and Perfect Relations.
Do that and the search results throw up quite a few press releases. The releases have
everything – email IDs and phone number. Of her and clients’.
The next day, Edelweiss filed a complaint with the cyber cell, Bandra Kurla Complex.
Their contention: Two employees of Edelweiss had been harassed, when they received
this lurid email. The complainant accused Sneha Chopra of having played some role in it.
She should be questioned. After all, the contents of the email had everything to do with
her and her husband. It was because of them, that the employees of Edelweiss had been
harassed. The cyber crime officials knew about the Rahul Madhyani case and also that
this was somehow related to it.
However, there was no proof to suggest that Sneha Chopra or Rahul Madhyani had sent
the email. So, they kept the two out of it.
When The Ken reached out to Edelweiss, its spokesperson said, over the phone, that they
don’t want to be associated with this story or the people mentioned in it, in any manner
whatsoever.
The same message was conveyed to this writer multiple times – “any manner
whatsoever”.
The Edelweiss incident had a major fallout. Now, the impostor had Sneha’s mobile
number. So, with every new profile, there was Sneha’s number. “Call her”, the post
would say, almost always. “For sex.” And that’s when the calls started coming in.
“So this imposter started posting that Rahul provides women and if you want them, call
Sneha Chopra,” says Sneha. “The messages were horrible. We run a prostitution racket.
Or that if the imposter has tagged someone on the profiles, it was like, if you want to get
out of this then call this number.”
“Till date, any profile that gets made, the person puts in my number. The person tags at
least 50 people. Out of which 10 people call us, saying what is this. Who are you guys?
Some people feel that we actually provide women. Most reach out on WhatsApp. Some
people inform. Some people complain. So since then, some 60 profiles must have been
made and I would have got at least 100 calls.”
“I started getting calls from all sorts of numbers. So one day I got a call from this person,
who was talking in a very dirty, vulgar tone – where do you stay, I will come at night…I
lost it. I was like, what the fuck do you think of yourself? I will come there and screw
your happiness. I’ve got calls from boys. So once this boy called. From his voice, he
seemed very young. He is like, I saw your number on Facebook. And I want, whatever is

written there. For tonight. I gave it back to him. I shouted and abused. I was like, “can
you even make out with the person you are calling right now? This is your sister’s
number. You want to make out with your sister. Go tell this to your mother.” I have been
told not to answer these calls. But my frustration, I have to get it out.”
2015-16
In mid-2015, Sneha’s batchmates from school and college started being targeted. Mostly,
females. Some, single. Others, married.
Sneha’s LinkedIn update, details about her school and college and the year she
graduated had proved costly. Now, her number was out there too. It is a difficult thing to
explain. Pornography and your name on a public platform, connected with your friends
and family. Quite often, and rightly so, it is them who are unforgiving.
“These girls, whose profiles were being made, I didn’t even know them,” says Sneha. “We
were from the same college and my batch but I wouldn’t know them, if they were
standing in front of me. But often, like always, people would wonder why are we being
targeted. What kind of dirty trick are you and your husband playing, we are from a
respectable family so please keep us out of it.”
Some folks weren’t understanding at all. Since Sneha’s number was there was on the
post. To them, it was absolutely kosher to abuse and threaten. Like this text, which
Sneha received and then immediately broke down.
Even as all this was happening, one of Sneha’s very close friends got targeted. Not once
but seven times. Her close relative, Anand Bhatia, an advocate at Bombay High Court
decided it was not something that could be left lying down – he heard Sneha and Rahul
out and decided that the courts need to hear it and the perpetrator be arrested. Early in
June 2015, Bhatia filed two cases. One at the Kurla Metropolitan Magistrate court. And
second, at the Bandra Metropolitan Court, for Rahul Madhyani.

After a year of arguments and back-and-forth with the police, on 10 May 2016, the
Metropolitan Magistrate 51st Court, Kurla, Mumbai, passed an order. This part, from the
order is notable:
“Advocate Bhatia submitted that the informant has lodged several reports of the
activities against her which is still going on Facebook. He submits that the informant has
filed a recent report which has been registered at Sion police station. He filed a copy of
the FIR on record to show how someone is misusing the social network, i.e. Facebook
and defaming the applicant by posting obscene photographs.

A bare look of the FIR and the photographs shake the conscience of the common man.
Now we are living in the era of information and technology. Most of the people now, as
netizens are using networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc in their day to day
activities. Therefore the role of the police officer in investigating cyber crimes becomes
more important. The approach of the police officers to close the investigation only by
recording statements…is not correct. Moreover by sending letters to cyber cell, crime
branch, CID Mumbai, would not solve the problem or prevent criminals or crime.
Therefore the police have to develop equally sophisticated methods of detection and
prevention of such crimes.
It is not impossible to ascertain the real culprit by using the proper scientific method.”
Rahul Madhyani’s case, filed at the Bandra Magistrate court, though hasn’t seen much
progress.
Data from the National Judicial Data Grid should put it in perspective. Every month, the
Bandra Magistrate Court registers about 350 fresh criminal cases. As of 25 August 2016,
the court has close to 42, 000 pending cases. 22 percent of the cases, 9, 699 of them have
been pending for more than 10 years. Another 22 percent have been pending for 5-10
years. 12, 144 cases have been pending for more than two years. Another 11, 591 cases
have been pending for under two years.
The wheels of justice turn slowly.
Anand Bhatia hasn’t given up, though. He has continued to follow up with officials
investigating the case – on leads and status.
Sometime in March 2016, though, the cyber cell officials made a major breakthrough in
Rahul’s case. It is a day that everyone associated with this investigation remembers very
clearly. The day, when Rahul was called in. And he was asked to come along with his set
of pictures, those of Richa Sajnani. Once inside the cyber cell, the officials told him:
“That’s not Richa Sajnani.”
What?
“That’s not Richa Sajnani. We ran a check. These are not Richa Sajnani’s pictures. They
are of Godhuli Chatterjee. She stays somewhere in the US. It looks like someone was
using Godhuli’s pictures, using the name Richa and chatting with you.”
Rahul’s face turned ashen.
“So, who were you chatting with for two years?” asked the official.
Rahul didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know,” he muttered.

As he left the cyber cell office, Rahul felt lost. Scared. His thoughts kept racing back to
Richa’s picture and their conversations – the love, the banter, the cooking, the traveling.
Was none of that real? How is this even possible? Who was it, if not Richa?
The name of Sneha’s brother has been changed in the story to protect his identity. Over the last
three years, no fake profiles of him or his family has been made.
The name of Rahul’s sister has been changed to protect her identity.
Late in 2015, Rahul Madhyani was let go from Rizvi College. The college had supported him
initially but Dr Khan was increasingly getting worried. His trustees are on Facebook, so are his
students. “There is no way, I could have justified an account being made of one of my girl
students,” he said. “What would I tell her parents? Not a day goes by when I regret that I had to
let Rahul go for no fault of his.”
Rahul Madhyani is currently unemployed. He has been taking freelance teaching assignments.
In most of his job interviews, the subject of Facebook and link with the fake profiles has come
up.
This story was updated on 10 September to change some identifiable information on one of the
protagonists in the story.
EPILOGUE
Rahul and Sneha look good together.
The way her arm rests on his hand. The way he smiles, looking at her, fanning off
mosquitoes over her head. The way Sneha looks at him, when he runs his hand through
his stubble. Or when he smiles; a full smile, which is rare. It is early evening and Sneha,
Rahul, Alok and I have been chatting for a while and run through a lot of things – life,
privacy, loneliness, friends, envy, lovers and jilted lovers…
Are you using Facebook? I mean, do you log in surreptitiously?
Rahul: No. Nothing. I just have one profile. It has nothing, except my picture. And I use
that to check if any profile of my friends or family has been made. Every night, this is
what I do. I’m done with Facebook. I’ve had enough for one life. I know who my friends
are. Only handful are left. I just call them. Or text.
Sneha: I use it. For my work. I need to know what’s happening. If my colleagues are
talking about a holiday or an article they read, you feel so disconnected. So I use it. It is
also because if I tell people that I am not on Facebook, people judge me. They find it
weird. But yes, I follow certain people but I am not friends with anyone. I have 0 friends
and 1 post.
(If you’re wondering what’s that one post, well, this is what it looks like)

Alok: I am not. After this, I don’t think I ever will. I have enrolled in a course on ethical
hacking. Once I am done with that, I want to find all the loopholes in Facebook and try
and educate people. I will do that. There are thousands and thousands of fake profiles
and I am actively discouraging people from being there.
You don’t want to share baby pictures…
Rahul: We are better off without it…we have not been able to do anything so that’s my
thing now. Avoid everything. What active life will I have now? So, yes avoid everything.
Alok: After what has happened, I am putting out nothing about my life there. You know,
what also hurts is that we are not celebrities. We are normal people. And nobody wants
to listen to normal people. We got thrown out of Facebook. We have written to
commissioners and politicians and ethical hackers. We have knocked on every door, but
the end result is nothing. No one wants to even look at you. All we have is no reaction. I
mean, some 100 lives have been affected and nobody bothers. Forget bothering, nobody
even wants to listen to our story…
Rahul: I feel guilty…not for what I have done but because of what has happened to
people. Everyone I cared for. I never imagined that my wife, my sister, my family could
be in this situation. I feel embarrassed. I’ve seen Sneha losing her friends and family, my

sister losing her friends. Imagine my embarrassment when I am facing new people, those
whose accounts have been made. Why my account? Who are you? Every time, I have to
repeat my story…
Could you have done anything different?
Rahul: I don’t know. For three years, I have been frustrated and angry. Every time a
new account was made. But now, I have calmed down. What can I do? I lost my job. I’ve
lived through it. I am living through it…
Have you thought about closure?
Rahul: Many times. The day this person gets caught, I want him or her to be behind
bars. And all I want to know is why? Why us? What did you gain out of this? What did we
do to you?
Sneha: Same for me…why do you grudge us so much? What did we do to hurt you?
There has been so much damage over the last three years that we don’t know if we’ll ever
be able to get back what we have lost.
Alok: I need answers. For everything. I will never forgive the person. For what he has
done to my sister. My family…
Rahul: Many times, I’ve asked on those profiles, why are you doing this? The only
answer I have got is ‘I will come and tell you on your deathbed’…I want this person
punished for what I’ve been through. That will be my closure.
It is getting late. Past 9 PM. We’ve been chatting for hours now and decide we should call
it a day. Rahul and Sneha have to attend a cousin’s birthday party. Alok must get home.
Rahul and Sneha had fun at the birthday bash. They chatted and smiled. At about 1 PM,
they got back home. It has been a long day. Rahul has been taking every class that comes
his way. Freelancing as a guest lecturer. He’s done three already today and is dead tired.
Sneha is chirpy – it is Teejdi tomorrow – a Sindhi ritual, where she will be fasting the
whole day, for her husband’s long life and good health.
Sneha does the bed. Dims the lamp on the nightstand. And then picks up her phone. She
taps the Facebook application and in the search box types Sneha Chopra. She goes
through the results, scrolling. Next, she types, Rahul Madhyani. She scrolls down.
Everything looks okay. “Nothing new today,” she says, relieved.
AUTHOR
Ashish K. Mishra

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The unlearnt lessons from a year of Covid testing
the-ken.com/story/the-unlearnt-lessons-from-a-year-of-covid-testing
May 11, 2021
The fault in our RT-PCRs
With the first wave in its rearview mirror, India took its eye off the
testing ball and was caught unprepared by the second Covid
surge. With RT-PCR testing capacity limited, quicker, cheaper,
and more mobile alternatives could help India grapple with an
inevitable third wave. If they’re able to crack the mass market,
that is
Even as the second wave of Covid saw cases soar in India, testing has not been able to
keep up
Uptake of RT-PCR technology for testing has been excruciatingly slow, with half the
Indian states still depending on the less accurate antigen tests
TataMD wanted to bring CRISPR tech into the market last November, but the tests are
still stuck at the pilot stage. TrueNat, another point-of-care option, has seen wider
acceptance
Newer, innovative diagnostics tools are also waiting in the wings, but the road from lab
to market is an arduous one
the-ken.com-The unlearnt lessons from a year of Covid testing 1/2 853

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the-ken.com-The unlearnt lessons from a year of Covid testing 2/2 854

The untold, complete story of GoJavas and Pigeon –
Part I
the-ken.com/story/complete-story-gojavas-pigeon-part-i
March 16, 2017
A distressed, once promising business that most people knew of. A buyer that barely
anyone had. And yet everyone took the information at face value. And ran with it.
Pigeon Express in talks to acquire GoJavas, the headline in the Mint said, dated 12 August
2016. To quote from the story:
“Courier service provider Pigeon Express Pvt. Ltd is in advanced talks to acquire e-
commerce focused logistics service provider GoJavas (Quickdel Logistics Pvt. Ltd), which
suspended operations last week amid an organisational overhaul, in a cash and stock deal,
said two people aware of the development. GoJavas, which counts Snapdeal (Jasper
Infotech Pvt. Ltd) as a key investor, had started scouting for possible suitors after a bid by
Snapdeal for a complete buyout fell through. Besides Pigeon Express, the company had
also held talks with another Delhi-based courier service provider, Trackon Couriers Pvt.
Ltd. However, the deal has swung in favour of Pigeon Express.”
And just as suddenly as the news of “advanced talks” had appeared, so did the news of the
sale too. Only a few days later, on 17 August, most publications carried some form of this
news: Pigeon Express Private Limited acquires QuickDel Logistics Private Limited. Anand
Rai joins as managing director.
Except for one minor detail—Pigeon Express never acquired QuickDel Logistics or
GoJavas.
Yes, you read that correctly. This is that story.
A blow-by-blow account of the several machinations that happened at GoJavas and

Snapdeal in the months of July, August and September 2016. The Ken spoke to several
former officials of GoJavas and Snapdeal for this story. Quite a few of them have ended
the-ken.com-The untold complete story of GoJavas and Pigeon Part I 1/7 855
their employment in the last six to eight months, thanks to the turmoil at both companies.
While GoJavas fired its employees en masse, Snapdeal has seen significant retrenchment
and layoffs. None of the employees wanted to speak on the record considering the
sensitive nature of the subject, but they had a lot to say privately. A few vendors of
GoJavas agreed to speak on the record and are pursuing legal remedies against the
company as well.
To put this story together, The Ken has also relied on various documents filed with the
Registrar of Companies (RoC) by both Quickdel logistics and Pigeon Express.
Our story begins sometime in early August 2016.
The deal
First, some numbers.
Shareholding in GoJavas as on 31 March 2015:
Praveen Sinha: 34.93%
Jasper Infotech Private Limited: 30.14%
Ashish Choudhary: 24.77%
Randhir Singh: 10.16%
Note that Jasper Infotech here is Snapdeal. From 30.14%, its shareholding in GoJavas
would go up to 49.99% in less than 6 months. Because on 2 September 2015, Snapdeal
invested Rs 117 crore in GoJavas to up its share—Rs 10 shares at a premium of Rs 3150.75
per share.
Stellar Figures
As of March 2015, GoJavas had Rs 188 crore in assets and about Rs 65 crore in cash
Since then there’s been status quo. To the best of The Ken’s research, GoJavas has not
filed any document since then to suggest a change in its shareholding structure.
Which is not to say nothing significant happened at GoJavas. Quite the contrary, as you’ll
see.
11 August 2016 is the date to remember. Mostly everything that happened at GoJavas
happened in the few weeks before or after 11 August. By early August, the directors on the
board of GoJavas had started quitting, one after another. The first ones to go were
Hardeep Mohinder Singh and Jayant Sood, the nominees of Snapdeal. Both quit in the
first week of August. Then, on 11 August, Ritu Madan resigned from the board and as the
company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
Even as all this was happening, on 11 August, GoJavas called a board meeting where two
individuals; one, Rahul Rai and another, Anand Rai, were appointed as directors of
Quickdel, its parent company. It is not clear if Anand Rai and Rahul Rai are related to
each other but according to documents filed, both have the same residential address: B-
5/313, Sector 8, Rohini, New Delhi – 110085.
On the same day, that is 11 August, GoJavas filed an altered Articles of Association (AoA)
with the RoC. This is the moot document, which brings to light the sordid saga of
GoJavas.
According to the AoA, overnight, Anand Rai, aged 39 years, became the “major
shareholder” in GoJavas.
The AoA states three individuals as “founders” or erstwhile members of the company
namely Randhir Singh, Praveen Sinha and Ashish Choudhary.
And a “passive” investor called Snapdeal.
Simply put, overnight Rai became the majority shareholder in GoJavas. It wasn’t a dead
company if you were thinking that. In March 2015, it had reported a turnover of over Rs
200 crore and a declared net worth (book value) of over Rs 100 crore. Just to put this in
perspective, at the last valued premium per share (that Snapdeal paid to acquire its
stake), approximately Rs 400 crore was the amount a buyer would ostensibly need to shell
out to acquire a 50% stake in GoJavas.
Where did Rai find the money to buy the “founders” shares? How much did he pay?
Company Filings
As per the Companies Act, 2013, a listed company has to file its return with the Registrar
of Companies within 15 days of change in shareholding of the promoters and top 10
shareholders of the company. The general practice in terms of an unlisted company is that
the change in shareholding can be filed at the end of the financial year
There are no filings to suggest any answers. Who is Rai? Well, we will get to that in a while
because this rabbit hole goes deeper. Much deeper.
The AoA is also illuminating in the various ways in which it describes Snapdeal’s role in
GoJavas, past, present and future. For a company, which counts marquee names as its
investors—SoftBank, Alibaba, Foxconn, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital,
Nexus Venture Partners among several others—this document raises quite a few
uncomfortable questions on its corporate governance. So let’s spend a little time going
through several clauses from the document to understand this better.
“The major shareholder acknowledges that the founders were responsible for conducting
the day to day management and operations of the company whilst Jasper’s role was
limited to a passive investor in the company.”
Let’s understand the significance of this clause. Here we have the single largest
shareholder in the company with two board seats (Jasper or Snapdeal), painting itself as a
mere passive investor overnight. What is even more curious is that Rai has been required
to acknowledge a facet that preceded his entry into the company—so there is no way he
has any basis to provide an undertaking indemnifying Snapdeal for acts that preceded
him. If anything, it would have to be the “founders” who have been named in the
agreement who would be in a position to provide such an acknowledgement.
But no undertaking of that sort has been furnished.
“The major shareholder and the company shall indemnify, defend and hold fully harmless
Jasper (and its directors, shareholders, officers, affiliates, agents, representatives,
successors and assigns and all the past nominee directors of Jasper appointed on the
Board, from and against all losses, whether actual or threatened…”
And more.
“In no event directly or indirectly including under vicarious liability or any other legal
theory, shall Jasper be responsible to bear any of the claims and liability (past, present
and future) whether statutory or contractual…The Major shareholder and the company
shall jointly and severally, fully indemnify, defend and hold Jasper and its directors,
officers and employees, shareholders and past nominee directors on the Board of the
company, from all third party claims, in relation to any liability or claims.”
Still more.
“The major shareholder and the company shall provide release/waiver/no objection letter
(in a form and manner acceptable to Jasper) to Jasper relieving and discharging Jasper
from any and all claims and liability. The ‘Release Agreement’ shall take precedence over
the terms provided in any binding mutually agreed document executed between the
company, Major shareholder and Jasper, to the extent of conflict with the terms
contained in the Release Agreement.”
Did you see what’s going on here? Rai became the majority shareholder of GoJavas after
acquiring the shares of the erstwhile founders. Meanwhile, Snapdeal, which was not a
party to this deal in any manner, continues to hold the same number of shares it held
before. Except, Rai has signed off on these heavy duty clauses to not only indemnify
Snapdeal of any potential liability that might arise due to some action in the past but also
absolve it of any present or future liabilities as well.
It will be fair to say that this has bad omen written all over it. But, here a question must be
asked, what exactly did Snapdeal fear? And why did Rai agree to sign off on such
indemnity clauses? Which buyer agrees to such onerous terms? Which buyer of a
distressed company agrees to such onerous terms? Did Snapdeal give Rai any
consideration for agreeing to these terms or was there any promise that incentivised Rai
to assume these risks unequivocally?
On 14 March, The Ken sent a detailed set of questions to Snapdeal. Ten in all. In an
emailed reply, the company’s spokesperson said:
“Jasper Infotech’s relationship with Gojavas has been that of a pure financial investor
with no operational control in the company. Your queries concerning operational matters
may kindly be directed towards Gojavas. The representatives of Jasper Infotech on the
Board of Directors at Gojavas board had resigned before the stake sale by the promoters
and before the submission of observations by the auditors. Accordingly your queries in
this regard may kindly be directed towards Gojavas.”
Think about it, here’s a company with 49.99% shareholding in GoJavas. And it doesn’t
even want to associate itself with it, forget explaining what happened. Keep in mind that
until July 2016, Snapdeal had two seats on the GoJavas board.
By way of answers, perhaps, there are a few clues left behind by Deloitte Haskins & Sells,
at the time, the statutory auditors of GoJavas. Because, even as this deal between Rai, the
erstwhile founders and Snapdeal was getting cemented, Deloitte sent a letter to the board
of the company saying it didn’t want to continue being the auditor anymore.
Deloitte wanted out.
The statutory auditor

Date: 23 September 2016
Subject: Resignation as statutory auditors for the year ended March 2016
“This letter is our written communication confirming our resignation as statutory auditors
of Quickdel Logistics Private Limited with effect from September 5 2016.
In August 2016, we had communicated our intent to resign as statutory auditors through
various meetings including the meeting held on August 26, 2016 with the management
and directors of the company…
Our resignation as the statutory auditors of the Company was, inter alia, due to the
following reasons:
1. We had not been provided with sufficient appropriate audit evidence to complete
our audit;
2. We had not been provided with appropriate sufficient audit evidence in respect of
the internal control environment in the company including entity and process level
controls and information technology controls;
3. We had not been provided with sufficient appropriate audit evidence to perform our
forensic procedures in relation to a vendor related potential fraud identified by the
company; and
4. senior management turnover at the company
As notified to you during our meeting held on 20 September 2016, we received a
communication dated September 15, 2016, from Jasper Infotech Private Limited (a
shareholder of the company). We enclose a copy of this communication together with all
the attachments received along with it, with a request to suitably respond to this
shareholder. Please note that in view of our resignation as statutory auditors as stated
above, we have not performed any procedures based on the communication.
CC: Anand Rai, Rahul Rai, Company Secretary and Board of Directors of Jasper Infotech
Private Limited.”
The rumours had started early in 2016.
That something wasn’t kosher about GoJavas; about the manner in which the company
started out, being incubated inside Rocket Internet-owned Jabong and then subsequently
Snapdeal becoming the largest shareholder in the company. “This was a strategic
investment by Snapdeal,” said a former senior executive at the company. “So despite what
people are saying, legally speaking, the deal was kosher. No assets were transferred from
Jabong to Snapdeal. The deal was strategic in the sense that Snapdeal had preferential
rates in shipment from GoJavas. But you know when people start talking, it means
something is going on.”
Around April, the murmurs grew stronger. Not only about the origin story of GoJavas but
also the lack of internal controls at the company, which had led to malpractices. The Ken
reached out to another former senior executive at Snapdeal to crosscheck this
information. “Yes,” he said. “There was a lot of chatter around this. In fact, Snapdeal
asked one of the big four accounting firms to do a diligence report on GoJavas. That
report showed several red flags. There were lots of questions asked, on funds, contracts
with vendors, you name it.”
Vendors have specifics.
A vendor who has worked with GoJavas for more than 14 months and was entrusted with
the task of freight operations for the company says that the practice of overbilling was
rampant at GoJavas. The Ken could not independently confirm this, and the vendor
requested not to be quoted because he still has outstanding dues with the company and
doesn’t want to jeopardise his settlement. “A bill is generated of Rs 20 lakh and the
payment is of Rs 40 lakh,” he said. “I have personally seen Rs 1 crore debit notes sent by
Snapdeal saying they won’t pay because damage of value of shipment or some other
excuse. That’s not how a company is run. There was collusion of a lot of people.”
The final bolt from the blue came in August, when vendors and employees of GoJavas
were taken aback by Rai’s appointment. “Nobody knows where Anand Rai came from,”
says Amit Bajaj, managing director of Mituj Marketing Private Limited, another vendor
who was brought in to do air freight shipment for GoJavas.
It is just like, next morning there is an email saying, he has taken over the company, and
we were really shocked
Amit Bajaj
Surprised, perhaps. But why shocked?
“Because he is not a big guy. He runs a small-time courier company in Delhi,” adds Bajaj.
“Where did he get the money to buy majority stake in GoJavas is a mystery.”
A senior executive at GoJavas, who played a key role in the company had this to say about
Rai’s appointment, “I was surprised too.”
All of this brings us to the question. Who is Rai? How did he get around to acquiring a
50% stake in GoJavas? And after he came in, whatever happened to the company?
All of this in Part II tomorrow.
The year when big tech reflects
the-ken.com/story/year-big-tech-reflects
December 27, 2017
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It is that time of the year when I put my smartphone away and stay away from those social
media feeds to catch up on my reading, listen to podcasts and what not. I think you
should, too. It’s also a time to sit back, put your feet up and reflect. Reflect on obviously
the year that went by, and come up with that one resolution that you are (almost) unlikely
to stick to. That’s how it works, doesn’t it? Mine, for example, would be to get off Twitter.
Impossible, right?
But as it stands, Twitter’s a good starting point to reflect. Both, for us, and the company.
For it is struggling to get its act together in India right now. It is stagnant, as users are
moving away from the platform to other spaces. Instagram and Snapchat being the most
prominent ones, especially among this one-term I’ve come to loathe off late: millennials
We captured both those trends last year. But guess who’s working overtime towards
winning that space? Facebook, with its quiet, yet super aggressive, policy build up. And all
of that with the 2019 general elections in mind. And then, there’s also Google, which
wants to change the way people search in India. Through languages, through voice search,
which they believe will be decisive in the push for the so-called “next billion users.” That’s
not where it ends with Google. It has sensed an opportunity with local search and is trying
to explore the same with hyperlocal delivery. Remember Areo? Or Aa-ree-yo, as the
Google officials insist it must be pronounced. Also, that investment in Dunzo is worth a
mention.
Allow me to indulge in a bit of whataboutery, for it has become our favourite national
pastime. I’ve seen a lot of tweets begin with ‘What about X’ this year than ever before. It
has now also trickled into our offline discourse. In bars, coffee shops, airport lounges and
the most awkward of places you can imagine (read: public bathrooms). SO WHAT ABOUT
the-ken.com-The year when big tech reflects 1/3 862

UBER, you ask, caps lock on. And I say, it’s all quiet on that front. At least while the new
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is trying to tidy the good old mess left by its former CEO, Travis
Kalanick. It wasn’t that way in India, at least early last year. Driver strikes, new products
and execution. That was their hallmark. But then, a speed breaker. Eric Alexander left
Uber as part of the marching spree there, for illegally obtaining the medical records of the
2014 New Delhi rape victim. All hell broke loose in the Valley tech press. But we had it
covered for you. And then you ask, WHAT ABOUT APPLE? I know the past week has been
rather eventful there: Sanjay Kaul leaving, the slowest growth in eight years and all that.
We had that covered too, reporting first in May about the government of India standing
up to the world’s most valuable company, not ceding its ground as far as incentives are
concerned.
While all that is great, you and I have an Aadhaar sword hanging over the head.
Yesterday, I met someone who told me this in the most audacious, Hindi tone possible. To
quote, “Bhaad main jaaye Aadhaar” (May Aadhaar go to hell). Obviously, he’s not too
pleased with all the events around Aadhaar and mandatory linking. But what if I told you
that a Bengaluru-based company was misusing Aadhaar in almost all of 2017 before it was
caught in the act by UIDAI? The implications of that situation are definitely worth
reading. And scary. Moving on. What if I also told you that India will become an
important, if not the final, frontier for telecom licensing? With the likes of Qualcomm and
Ericsson trying to virtually pulverise Indian OEMs into submission, and in subtler terms,
use advocacy. You know what’s also interesting? That the government is trying to ride the
AI bullet train. Like China, South Korea, the UK and many others. Except, its plans are
rather fuzzy right now.
Sigh!
I don’t know about you, but these are some of our stories I’d put down as must-reads this
year.
Aadhaar’s Dr Security and Mr Scale Problem
The rehabilitation of Nitin Mangal
The last line Uber India crosses, and Uber India wants to fix things.
Everything
With three key battles shaping up, Facebook beefs up its policy play. Also, a
profile of its most powerful official in India, Ankhi Das. And then, Facebook’s
bid to become the Indian government’s default public square
India — the last telecom licensing frontier
You can bring bullet trains from Japan, but not artificial intelligence, which
as it turns out, Google seems to have a headstart in India.

I hope 2018 is just as exciting for some of these companies. They’re now in big tobacco
territory globally, but in India, with the market only growing, there could be plenty more
trends coming up next year. Needless to say, at The Ken, we’ll have it covered.
Learning Japanese is one of my other resolutions. In that spirit, Sayonara and

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu!

Things don’t add up at Vakrangee: Share price, biz
model, and a Sebi probe
the-ken.com/story/vakrangee-share-price-sebi-probe
April 3, 2018
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It is a hot, dry 23 March. Just before lunch.
“This has been a bank for the last eight years,” says Dileep Kumar Mehta, bank manager
of Andhra Bank in Kota.
No kendra? “Never.”
Did they conduct camps? “No.”
Is the address correct? “Yes.”
Do you know about them? “Yes, I have heard about them. But they were never here.”
It is a surreal conversation. The address is right, to the T, from the annual report of
Vakrangee, but the kendra doesn’t exist.
A few weeks back, The Ken took a short trip to Kota. The city in Rajasthan, known for its
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) coaching classes, hotels that don’t allow unmarried
couples to room up, a biggish train station, and, well, not much else. The small city is
where Mumbai-based Information Technology (IT) services company, Vakrangee Ltd,
has its largest number of kendras or outlets. The company, headed by Dinesh Nandwana,
has a business model, which can be best described as a supermarket for financial
inclusion services. It has white label ATMs, helps people open and run bank accounts,
the-ken.com-Things dont add up at Vakrangee Share price biz model and a Sebi probe 1/3 865
gives out money to those enrolled in rural employment schemes, enables people to buy
insurance, and, in some cases, it helps customers connect to Amazon, which is trying to
reach the rural populace of the country.
Where are the kendras?
Of the 20 kendras listed on the company's website, which The Ken visited, four were
completely operational, eight were cyber cafes, which processed online payments and the
last eight did not exist
To offer these services, Vakrangee has outlets, which it calls kendras. It claims it has over
40,000 such kendras in the country. In Kota, it has 146 kendras listed on the website. Of
the 146, The Ken visited 20 centres. Of the 20, only four were fully functional. It means
they had a working ATM, a tie-up with a public sector bank and offered eMitra services
provided by the Rajasthan government—essentially a centre for bill payment and voter
registration. Eight other centres had no services except for eMitra.
The rest were never part of Vakrangee. Some had applied to be part of the network, but
for one reason or another, they were never operational, and others had never even
applied for a franchise.
We reached out to Vakrangee. What gives? “We are in process for appointment of a
reputed consultant to carry out business quality analysis of Vakrangee kendras and have
scheduled a Board meeting on 31 March 2018. The consultant would physically visit the
stores and also analyse the activation of various services at the kendra outlet,” said a
Vakrangee spokesperson in an emailed reply.
The company then declared to the exchange that it had appointed the consulting firm
Grant Thornton to audit the kendras.
Amazon
Dinesh Nandwana
PC Jeweller
SEBI
Vakrangee
AUTHOR
Patanjali Pahwa
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AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
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Thirty minutes and a wrinkle in (Indian Standard) time
the-ken.com/story/indian-standard-time
April 20, 2019
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DP Sengupta, 83, shuffles from living room to bedroom amidst a cacophony of ringing
landline phones. Ignoring the calls, he scrounges, instead, for an Indian Express clipping
from 1976. Ours is a telephonic chat, but one can still vividly picture the bald, bearded and
baritoned scientist going from room to room during the conversation. Sengupta is former
visiting professor at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and
emeritus fellow at the Indian Institute of Science. He’s also a critic of nuclear tests, an
amateur ghazal singer and author of children’s science books.
But above all else, he’s an advocate for changing Indian Standard Time (IST).
Sengupta and research partner Dilip Ahuja, 68, were in Mumbai on 18 March for a talk at
the Observer Research Foundation. The lecture, ‘Energy and non-energy consequences in
adjustments in Indian Standard Time’, was their latest in a series on why IST should be
pushed ahead by half an hour to UTC+6:00 instead of the current UTC+5:30. These
lectures, spanning 10 years and about as many cities, from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi,
take off from their 2011 study—one which is almost always footnoted in articles or
rebirthed in research papers about why India needs a modified IST.
Time is anything but objective. Our hours, minutes, and seconds are dictated by atomic
clocks so precise, they won’t gain or lose a second in millions of years. Their exacting
nature is why the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) uses them to
define UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, as the basis for civil time. All countries, in
turn, align to their assigned atomic clocks that march to the BIPM drum.
the-ken.com-Thirty minutes and a wrinkle in Indian Standard time 1/2 868

But even precision bends to the whims of our earth. The tilt of the planet’s axis, the
churning of tectonic plates and the tides of the moon tease man-made time every now and
then, reeling it in a perpetual game of catch-up. Here’s an example: the moon, through the
power of tides, is slowing the earth’s rotation. This means our days are getting longer—by
2.5 milliseconds every century.
For satellites, aircraft, sportspeople and just about any kind of programming for which
milliseconds are make or break, this is everything. The slower the earth gets, the faster the
millisecond-gaps will pile up. In which case, a leap second will be added more regularly to
the UTC than it is today.
If one millisecond can do this much, imagine the chronological chaos that once was in a
country as extensive as this. India’s longitudes span 68° 7′ east to 97° 25′ east. That’s
almost 30° of longitude, while time zones roughly change by one hour every 15°. The sun
that rises at 4:30 AM in Arunachal Pradesh at the northeastern tip of the country rises at
6:30 AM in Gujarat in the west. If dusk awakens at 4:30 PM in our eastern flanks, it
doesn’t do so until 6:30 PM in the west.
BIPM
Current Science
Energy savings
GMT
Indian Standard Time
IST
National Physical Laboratory
TERI
Time
Time zone
UTC
the-ken.com-Thirty minutes and a wrinkle in Indian Standard time 2/2 869

Three things Indian medtech must get right, and one
that is still open ended
the-ken.com/story/three-things-indian-medtech-must-get-right
August 18, 2016
It is hard to believe how uniquely slow government response can sometimes be.
It was 25 years ago that a geeky group of doctors and engineers in Thiruvananthapuram
made India’s first biomedical implant – a heart valve for children born with rheumatic
heart disease. Virtually every scientific institution of some repute contributed to its
development. In March, TTK Healthcare, which had licensed the technology from Shree
Chitra Tirunal Institute, sold the 100,000th unit.
In the quarter century since, despite many false starts, India did not set up a medical
device regulator.Something had to give – device makers never got the home court
advantage. On the contrary, for a long time, Indian manufacturers were left out of public
procurements because the specs were such that the locals almost never qualified.
A beginning to end that existential crisis of medtech products – which no single ministry
takes full ownership of but at least four of them exercise some control over — is now in
sight.
A draft Medical Device Rules [PDF] is seeking expert opinion toward drafting a Medical
Device Bill. If July 11 meeting of senior bureaucrats before the Prime Minister’s Office
yields any result, the Bill will be tabled in the winter session of Parliament.
In addition, the Modi government earlier this month sent out an advisory to all state
governments and Central health agencies to include Indian regulator approved medical
devices for consideration in procurements and not insist on the US FDA approvals as
benchmark.
the-ken.com-Three things Indian medtech must get right and one that is still open ended 1/5 870
If we assume that some, even if not all, of the proposed changes will get enforced, in
phases at least, then the ball is lobbed back into the entrepreneurs’ court. In this import-
dominated market – 60% of disposables and 90% of medical electronics are imported –
medtech companies must get a few things right to win at the competitors’ own game.
Let me list three, in order.
Clinical feedback in, founder hunches out
As I wrote last week, one of the reasons Perfint Healthcare couldn’t get a proper product
market fit – yes, the inevitable jargon – is because whatever on earth they did in the name
of market research was horribly wrong.
Around 2013-14 when Perfint was reversing its sales and returning money to the banks,
there was another medtech start-up in Chennai which was following a similar trajectory.
(The chief executive doesn’t want his company or its venture capitalist to be named.)
Nearly Rs 45 crores in investment from a Chennai-based institutional investor had gone

up in smoke in about 18 months. This medical device services company had switched to
making products when some of its potential clients suggested “instead of sourcing why
don’t you make products for us”. Without enough ground research on the kind of products
they’d make, or any manufacturing roadmap, or even a professional chief executive in
place, the start-up switched to making products. It blew all its cash without any product in
hand.
These are probably extreme examples. And to be fair, medtech has a particularly stiff
challenge. The cliche’ ‘customer is always right’ remains a cliché. Because between the end
user and the product maker there are many variables – hospitals, insurers, patients,
families, nurses, technicians, and a few others in the supply chain – each of which
influences the product acceptance and adoption.
So, getting the correct clinical market inputs is the first important step. Not a priori
market research that may throw a monkey-wrench of information and fail to capture how
real users experience needs. What is needed is research that tells the truth, not what an
entrepreneur wants to hear.
'Very few bioengineers listen to doctors and which is why very few Indian medical
technologies become successful”
Cardiac surgeon MS Valiathan, under whom Tirunal Institute emerged as the first, and for
a long time the only, government institution to develop several medical technologies to
reach the market, told me recently most medtech innovators trip here.
“Very few bioengineers listen to doctors and which is why very few Indian medical
technologies become successful,” he said. “There are hundreds of technologies sitting in
various institutions for decades.”
Could there be a business opportunity in listening?
An interventional radiologist who tried Perfint’s product and later partnered with an
engineering company to build a similar product, says he has no way to find out what
radiologists in other parts of the country want.
He wants to know if he can hire a professional services company to truly assess users’
interest before he enters into manufacturing. “I have some radiologists in Chennai coming
to my centre to try out my prototype. But that tests the market only in a limited way,” he
says.
No medtech can cut its way to growth without really identifying a well-characterised
clinical need. It’s proven now that medical device innovation particularly fits into the
“brainstorming and rapid-prototyping cycle” that lies at the heart of design thinking
approach, says Paul G Yock. An authority in bioengineering, Yock has run the popular
programme in Biodesign at Stanford University for several years.
R&D costs can’t guide pricing
To cite Perfint’s example again, distributors would tell its sales executives that if they
reduced the price from Rs 1 crore to Rs 10-20 lakhs, they could garner sales of Rs 100
crores or thereabouts. (It has been the elusive sales number for the founders for some
years.)
Owing to healthcare’s overall complexity, where most medical decisions are rife with
trade-offs and uncertainty, the standard formula of adding up all costs and working out
margins can’t ensure correct pricing. Perfint management has always harped on their
high cost of R&D. Is that the reason why its products were priced high and failed to get
wide adoption?
The answer is both yes and no. Since the product is not a good clinical fit, lowering price
wouldn’t have helped; and since the price is high, it is not bundled with other devices and
sold as a package to increase usage.
Many times the price the user is willing to pay has nothing to do with the cost of R&D.
Doctors say if economics doesn’t come in the way for a patient then they choose a product
that gives her least discomfort. Say, a catheter, that has good tactile feel and is not
traumatic to tissues while draining urine from the body.
If entrepreneurs think from users’ viewpoint and work out pricing backwards, they have a
higher chance of success. That would help them keep costs under check, which is a good
differentiator because governments and service providers today are forced to take a
nuanced view of health economics and comparative effectiveness to keep the cost of
healthcare low.
To that effect, last month the Indian government brought cardiac stents under the
National List of Essential Medicines and capped their prices for the first time. (It’s
another matter that domestic manufacturers are happy because the decision ends the
wide price disparity between local and imported stents in a given category.)
Steady state of skills supply
That brings me to the third thing medtech entrepreneurs must take into account –
ensuring a steady supply of technical skills. One way to do that is to organize as
Germany’s Mittelstands [PDF], the mid-size wonders of industrial efficiency.
Given the specialised nature of these products, which require expertise from both
engineering and medicine and together must understand healthcare regulations, medtech
companies would do well if they fostered a culture of apprenticeship common in
Mittelstands.
What these German entities have shown is that to become world class you don’t have to be
big.
Since medtech in India lacks turnkey generic infrastructure which enables development
costs to drop close to zero, finding an anchor teaching research institution solves the
problem to an extent. Unlike corporate, a research institution is not fixated on enhancing
a product line.
For nearly three decades Tirunal Institute has been such a catalyst around
Thiruvanathapuram. This year alone it has added five new institutions where it’d steer 35
medtech projects of the Department of Science and Technology.
Now, entrepreneurs have to make sure these projects don’t get flubbed, but convert into
products. For instance, Perfint has secured a substantive grant, close to Rs 10 crores,
under the Prime Minister’s Uchchatar Avishkar Yojana to develop a new robotics product
in association with IIT-Madras.
It may not be apparent, but more than professional investors today it is the government
agencies which have the will, and wherewithal, to support new medical technology.
Understandably, it will lean towards technologies that will solve problems of the largest
number.
Need vs Want
And that brings me to the fourth point, and one which is still open ended.
Problem selection
Should innovators in emerging economies restrict themselves to solving problems of the

masses? Should it always be about the well-characterised clinical need or should
entrepreneurs work on aspirational products which may become essential products in
future?
Should innovators in emerging economies restrict themselves to solving problems of the

masses? Should it always be about the well-characterised clinical need or should
entrepreneurs work on aspirational products which may become essential products in
future?
More than noble aims, what works in entrepreneurship is the passion for solving a
problem.
Aswath Ramani, who heads research and development at the TTK group, says he started
work on Chitra heart valve not because six out of 1000 children were born with rheumatic
heart disease and could not afford treatment, but because it was a great engineering
problem to solve. At 77, he still works on new technologies but his advice to young
entrepreneurs remains the same.
(As an aside, the infant food formula was developed at Mysuru’s Central Food
Technological Research Institute in the 1950s but it became an epic success and an
enduring brand like Amul because Verghese Kurien was passionate about it.)
Whether to fund aspirational products in India or not is a question, I’ve learnt, even the
government funding agencies are grappling with.
For device makers, whatever the nature of the product, the clinical need must be
addressable through a market.
“Walking every day is one of best medicines for my mother but can I address it through a
market and make my mother walk? A medical device is not a consumer product; lots of
people buy iPads but don’t use it [and that doesn’t materially impact Apple],” says Mohan
Sivaprakasam, director of Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre at IIT-Madras which
was set up a few years ago to develop and deploy medical technologies.
That explains why, Embrace, the low-cost infant warmer developed at Stanford for
emerging economies which should have been a killer product in India with nearly 26
million new-born babies every year, hasn’t turned out to be so.
Through the Birac-ulors: The odds for India’s only lab-
to-market engine
the-ken.com/story/through-the-birac-ulors-the-odds-for-indias-only-lab-to-market-engine
January 7, 2019
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It was born out of a national shortcoming. One where taking new ideas to market, when
the innovator did not want to become an entrepreneur, was papered over forever. This
was early-to-mid 2000s. Life sciences innovation in India was contracting into a bolus of
agony even as the rest of the world was forging ahead with breakthroughs in food, fuel,
drugs and devices. The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), set up to work with the
industry, had turned into a grant-giving body, like many government agencies. A handful
of academics, technocrats and policymakers crisscrossed the country in wide-ranging
consultations to arrive at what would become Biotechnology Industry Research
Assistance Council (Birac). An agency outside the government, working for the
government, running market-driven evaluation of ideas but in an un-government like
fashion.
It was a breath, rather a gust, of fresh air. In its organisational design, in hiring, and,
importantly, in how it funded the industry. As Maharaj K Bhan, the then secretary of
DBT, pushed for reforms, he’d field volleys of queries from the finance ministry which,
while appreciative of new processes, was cognizant of the Comptroller and Auditor
General’s (CAG) scrutiny. Remember, it was the time when CAG reports set in motion
legal ordeals for various departments. Bureaucrats were more concerned about “recovery
and saving their skin” than the success of startups. Yet, here was an about-to-be-born
organisation which wanted complete freedom on hiring and firing, on offering salaries, on
deciding the career path of lateral hires and backing risky ideas.
“I told them I’d take approval for the percentage of the total budget spent on human
resources but whether I want 100 low paid employees or 30 high paid ones, that’s my
call,” recalls Bhan.
The agencies of this kind have to remain very nimble, market oriented, very commercially
oriented. They are not the researchers but the purveyors of the world where linkages are
created
Pankaj Chandra, Vice-chancellor, Ahmedabad University; Member, Birac Board
How would Birac keep corruption low?
“Predominance of women”, Bhan would counter.
the-ken.com-Through the Birac-ulors The odds for Indias only lab-to-market engine 1/3 875
True to that spirit, in the initial years, 90% staff was women. Renu Swarup, who, as a DBT
member secretary, was part of the early discussions in 2007-08, became the first
managing director when Birac was officially set up as non-profit public sector enterprise
in 2012.
In the six years of its formal set up and until FY18, Birac has ensured Rs 1870 crore ($268
million) in funding support to 750 startups and entrepreneurs—Rs 942 crore ($135
million) out of its own budget, Rs 928 crore ($133 million) from the industry. Basis its
funding philosophy, the industry gets money only if it matches Birac’s grant with its own
commitment, dollar for dollar. Such funding was the lever most in the biotech industry
needed to start or rev up their innovation engine.
Feedback Loop
Matching every government rupee with industry rupee, Birac has

brought Rs 1870 crore to the tech commercialisation table. After
750 startups, 165 IPs, 35 incubators, 30 products, and much
more, should it stick to its economic script or reform?
Seema Singh, 7 Jan 2019
Birac was set up as a unique public sector enterprise to provide 360-degree support to
enable tech development and commercialisation in life sciences, which inspired other
govt agencies to fund startups
In eight years, it has created an organised marketplace for bio-translation; a network of

700+ mentors to speed up tech commercialisation
As it now gets into disbursing risk capital, should it pick winners and back them to the
market or continue to sustain its industry enablement?
Its challenges are not trivial because, in a stodgy country, people with innovation and
product building experience are few and far between
To err is…
the-ken.com/blog/to-err-is
December 24, 2018
From day one, The Ken’s value proposition has remained clear and unchanged: One
story a day. Thorough, deeply-reported, insightful. We may tell fewer stories, but we
strive to tell them better and more accurately than anyone else. The goal is perfection,
and we must hold our hands up and admit that we’ve had our slip-ups. Errors have crept
in, and some of you have even pointed them out. While we’ve gone back and fixed these
mistakes, issued clarifications and castigated ourselves, we haven’t forgotten.
In fact, over the last two months, we’ve kept a detailed count of every error. Because
while we don’t believe in dwelling in the past, we do believe in learning from it. Between
15 October and 15 December, we’ve made a total of 34 errors. Now, keep in mind, these
aren’t errors that are major enough to detract from the point of the piece. In most cases,
they’re minor details that were misreported and weren’t spotted by the desk, typos,
errors in currency conversion, or even headlines tweaked for greater accuracy.
the-ken.com-To err is 1/3 878

But no matter how small the error, we don’t take it lightly. In fact, for every error, we
issue a clarification where we go on record and admit fault. That’s the part you see at the
end of some of our stories. But internally, the buck doesn’t stop there. There’s always an
inquisition of sorts. Not quite the Spanish Inquisition, but exhaustive nonetheless.
Everyone involved comes together to go over our processes to understand exactly how
these errors slipped through our system. Were they reporting errors? Fact-checking
lapses? A lack of oversight? Gaps in the handover process? By identifying how these
mistakes entered the system, we’ve been able to implement new ones to eliminate them.
From instituting a more rigorous fact-checking system to ensuring copies are closed and
ready days in advance to ensure no hurried, last-minute additions and errors, we’re
plugging the holes in our processes. We’re also ensuring an additional, fresh pair of eyes
to go through each copy, over and above the editing we previously had in place. You
deserve better, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure you get the best product
possible.
The goal remains perfection, and through this process of auditing our slip-ups, we
believe we’re moving closer to it. As with any change, this will require some fine-tuning,
and we expect that we’ll have it all figured out by the start of 2019.
So, consider it a New Year’s resolution then. Here’s to an error-free 2019.
AUTHOR
Ranjan Crasta

A huge fan of the Oxford comma, Ranjan joined The Ken's edit desk after five years in
the badlands of digital journalism. Now, his life's mission is to bring story-telling and
accessibility to business journalism. Well, that and foisting cat adoptions on
unsuspecting passers by.
View Full Profile

To Moon and Mars, again
the-ken.com/story/to-moon-and-mars-again
November 4, 2016
Exploration
If Chandrayaan-1 was a science mission & Mangalyaan-1 a tech

mission, then their follow-on missions are certainly swapping the
tags. What do we expect?
Seema Singh, 4 Nov 2016
Many theories and metaphors exist on how the Moon got its rugged, groovy looks. Last
week, one of the long-running lunar programmes of Nasa revealed how one of the
biggest and the youngest crater—there are thousands on the Moon—was formed. The 3.8
billion-year-old Orientale has withstood severe fracturing, melting, virtually all brutal
natural phenomena, upon its crust to become the weather-beaten giant ball that we see
from the earth.
But Moon’s ruggedness is not a feature of its past. Our closest celestial neighbour is still
being hit by comets and asteroids. Last month, researchers showed that on an average
180 new craters are formed on the lunar surface every year.
And that explains why the Indian space agency, Isro, is creating artificial craters. Near
the fort town of Chitradurga, 400 km from Bengaluru, Isro has created a dozen of them
—10 metres in diametre, 3 metres in depth—to simulate the lunar terrain. It has begun
testing equipment, specifically the Lander and associated electronics and avionics, for
the second Moon mission. Chandrayaan-2 is scheduled to launch in late 2017 or early
2018.
the-ken.com-To Moon and Mars again 1/6 881

In 2008, when Isro sent a spacecraft to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1, it was the first time
India was sending a satellite beyond the geostationary orbit—from the 36,000 km high
orbit that Indian rockets were routinely injecting satellites into, it went much farther, to
3.6 lakh km. But the spacecraft was so designed that it could fit the existing rocket’s,
Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle’s (PSLV), carrying capacity. The XL version of the rocket
used had been in use earlier and needed just a tweak. In summary, it was the set of
payloads, the 11 instruments on the satellite, that set the mission truly apart.
“Several missions had gone before us, but Chandrayaan-1 gets the credit for discovering
water [molecules] on the Moon for the first time and the processes that are responsible
for its formation. even though the instruments onboard were from Nasa,” says AS Kiran
Kumar, chairman of Isro.
Broadly speaking, Chandrayaan-1 was an exploration mission; a science mission so to

say. In comparison, Chandrayaan-2 is a technology mission, one where Isro is building
and testing a host of new technologies starting with the soft landing of a spacecraft on
the Moon. Or any planetary surface for that matter. (It did, however, crash-land its probe
the first time and the site on the Moon has since been named as Jawahar Sthal.)
This time around, Isro is sending an Orbiter, a Lander and a Rover to the Moon. “Unlike
the previous crash-landing, we have a controlled descent this time which means much
manoeuvring of our normal liquid engines so that you can compensate for the
gravitational pull and have a safe touchdown,” says Kiran Kumar. It has built a set of
imaging and sensing technologies which would ensure that the Lander identifies a ‘safe’
area to land and doesn’t topple over. “We are currently experimenting this [in
Chitradurga]” he says. “Besides these, there are several Rover-to-Lander and Lander-to-
Earth communication technologies that we have built for the first time.”
In what could be called an incredible happenstance, TeamIndus, the only Indian

participant in Google’s $30 million Lunar XPRIZE, will probably be ahead of
Chandrayaan-2 in landing its spacecraft and Rover on the moon. This week it confirmed
buying a commercial launch slot for late 2017 on one of the PSLV-XL rockets and it is
likely to be the only satellite on that launch. For testing, says Rahul Narayan, co-founder
of TeamIndus, “We plan to utilise services of an established ‘lunar terrain simulation’
facility to ensure we truly understand the behaviour and dynamics of operating on the
lunar surface.”
Only three other countries have managed a soft launch on the Moon—the United States
and Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, and China in 2013.
While TeamIndus’ is a private endeavour, a true moonshot as it were, and its Rover is
expected to travel a short 500 metres to take images and send them back to the earth,
Chandrayaan-2 Rover has bigger tasks cut out. The former’s lunar surface operation is
expected to last no more than 320 hours whereas the planned life of Isro’s Rover is one
lunar day or 14 earth days or 336 hours. (In other words, the planned maximum life of

TeamIndus rover is 320 hours whereas the planned minimum life of Isro’s rover is 336
hours.) Isro wouldn’t disclose much except that “on the surface of the moon, more
systematic observations are planned.”
Not done with the Moon yet
The manned Apollo missions of Nasa in 1969 and later left behind two notable legacies:
that the Moon is a dry, arid place, and that, as humans, we have found all that there is to
find on the Moon. Which is why after a flurry of missions in the late ’60s and early ’70s,
Nasa turned away from the Moon and directed its resources to Mars and others planets
and asteroids.
By the middle of the first decade of this millennium, though, spacefaring nations showed
a renewed interest in Moon. Now, Isro wants to extend Chandrayaan-1 studies further,
get more quantitative affirmation of the findings.
Planetary researchers say despite Moon being the most studied celestial object, its
minerals, which are like fingerprints, have many stories to tell about its geologic history.
The M3 spectrometer that Nasa sent on Chandrayaan-1, mapped the Moon extensively.
To compare it with the human eye, which can see between 400 to 700 nanometers —
from violet to red on the electromagnetic spectrum—M3 could penetrate 3000
nanometers. Isro chairman says the new spectrometer on Chandrayaan-2 will go up to
5000 nanometers. “This would better demonstrate the parameters measured so far.”
With this kind of perception, Isro expects to see things never seen before.
Unlike the first mission where six out of eleven instruments onboard were made by
international teams, in Chandrayaan-2 all five (or you could say only five) payloads are
made by Isro and Indian academics.

That may look like less but, in terms of scope, Kiran Kumar says it’s “one big step
higher”, but won’t confirm when the final step would be taken. That is, to send a
Retriever to bring back samples to the earth, which China is sending through Chang’e 5
next year. “We are trying to advance our capability, step by step,” says the chairman.
Chandrayaan-2
Unlike the first mission where six out of eleven instruments onboard were made by
international teams, in Chandrayaan-2 all five (or you could say only five) payloads are
made by Isro and Indian academics
It’s never fair to compare India with China, yet it’s worth mentioning that the fusillade of
space launches we see from China is the result of a 10-year Strategic Priority
Programme; the first five years alone saw $450 million in funding. Now contrast that to
Isro where funding arrives piecemeal; the budget approval comes much after any project
gets a nod in principle.
Coming back to Chandrayaan-2, at Rs 605 crore, it’s an ambitious project. And why not.
There’s a lot to learn about the Moon, not least because it is hit by space rock so often
that it apparently gets a makeover every 81,000 years.
So, we asked one of the world’s leading planetary scientists, Maria Zuber at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what are three important questions about the
Moon that the world expects forthcoming missions to answer. Zuber is the principal
investigator of Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) program who
last week published the Orientale findings. Her choicest questions are:
* What are the details of the giant impact that produced the Earth-Moon system?
* What is the role of water in the evolution of the Moon?
* How deep did the South Pole-Aitken basin excavate? (It is the largest impact basin on
the Moon and one of the largest in the solar system.)
The red hot planet

In comparison to Moon, Mars is much more challenging, and charming too. If
Chandrayaan-1 took 5.5 days to reach the lunar orbit, Mangalyaan-1 took 300 days to
enter the Martian orbit. But when it did, on September 24, 2014, it created history. In a
precise, do-or-die space manoeuvre, it inserted the satellite in the Mars orbit through a
mode of travel called Minimum Energy Transfer Orbit.
Since it reached Mars just two days after Nasa’s MAVEN orbiter, after initial celebratory
statements and stories, comparisons flew thick and fast. The most conspicuous of them
was, of course, the price tag—at $73 million, Mangalyaan-1 was cheaper than the movie
Gravity and cost just 11% of Nasa’s budget for MAVEN.

Without taking anything away from Mangalyaan-1, it was an unfair comparison. Isro’s
mars mission was a pure technology demonstration, whereas MAVEN was a well-
calculated science mission with big payloads. That’s how Nasa has worked so far—choose
science missions and then purchase rockets to deliver the payloads.
So in September, three years after its launch, when Isro called for proposals for payloads
on Mangalyaan-2, the excitement was rife that the next spacecraft to Mars would go up
in May 2018—the window when the earth is closest to Mars comes every 26 months.
“The earliest window for Mangalyaan-2 is 2020; 2018 is out of the question,” says Kiran
Kumar. It’s evident from the Isro call for proposals that the next Mars mission is an
exploration mission, not a technology demonstrator. The tech “processes will be same”
next time, but the satellite will be “of much higher capacity”.
“Our real constraint the first time was the amount of fuel we were able to carry on the
launch vehicle. We needed fuel to put the satellite in orbit, do all the manoeuvres and be
able to withstand all mishaps. But we did not face any problem and we were left with a
lot of fuel; even today we have 30-35 kg of fuel which can last up to many years,” says
Kiran Kumar. Isro will undertake a manoeuvre in January to ensure the satellite does
not get caught in the long eclipse duration which could discharge its batteries.
Mangalyaan
“You can say these are not Mars-shaking observations but they are incremental and
different from the knowledge base that existed, ' says Kiran Kumar. The satellite has
lasted much beyond its six months of planned life. 'We have taken most comprehensive
pictures, more than all previous missions combined. We are still collecting data, who
knows we might hit upon a big discovery'- Isro chairman Kiran Kumar
Isro may be budgeting for better instruments this time, seven times bigger than the first
mission going by the proposal call, but the fear is it may not end up with the best-
planned experiments. There isn’t a critical mass of planetary scientists in the country.
Some academics even think the six-week window of the call for proposals wasn’t long
enough.
To be fair, it’s not Isro’s job to “prepare” planetary researchers, but given the ambitious
deep space voyages it has planned, to Venus and asteroids, perhaps Isro would be better
off ‘funding’ planetary studies in some institutions, say the Indian Institute of Science,
and then get them to put together strong space experiments. “Isro should get out of the
Indian mentality that there are no experts—just because you are a scientist, you should
be able to switch fields easily. You need deep expertise,” says a space scientist who has
worked with the agency before.
Depth in bench science is an invaluable resource. In mid-October, Nasa’s MAVEN

discovered the rate at which Mars was losing its atmosphere to space, a big advancement
in Mars understanding.
What about Mangalyaan-1?

PS: The story has been updated to explain the difference between the planned maximum
and the planned minimum life of the rovers of TeamIndus and Isro respectively.
AUTHOR
Seema Singh
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Today’s PSLV launch could create history. And a new
market for Isro
the-ken.com/story/todays-pslv-launch-create-history-new-market-isro
February 15, 2017
For over two decades, it has impeccably accomplished the tasks allotted. This morning,
with 37 consecutive successes behind it, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) will
lift-off from Sriharikota with 104 satellites on board, almost thrice the number that
a Russian rocket, which currently holds the record, carried three years ago.
It is not that there is no other rocket in the world that can haul so many spacecraft.
Indeed, there are several with much higher payload capacities than the PSLV. Rather,
today’s flight is a testament to the meticulous mission planning and flawless
execution capabilities that Isro’s launch vehicle teams are capable of.
Since its first successful flight in 1994, this Indian rocket has placed 122 satellites in orbit,
43 of them Indian (including the Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe and the Mars Orbiter
Mission) as well as 79 foreign ones from 21 other countries. It has carried multiple
satellites on 18 occasions. Last June saw the PSLV lift 20 satellites (21 if a tiny satellite
snuggled inside another spacecraft and ejected only a few months later is also included),
its previous best that helped prepare for today’s all-time record.
The higher the number of satellites being taken on a single rocket, the greater the
attention that must go into every small detail to make sure nothing goes wrong and
jeopardises the whole mission. It is far easier—and much less nerve-racking—to launch
one or two satellites instead of a whole swarm of them.
AS Kiran Kumar, who heads the Indian space agency, points out that today’s launch was
not undertaken in order to achieve a new record. The principal payload for the mission
included Isro’s own earth imaging spacecraft, a Cartosat-2 series satellite, and two Indian
the-ken.com-Todays PSLV launch could create history And a new market for Isro 1/8 887
nano satellites, INS-1A and -1B, each weighing around 9kg. After these were
accommodated, the rocket still had some capacity to spare. Carrying another 101 satellites
from abroad earned money that almost halved the cost of launching the Indian satellites.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of small satellites weighing
between 1kg to 50kg being built and planned. The low cost of these satellites makes space
accessible to universities as well as governments of non-spacefaring nations. Companies,
too, are looking at constellations of such satellites for applications such as rapid earth
imaging and global tracking of ships. As a result, small launchers are meeting the growing
demand from this market segment.
The PSLV has emerged as a cost-effective and reliable launcher for such satellites. Today’s
launch, if successful, should further consolidate that position. Cramming as many
satellites as possible on the rocket might for Isro also be a way of remaining competitive,
perhaps allowing it to avoid the development of a new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle
(SSLV) of its own. For over a decade, an export control licensing policy discouraged
American satellites from using Indian rockets, but the unit economics could trump that.
First steps
Today’s effort at launching so many satellites rests on foundations that were put in place
20 years ago, almost as soon as it became clear that the PSLV could fly reliably.
The PSLV’s maiden launch in September 1993 had failed primarily due to a software
error which, instead of correcting, irretrievably worsened the problems produced during
the separation of its spent second stage from the rest of the rocket. Those issues were
swiftly corrected, and its next flight, a year later, was, as Isro likes to term such successes,
‘a textbook launch’. After one more developmental launch in 1996, the launcher was ready
to begin the operational phase of its career.
The PSLV’s payload capacity then had to be enhanced in various ways so that it could
carry IRS-1D, the first time an operational Isro remote sensing satellite would be
launched from India. Its predecessors, IRS-1A, -1B and -1C had travelled on Soviet and
later Russian rockets.
The PSLV’s greater capacity made it possible to consider putting more than just one
satellite on subsequent flights.
Even before the PSLV-C1 mission launched the IRS-1D in 1997, a contract was signed for
two smaller satellites to piggyback on the very next mission to launch another Isro remote
sensing satellite, IRS-P4 (OCEANSAT), according to S Ramakrishnan, who had been with
the PSLV project almost from its inception and headed it from 1996 to 2002. He later
became director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram,
Isro’s lead institution for launch vehicle development, before retiring from the
organisation.
One satellite, weighing 107kg, was from South Korea and the other of 45kg from
Germany. The idea, then, was to clear two zones on the equipment bay, a circular
platform in the rocket’s fourth stage that holds vital flight equipment. The two satellites
would be mounted in these two zones.
As it happened, the PSLV-C1 had a minor problem, and IRS-1D ended up in a lower orbit
than planned. “We had to make a presentation to the South Koreans, who were worried,
to convince them that we understood the problem and would be able to fix it,”
Ramakrishnan recalled.
Moreover, extensive analyses, simulations and even ground tests were carried out to make
sure that the two additional satellites could be safely flown along with the main spacecraft
in the PSLV-C2 mission. The satellites and interfaces holding them securely in place on
the fourth stage had to withstand all the loads and stresses as the rocket accelerated
through the atmosphere to reach orbital velocity of almost 7.5 km per second (about
27,000 km per hour) in just 16 minutes.
Once the rocket’s fourth stage went into space and reached orbital velocity, its twin
engines shut down. Then a carefully choreographed dance ensued, unseen by human eyes
and beyond human control, as the fourth stage executed a series of precisely-timed
manoeuvres to release the satellites it carried. First, the IRS-P4 would be ejected. Then
the stage had to swivel before releasing the South Korean satellite. Another turn and the
German satellite could go. Finally, a last pirouette.
These manoeuvres, which had to be incorporated into the rocket’s flight software before
lift-off, were worked out so that the orbits of the spacecraft as well as of the spent fourth
stage became spatially separated, Ramakrishnan said. Detailed analysis was done to
“ensure collision-free separation even under [the] worst conditions,” he and his
colleagues noted in a journal paper.
The PSLV-C2 mission went without a hitch in May 1999. The launch of two foreign
microsatellites signalled Isro’s “successful entry into the multi-million-dollar commercial
launch services market,” they observed in the paper.
The very next launch two years later brought another challenge. The European Space
Agency (ESA) had requested a different orbit for its satellite, Project for On-Board
Autonomy (PROBA), from the one that the PSLV-C3 would be executing for Isro’s
Technology Experiment Satellite (TES). Another foreign satellite, Bispectral and Infrared
Remote Detection (BIRD), was to be left in the same orbit as TES.
A change in orbit meant that after the TES and BIRD satellites were ejected, the fourth
stage needed additional velocity. Although the PSLV’s fourth stage had been designed so
that its two engines could restart, such re-ignition had not been demonstrated at the time,
Ramakrishnan remarked. The PSLV was still a new launcher, and failure would attract a
lot of attention.
So instead a way was found to utilise two of the six thrusters on the fourth stage, each of
which generates only 5kg of thrust and are used to control the stage’s orientation. These
thrusters continue to operate even after the main engines cut off and could provide the
additional velocity required.
“This worked very well and the customer was happy. Whatever we promised, we could
deliver,” he said.
(It was only last year that the PSLV placed satellites into very different orbits by restarting
its fourth stage engines.)
With growing confidence, Isro went on to carry out further multi-satellite launches using
the PSLV. It found ways to accommodate many more satellites on the fourth stage,
developing new interfaces, fixtures and satellite launch adapters in order to do so. A great
deal of customisation was often required when taking satellites from different customers
on the same rocket.
“I don’t know whether it is our culture or nature, we try to accommodate customers and
meet their requirements, sometimes at short notice,” Ramakrishnan remarked. “That’s
how we get so many customers.”
For a pie of the international market

Foreign satellites have usually hitched rides with PSLV flights that had an Indian
spacecraft as the principal payload. Just six of the PSLV’s 37 successful flights so far have
been wholly devoted to foreign satellites.
As a result, 67% of all Indian satellites launched by the rocket have weighed more than
500kg. In the case of foreign satellites, on the other hand, 67% of them have been in the
1kg to 50kg class. Today’s launch, with the Cartosat series satellite having a mass of over
700kg and the 101 foreign satellites weighing between 1kg and 5kg, is, therefore,
emblematic of this phenomenon.
With Isro planning to launch the PSLV more frequently, the rocket could be well placed to
take advantage of the rapidly escalating numbers of small satellites that are looking to get
into orbit.
Last year, the PSLV was second only to America’s Atlas V rocket in the number of 1-50kg
class small satellites launched, according to the ‘2017 Nano/Microsatellite Market
Forecast’ from SpaceWorks Enterprises, a US-based company that prepares assessments
of global satellite activity. It predicts that nearly 2,400 such satellites “will require a
launch from 2017 through 2023.”
“The PSLV already has an excellent reputation for providing ride-share opportunities for
small satellites and this record-setting launch will certainly bolster that,” commented Bill
Doncaster, senior systems engineer at SpaceWorks, in an email.
Companies are now planning to operate constellations involving large numbers of small
satellites. Planet, an American company, for instance, intends to have 150 satellites in
orbit that will image the whole globe daily. It used the PSLV to launch a ‘flock’ of a dozen
of its Dove satellites last June. Today’s PSLV launch will carry another flock of 88 Dove
satellites, each weighing less than 5kg. This was “the largest fleet of satellites launched in
history,” the company proudly pointed out.
The SpaceWorks forecast indicates that not only is the number of small satellites set to
rise but also the share of the commercial sector would go up from 40% of such satellites
during 2009-2016 to 70% in 2017-2019. The PSLV could be well placed to attract
companies looking for launches.
Another forecast, ‘Satellites to be Built & Launched over the next 10 Years‘, published last
year by Euroconsult, a space consultancy firm headquartered in Paris, predicts that there
could be 5X the number of satellites weighing less than 50kg coming up for launch during
2016-2025 than in the previous ten years.
Small satellites have a low unit cost, which is the reason for their success, observed Rachel
Villain, principal advisor at Euroconsult, and editor of that report as well as its previous
editions. “So they dominate in number but not in market value,” she said in an email.
On the other hand, the 1,450 satellites that weigh more than 50kg at launch (without
counting the two mega constellations planned by OneWeb and SpaceX) represented only
16% of the 9,000 or so satellites that could be launched between 2016 and 2025 but
accounted for 92% of the market value.
Indeed, the PSLV’s attractiveness as a launcher for small satellites has already shown that
downside. The revenue earned through Isro’s commercial launches during the financial
year 2015-2016 amounted to just 0.6% of the global launch services market, according
to a reply the government gave in the Rajya Sabha last year.
Reinventing for small launches
Small launchers are entering the market to specifically target the small satellite segment,
seeking to offer cheap and frequent rides to space. China has two such launchers,
the Long March 11 and the Kuaizhou-1A. Just recently, Japan’s SS-520-4, the world’s
smallest orbital launcher, failed in its first flight. Rocket Lab, an American private
company, is preparing to flight test its Electron rocket later this year from a launch base it
has established in New Zealand. More systems, such as Virgin Galactic’s
LauncherOne where the rocket will be fired from a Boeing 747 aircraft, are under
development.
SSLVs have been slow to materialise and that has constrained the near-term growth of
small satellites, according to the SpaceWorks analysis.
“For some small satellite customers, we believe a launcher that operates frequently, such
as 6-12 times per year or more, with 10-20 or even fewer small satellites is preferable to a
single launch with 120 small satellites,” said Doncaster in his email.
Isro, too, is thought to be considering the development of its own SSLV with the capacity
to lift up to about 500kg to a few 100 kilometres above the Earth. The PSLV, by
comparison, can carry something like 1.7-3.8 tonnes depending on the orbit required.
An SSLV was in the roadmap that Isro had prepared for launch vehicle development, said
K Sivan, the VSSC director. But no decision had yet been made on whether such a
launcher was required or not.
While an SSLV would be cheaper than the PSLV, the reduction in cost may not be
commensurate with the extent to which the payload capacity would come down, he
remarked. Consequently, on the basis of cost per kilogramme of payload put into orbit,
the PSLV could work out more economical than an SSLV.
So, an alternative way of thinking was that it was best to put as many satellites as possible
on the PSLV. “Like whatever we are doing now, [over] 100 satellites. This is very
efficient,” he remarked.
Gopal N Raj is a science journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram who has written

extensively about the Indian space programme for over two decades and published a
book, ‘Reach for the Stars: The Evolution of India’s Rocket Programme’. Follow him on
Twitter @GopalRajN
Lede image: PSLV-C37 First Stage integrated at Vehicle Assembly Building. Courtesy: Isro
Update: The story was updated on 16 February to reflect the correct name of the company
that launched 88 Dove satellites.
Toothless Tiger: Between court cases, Trai can’t
regulate the industry
the-ken.com/story/trai-court-cases-regulate
May 11, 2018
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April ended with many busybodies swarming the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
(Trai) office in New Delhi. There were several meetings that demanded “all hands on
deck”, called to figure out ways to deal with a major blow to Trai’s role and image. The
Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) had recently issued a
partial stay on Trai’s rules on predatory pricing and defining a significant market player
(SMP), i.e. having more than 30% market share, which it set in February. An official
present in the meetings said that the stay was akin to “cutting off their limbs” and not
letting Trai do its job. It has set the cat among the pigeons since.
Trai is at a crossroads today trying to figure out how to regulate the industry. There are
now three major cases being argued in different courts across Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai
where Trai is a party, and all of them are taking aim at its core functions in mobile
telephony. Namely:
regulating tariffs where it must ensure that it is non-predatory, non-discriminatory

and transparent in nature,
regulating and ensuring there is interconnection between operators,
ensuring quality of service for consumers.
These cases are being filed by incumbent operators, Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea
Cellular. They say that the new Trai regulations are designed to favour one operator—
Reliance Jio. Trai’s counter-argument is that these changes become necessary as India
moves towards data-based networks.
But things weren’t always like this.
Trai was established 21 years ago to regulate mobile telephony, which, back then, had only
14.5 million users. Gradually, its scope was expanded to regulate multiple information
and communication technologies (ICT). This included internet, television, DTH and
radio. Today, all these technologies are converging on smartphones. Hence, Trai’s
regulation of the industry in a neutral and impartial manner has become critical.
As a regulator, Trai has not shied away from taking bold decisions to ensure an orderly
growth of the ecosystem. For example, in 2007, it passed a regulation which required all
DTH operators to offer TV channels on an à la carte basis and said that they could not
compel customers to subscribe to a bouquet of channels. Eventually, it fixed bouquet
tariffs on DTH for consumers and also made pay channels possible.
the-ken.com-Toothless Tiger Between court cases Trai cant regulate the industry 1/2 895
But today, that boldness looks partisan. In February, over a Telecom Tariff Order (TTO),
Trai changed the definition of an SMP. The order required that SMPs (read as Airtel,
Vodafone and Idea Cellular) would have to disclose all their tariffs on an online portal to
prevent predatory pricing. But this new definition did not take into account two crucial
parameters in place for over 20 years. “As per the earlier definition, [an SMP] had four
different aspects to it.
Trai harder
Multiple court cases are attacking the core functions of the

telecom regulator. Defanged by court decisions, Trai’s new
regulations are seen favouring Reliance Jio
Shashidhar KJ, 11 May 2018
Trai's core functions are to regulate tariffs, interconnection and quality of service in the
telecom industry. Multiple cases are hampering its functioning
Its recent regulations are seen as being favourable only to Reliance Jio. But Trai feels
that they are needed as they move to data networks
Operators concede that data networks are the future. Therefore it becomes crucial that
Trai is not seen as partisan towards players with new rules
A Parliamentary committee is now looking at amending the Trai Act to give it more
powers to regulate the industry
the-ken.com-Toothless Tiger Between court cases Trai cant regulate the industry 2/2 896
Trapped in transition: The rough road ahead of
Vodafone Idea
the-ken.com/story/vodafone-idea-merger-results
November 22, 2018
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The key takeaway from telecom giant Vodafone Idea’s first ever analyst meeting was this
—the company doesn’t expect the two-year-old tariff war to continue. From here on out,
the company believes that tariffs will cease the downward spiral they have been on since
Reliance Jio first sent the telecom industry into a tizzy by lowering data prices and forcing
competitors to follow suit. This belief carries hope for Vodafone Idea, something that’s
been in short supply since it announced its maiden quarterly results just over a week ago.
The predicament the company finds itself in is not something most would have seen
coming just two years prior. Back then, the decision to merge Idea Cellular and Vodafone
India seemed like a match made in heaven. Even their competitors agreed. At the World
Economic Forum in Davos in January 2017, Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal openly
backed the idea of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular merging to become the largest telco
in the country. “It’s a perfect match… The strength and weaknesses match very well. Rural
and urban [subscribers]. Spectrum portfolio,” Mittal said.
This sentiment was evident when the two companies finally announced their merger
plans in March that same year. After all, they had a lot to offer each other. Vodafone India
had been looking to list on the Indian stock exchanges since around June 2016. Idea, as
an already listed company, would help them achieve this. In addition, while Idea had
made inroads into rural areas, Vodafone had a larger presence in metros. The merger was
supposed to help the companies consolidate their capital and operational expenditure,
reduce their debt, and raise their average revenue per user (ARPU) on data plans.
So, when the merger finally went through in August 2018—with the two companies
forming a merged entity called Vodafone Idea Ltd—it should have been good news. A
bulwark against the unceasing creep of rival telco Reliance Jio.
The maiden quarterly results, however, were more nightmare than fairytale. To begin
with, the company posted a net loss of Rs 4,974 crore ($690.35 million) during the
September quarter. Vodafone Idea lost 13 million subscribers during the quarter—more
than double the subscribers lost by Airtel in the same period. Hopes of an increase in
ARPU also proved unfounded. ARPU in this quarter declined to Rs 88 ($1.23). Vodafone
Idea has now launched new minimum recharge plans aimed at stemming the ARPU
depletion. While its rivals also saw a drop in ARPU, Airtel’s ARPU for the same quarter
stood at a comparatively better Rs 100 ($1.4), while Jio’s was an even higher Rs 131.7
($1.85).
the-ken.com-Trapped in transition The rough road ahead of Vodafone Idea 1/2 897
Unsurprisingly, revenue took a body blow. Total revenue fell 7.1% quarter-on-quarter to
Rs 12,023.8 crore ($1.66 billion). Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and
amortisation (EBITDA) was Rs 978.8 crore ($135.85 million), a steep drop of 28.7% from
the preceding quarter.
Merged headache
It was pitched as a match made in heaven. But a mountain of

debt, an exodus of customers, and a patchy network have
conspired to leave Vodafone Idea reeling
Shashidhar KJ, 22 Nov 2018
The merger between Vodafone India and Idea Cellular was meant to create an entity
capable of fending off the Jio juggernaut
But Vodafone Idea's maiden quarterly results have been disastrous, with debt rising and
profitability falling
The company's top management has attempted to put a positive spin on things, but
Vodafone Idea faces an uphill road ahead
To survive, it must stem its declining ARPU, ringfence subscribers, and sort out its
patchy network. But even this may not cut it
the-ken.com-Trapped in transition The rough road ahead of Vodafone Idea 2/2 898
Tsundoku: The burden of the unread book
the-ken.com/story/tsundoku-mental-clutter
September 1, 2018
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If, like us, you love reading, then, like us, you most likely have an array of books lying on
your bookshelves, untouched, unread and uncared for. The Japanese even have a word for
this—Tsundoku, the art of buying books and never reading them. Books bought in a fit of
enthusiasm but eventually lost among the daily din of what has become a much-cluttered
life.
This clutter takes many forms.
There’s the obvious: in all probability you have 10 tabs open on your browser, prompts for
12 unread emails, 15 WhatsApp notifications and sundry other alerts clamouring for your
attention at this very moment. And social media platforms have mastered the art of
occupying our attention, to the point where we obsessively check and re-check their apps
and websites for yet more notifications and updates.
But then there are things that may not even seem like clutter at first glance. Take
infotainment—a broad category that covers everything from TED talks to National
Geographic documentaries to books on pop psychology and behavioural finance to
podcasts on history, science and politics.
Thanks to the internet, we have easy access to enormous amounts of information and
wisdom and—remarkably enough—most of it can be accessed free or at a nominal charge.
And yet this cornucopia of knowledge flatters to deceive. In the end, we turn all this into
yet more clutter.
the-ken.com-Tsundoku The burden of the unread book 1/2 899

Psychologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists are now moving towards a view
that our brains are experts at fooling us, and that we’re are just like Jon Snow from Game
of Thrones. We know nothing.
How does this cluttered mind affect us? For one, we lose focus and our attention span
suffers (admittedly a contentious claim, but one worth considering). Second, there is the
small matter that this diversity of material does not seem to be making us any happier. In
fact, stress levels around the world are on the rise. India is above average (not a good
thing), especially when it comes to people working in corporate jobs.
This is what our 10-part series for The Ken is all about. We will delve into these and other
issues, identify their root causes and suggest remedies. In this piece, we give you an
overview of what lies ahead.
The question that springs to mind is, how do we deal with this clutter? Well, first we need
to go a little deeper into our brains and understand what makes them tick.
The knowledge illusion

Donald Rumsfeld, a former US defence secretary, was famous for saying, “There are
things we know that we know.
the-ken.com-Tsundoku The burden of the unread book 2/2 900

Under the radar of regulation, crypto conmen spin
brazen Ponzi schemes
the-ken.com/story/under-radar-regulation-crypto-conmen-spin-brazen-ponzi-schemes
October 17, 2017
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There are many fake cryptocurrencies in the market nowadays, but as a ‘member’ of the
Indian government, Amit Lakhanpal often assures, he’s got a safe bet for buyers which
will shortly overtake even bitcoin.
This must interest you just a little bit, after all, bitcoin has been the buzzword lately—the
cryptocurrency which made many early adopters of the technology millionaires
overnight. But those who missed the bus with bitcoin are now left confused, as hundreds
of new crypto-assets have emerged and it’s hard to tell which one is going to be the next
best thing.
Amit M Lakhanpal, MD of a real estate firm, also claims to be a member of the Ministry
of Finance and winner of awards like Pride of India, Rashtriya Ekta Puraskar, and
Mahatma Gandhi Gaurav Samman. Covered in gold accessories, he claims he’s got the
next big cryptocurrency.
To the moon
Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency came into existence in 2009. Since then it has
rallied from $0.06 per coin to $5,600, a rally of 9333233%, as per the Coindesk price
indicator.
Cryptocurrencies are a volatile asset class and hard to understand. Having someone who
is seen as a government official, a guide in the sea of confusing blockchain based assets,
would seem reliable to many. The blockchain is a decentralised and distributed public
the-ken.com-Under the radar of regulation crypto conmen spin brazen Ponzi schemes 1/3 901
ledger which is used to record transactions across a network of computers.
Lakhanpal is the founder of Money Trade Coin (MTC), a new cryptocurrency, which as
per their press release, “is forecasted to exceed the value of $500 (~Rs 32,500) per coin
this year across cryptocurrency exchanges.”
There’s just a tiny problem. It’s fake.
MTC is the product of a bizarre merger between the murky world of multi-level
marketing (MLM) or Pyramid schemes and cryptocurrencies, a technology that
maintains its legitimacy by being public and transparent.
MTC has no public blockchain, no mining process or a wallet that could store the coin
and is run like a pyramid scheme by direct distributors.
Mining is the process through which each entry is verified and registered over a
blockchain. A cryptocurrency wallet is a software (like Jaxx) or hardware (like Trezor)
which is used to store, send and receive digital tokens.
As per Lakhanpal, MTC is a centralised cryptocurrency. This is quite similar to E-Coin, a

fake cryptocurrency which was recently closed by Switzerland’s financial regulator.
According to coinmarketcap.com, a website which tracks the price movement of digital

currencies, there are 1159 cryptocurrencies globally as of now. The number comprises
both genuine and fake cryptocurrencies as the website does not “judge the merits of any
cryptocurrency” and as long as any token “meets the listing criteria, it’s eligible to be on
the site.”
This story is about how one of the most important technological inventions since the
internet—bitcoin—remained unnoticed by the Indian government but got the attention
of a few opportunists who were not shy of deceiving gullible people.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
the-ken.com
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Unicommerce’s founding makes sense, its acquisition
by Snapdeal doesn’t
the-ken.com/story/unicommerces-founding-makes-sense-its-acquisition-by-snapdeal-doesnt
August 24, 2017
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The news appeared on 22 August 2017, the day before, buried in the inner pages of
various newspapers and websites. The three founders of Unicommerce had quit Snapdeal.
But even then, their press statement was interesting for this snippet, “As part of the sale
transaction in April 2015, it was mutually agreed that we would continue to work at
Unicommerce for another two years and steer the company to further growth.”
Because Unicommerce was unlike any company Snapdeal had bought.
Snapdeal acquired Unicommerce in the year 2015, at least on paper. Snapdeal’s founders
Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and VC investor Nexus were sitting on both sides of the
table—they were both buyer and seller. So, did this deal, in the way it was carried out raise
issues of corporate governance at the company? People at Snapdeal who have looked at
this transaction closely believe that the Snapdeal’s board of directors signed off on it. That
sanctimonious blessing makes the transaction right.
What’s right is a matter of opinion. What actually happened is this story. So, let’s dive
right in. To Day Zero.
“All said and done, Unicommerce was a really good company”

Unicommerce was founded in 2012. By three co-founders. Ankit Pruthi, Karun Singla and
Vibhu Garg. All batchmates from IIT Delhi. In his earlier assignment, Singla had worked
at Snapdeal and understood the e-commerce business well. It was there that the idea of
the-ken.com-Unicommerces founding makes sense its acquisition by Snapdeal doesnt 1/2 904
Unicommerce first came about. How about a company that can provide software to sellers
on an e-commerce platform. This software can be integrated into the backend of the seller
and the e-commerce company, so they can talk to each other.
Unicommerce called it Uniware, a web based real time software. So, order in. Order out.
Payment in. Inventory check. Processing returns. You know, mundane, but important
stuff, which is needed to build an e-commerce company. To put it simply, imagine being a
seller, selling on several platforms like Jabong, Myntra, Snapdeal and having to deal with
different software for each company. Unicommerce put it all together.
Thanks to Singla’s stint at Snapdeal, enter into the picture, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
If you aren’t familiar, both are co-founders of Snapdeal. Messrs Bahl and Bansal entered
Unicommerce as angel investors. On 29 February 2012, Unicommerce E-solutions Private
Limited issued Rs 10 equity shares to them. The share was issued at a premium of Rs 990
per share and Bahl and Bansal invested Rs 9,90,000 each into the company.
The world of venture capital in India is fascinating in the way it works. It will be fair to say
that it works a lot, maybe too much of it, on signalling. So if X is investing monies in
company A, Y thinks…hmmm…we shouldn’t miss out on that, I’m sure X must have seen
something of value and only then invested in the company.
the-ken.com-Unicommerces founding makes sense its acquisition by Snapdeal doesnt 2/2 905
Unicorn blues: The unbearable lightness of being Hike
the-ken.com/story/unicorn-blues-the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-hike
July 11, 2018
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Question: How can you tell that a unicorn startup is in trouble?
Answer: When it starts conjuring up make-believe metrics to tout success/traction.
Take Hike, for example.
In August 2016, the instant messaging startup founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal raised $175
million. The funding round was led by Chinese behemoth Tencent and Taiwanese
manufacturing company Foxconn at a valuation of $1.4 billion. At that time, Hike was
only four years old. It was the fastest Indian startup to enter the exalted unicorn club
(startups with a valuation of $1 billion or more).
Since that euphoric high, though, the company has largely flattered to deceive.
In a recent blog post, Mittal laid out a new metric for the company—DAU LTV (daily
active user lifetime value). According to the company, this metric attempts to answer the
following question:
“What % of our user base comes back to our app for how many days in a 7 day period?”
At first glance, “DAU LTV” might sound like a fair metric for a social network/instant
messaging company, but it is meaningless at best and grossly misleading and
disingenuous at worst.
Why so?
the-ken.com-Unicorn blues The unbearable lightness of being Hike 1/2 906

Individually, DAU (daily active users) and LTV (lifetime value of a user) are by themselves
excellent and well-regarded metrics. DAU is an absolute figure that reflects user
engagement while LTV is usually a dollar figure that attempts to capture how valuable
each user is to the company. But combining the two is like cross-breeding a chimpanzee
and a goldfish—it is neither meaningful nor desirable. What’s more, the dimension that
this combined metric is said to measure—percentage user engagement over a period—is
neither goose nor gander, and has little to do with DAU or LTV.
More importantly, this metric fails the basic test of every good metric. The value of a
metric is to provide a ready reckoner of a company’s health—a short-hand to capture and
represent its trajectory. Against this requirement, DAU LTV neither informs nor does it
capture the company’s health. If anything, it provides a misleading picture of the same.
How so?
In his blog post, Mittal claims that they have “a tremendously active platform” as “a
majority of users come back to the app > 5 days out of 7”. Ostensibly, this metric will
further rise to show ever greater levels of engagement. But what this figure obfuscates is
that the primary reason for showing a high level of engagement is that users are
abandoning the platform. In the 18 months since its last funding round, Hike’s daily
active users (DAU) metric has fallen by a whopping two-thirds—from 23 million to 8
million, according to app market tracker App Annie.
Network effects
The first set of people leaving a social network are typically the marginal users—folks who
hardly use the platform.
the-ken.com-Unicorn blues The unbearable lightness of being Hike 2/2 907

Up all night: Capitalising on India’s big sleep gap
the-ken.com/story/india-and-sleep
July 25, 2019
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It was in early 2018, in the temperature-controlled Sleep Research Laboratory in the Life
Sciences department of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), that seven mice took
us one step closer in the quest to unravel the mysteries of sleep. Shepherding them was Dr
Sushil K Jha, a neurologist who’s devoted 20 years to mine whatever there is to know
about sleep and memory consolidation.
In his experiment built on classical conditioning, Jha trained the mice to respond to a
light that’d flash before a dispenser apportioned some juice. He then conditioned some to
sleep after the ‘treat’, and restricted the others’ sleep. His findings? One: that sleep-
deprived mice didn’t respond to the sequence of events and forfeited their chance to get
juice. Two: proof that sleeping cements appetitive memory, or memory of food-related
stimuli. Appetitive memory is what makes us pick a cola in a clear, chilled bottle over cola
in an opaque plastic bottle. It’s what prevents animals from visiting an area rich with food
if they’re conditioned by the stimulus of a threat (read: predator) there. Sleep dictates
responses to stimuli and can be the difference between whether you have, or are had.
“In essence, sleep deprivation after the acquisition of a new memory leads to some
impairment of that memory,” Dr Jha underlines.
Let’s zoom out and view things in perspective. In March 2017, activity tracker Fitbit
announced its India-specific data for 2016. India was the second-worst sleeper (6.55
hours) after Japan (6.35 hours). As per the Sleep Cycle app, which updates country-wide
findings every week, fewer than 20% Indians sleep for eight hours. Godrej Interio’s 2018
survey, which had 8,000 participants in metros, revealed that 93% reported sleep
deprivation. Mattress startup Wakefit, which has an ongoing survey called the Great
Indian Sleep Scorecard, released its findings across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and
Mumbai in March 2019. Mumbai had the worst sleep, with 81% respondents reporting
insomnia and 36% sleeping less than seven hours, followed by Delhi, Bengaluru, and
Hyderabad.
the-ken.com-Up all night Capitalising on Indias big sleep gap 1/3 908
It’s fair to raise a brow over sleep surveys by commercial stakeholders in the ‘sleep
economy’. But India has no official or government-mandated sleep survey to date. We’re
one of many countries on a bandwagon that equates the lack of sleep with success.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the US, where Silicon Valley is obsessed with
attaching metrics to sleep, turning a necessity into a task to be perfected in the cult of
productivity. Sleep, as they know it, is an inconvenience in the pursuit of optimum
wakefulness, something to be hacked through. Consider Oura smart rings,
electromagnetic field-blocking Faraday tents, mattresses with sensors, white noise
machines, lights that simulate sunrise, mulberry silk eye masks, and Nightfood.
Yet, the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared sleep deprivation a
public health epidemic.
Sleep on it
India is a sleep-deprived nation, if latest reports are to be

believed. And what’s worse is that Indians often romanticise not
sleeping. But startups focused on ‘sleep tech’ see an
opportunity; and it’ll be a while before they hit snooze on their
plans
Roshni Nair, 25 Jul 2019
We're ensnared by a global sleep crisis. People today are so sleep-deprived that sleep
tech - wearables, ambient noise machines, and thermoregulated bedding, and more -
are essentials in some homes
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US declared sleep deprivation a
public health epidemic, but there are no alarm bells in India even though country-
specific surveys suggest otherwise
As Indians struggle to manage even seven hours of rest, a slew of companies are stepping
into the 'sleep economy'. These include bedding startups, wellness companies, and even
airport service providers
As commerce gains ground, sleep researchers - who are few and far between in India -
are unravelling the mysteries of sleep, and its role in just about everything from
memory management to hormonal balance
Vakrangee: It is all relative
the-ken.com/story/vakrangee-it-is-all-relative
May 7, 2018
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UPDATE: When we left off, a cloud of uncertainty surrounded Vakrangee. Its auditor
had resigned, its share price had tanked almost 83% from its January peak following
an endless loop of lower circuits, and institutional investors were either keeping their
distance or heading for the exits. Things were decidedly grim for the company. A lot
has happened since.
After oscillating between the lower and upper circuits for a while, Vakrangee’s stock
saw a high of Rs 68 ($0.97)/share on 7 August after the circuit filter was revised from
5% to 20%. Five days later, on 12 August, Vakrangee announced its dismal first quarter
results for the financial year—compared to the same quarter last year, net profit
declined 92% to Rs 13 crore (~$1.8 million), and revenues fell 22.6% to Rs 1,011.5 crore
(~$144.4 million).
Soon after, the stock dropped to Rs 42 ($0.59)/share.
Vakrangee’s stock market prospects were not helped by the news that came in the day
before it announced its results. Market regulator Sebi (Securities and Exchange Board
of India) ordered Vakrangee Holdings Private Ltd (VHPL) to make a public offer to
shareholders of Vakrangee Ltd. This comes as a result of Sebi’s ongoing investigation
into Vakrangee’s promoter holding company transactions in the years 2013 and 2014.
Sebi found that during the June-end quarter for 2013, VHPL increased its stake in the
company from 22.97% to 24.93%. At one point, VHPL’s stake hit 25.50%, exceeding the
25% shareholding threshold in Sebi’s Takeover Regulations. This should have triggered
a mandatory 26% open offer to public shareholders. However, VHPL failed to
announce the open offer.
the-ken.com-Vakrangee It is all relative 1/3 911

In other news, the company has scrapped its Rs 1,250 crore (~$178.5 million) share
buyback plan. In its fourth quarter filings, Vakrangee announced that it will cancel the
buyback and dividend payout it had proposed back in February as it now wants to
spend that money buying ATMs for its next generation gold and silver kendras.
Then, in June, when the series of lower circuits came to a halt at levels of around Rs
31/share, and the scrip started hitting upper circuits again, institutional investors like
Baron Funds made a hasty exit.
The fund bought seven million shares on 1 June at a price of Rs 34.08 ($0.49)/share
and sold-off 10 million shares on 15 June at Rs 41.51 ($0.59)/share. One can assume the
firm must have bought three million shares at an earlier date, and selling these
combined with the seven million it picked up in June must have helped it cover its
losses.
Baron is a long-term investor. In fact, those are the first two words on the firm’s ‘Who
we are’ page. The Ken wrote to Baron to understand why a long-term player like itself
would take such a punt, but we received no response.
As institutional investors made their exits, retail investors were busy catching this
falling knife.
Aadhaar
Abirathi Trading
Amazon
Blue Pearl Trading
BSE
Dinesh Nandwana
NSE

PWC
SEBI
Vakrangee
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla
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Patanjali Pahwa
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Voting with their feet, India’s young workers are
remapping the metros
the-ken.com/story/indias-young-workers-are-remapping-metros
October 27, 2020
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As city after city fell into the grips of often suffocating lockdowns due to the pandemic,
The New York Times provocatively asked , How Will (American) Cities Survive the
Coronavirus? Then, earlier last month, Singapore reported a drop in its population for
the first time in 17 years , as fewer foreigners were now able to work in the city-state.
With India’s largest cities often emerging as nerve centres of the pandemic, must India
too brace for an urban exodus? With India’s economy slowing down, the urban jobs
engine is no longer humming like a well-tuned machine. To complicate matters, the cost
of living in Indian cities remains high and ease of living remains poor.
The evolution of India’s urban landscape will be a bit more complicated. India’s cities will
probably not experience the sort of urban evacuation that some of the largest cities
globally may see. But that’s not to say that the pandemic will leave no imprint whatsoever
on urban India.
What appears likely is this—India’s oldest metros (Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata)
will experience an urban flight as the working age population opts to work and live out of
younger cities. The younger cities span Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, and
perhaps even Lucknow and Jaipur. India’s young professionals are increasingly
gravitating towards this cluster as these cities offer better job prospects, are more
pandemic-friendly, and offer a significantly lower cost of living. But can India’s younger
cities withstand the often-debilitating effects of the pandemic? Can they hold the people
they’re inviting with these job prospects?
the-ken.com-Voting with their feet Indias young workers are remapping the metros 1/2 914
Sorry, no vacancy
To be clear, the urban desertion that India seems to be experiencing is not a phenomenon
affecting all Indian cities uniformly. Also, this movement of professionals from older
metros to the younger ones has not been ‘triggered’ by Covid. The pandemic has simply
hastened a trend already underway for some time.
In an earlier story for The Ken, this author had highlighted that the four senior metros of
India had been struggling to create new jobs even before Covid-19 fears set in.
Bengaluru
Chennai
coronavirus
Covid-19
Delhi
Hiring
Hyderabad
Jobs
Jobs market
Kolkata
Metro cities
Mumbai
Post-Covid
Post-pandemic
urban
the-ken.com-Voting with their feet Indias young workers are remapping the metros 2/2 915
Watch this space: New Bill could unleash facial
recognition free-for-all
the-ken.com/story/new-bill-facial-recognition-free-for-all
February 11, 2020
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For the last few months, India has witnessed protests across the length and breadth of the
country. The target of protesters’ ire has been the controversial Citizenship Amendment
Act 2019 (CAA), which aims to amend the definition of illegal immigrant for Sikh, Hindu,
Buddhist, Christian, and Parsi refugees from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries.
Though this would result in citizenship for these refugees, the CAA does not make a
similar allowance for Muslims.
While India’s security forces have hit the streets to clamp down on anti-CAA
demonstrations, police in Delhi have relied heavily on technology. The Delhi Police
resorted to its Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) software—initially set up to
track missing children—to surveil a political rally headlined by Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
The technology allows the police to match photos of subjects against a set of large
databases. In the case of the rally, police officers matched attendees to video footage
collected at the ongoing protests, allowing for the identification of potential rabble-
rousers.
While the intention may seem understandable, the video surveillance and tracking of
these ‘suspects’ has no legal basis. At present, the century-old Identification of Prisoners
Act (IPA), only allows for the capture of fingerprints of prisoners as long as they are in
jail. Once a prisoner is acquitted, the authorities are required to erase the record. In
reality, authorities rarely comply with even this.
If the Union government has its way, however, this is set to change. Drastically.
For over two years now, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)—the technology and
statistical arm of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)—has been working to amend the
IPA. It aims to widen the scope of collection of all key biometrics, its storage, and the
duration for which this data can be stored.
According to a high-ranking official working closely with the NCRB, the division’s Central
Finger Print Bureau submitted nine amendments to the IPA. The home ministry has
assimilated these in the form of a new Bill —the Identification of Prisoners and Arrested
Persons Bill, 2020. It will likely be tabled in the Monsoon session of Parliament, which
begins in July, the official said. Another official involved in the drafting of the Bill
confirmed this, saying it would also legitimise this sort of data as evidence—something
that has previously been a grey area.
the-ken.com-Watch this space New Bill could unleash facial recognition free-for-all 1/3 916
If passed in its current form, the Bill will provide legislative backing far beyond the mere
collection of fingerprints. The biometrics it will include range from foot and palm prints
to photos, iris and retina images, voice samples, and even vein patterns.
Crucially, the Bill allows police agencies to collect biometric samples of not just prisoners
and arrested persons but also individuals summoned for interrogation, as per section 41A
of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Big Brother
India's National Crime Records Bureau has drafted a Bill that

could turn the country into a surveillance state, and it dovetails
ominously with the government's facial recognition ambitions
While video surveillance has become common in India today, it has no legal basis yet.
This could soon change
The Ministry of Home Affairs plans to table a Bill to legalise collection of biometrics of
mere suspects
If passed in its current form, the Bill will provide legislative backing to the NCRB's
ambitious facial recognition system
With technology and law on its side, the government could virtually turn India into a
surveillance state
What are Indians paying to get vaccinated?
the-ken.com/story/vaccine-price-survey
June 1, 2021
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India is the only major country globally that is asking its citizens to pay for getting
vaccinated against Covid-19. But if having a majority of citizens in a developing country of
1.3 billion paying out of their meager incomes to literally stay alive is bad, then imagine
the consequences of allowing virtually unrestricted pricing by private players.
The current formula devised by the Indian federal government splits all available vaccines
between itself, state governments, and private players in a ratio of 50:25:25.
It’s the 25% vaccines that are being sold and administered by private hospitals and
players where there’s both tremendous opacity and variance.
If you are in India, and got vaccinated after 1st May, between the age of 18-44,
and received your dose through a private channel like a hospital, your
apartment complex RWA, or via your employer, this survey is for you.
For the purpose of simplicity, let’s talk only about one vaccine – Covishield. This is the
Indian brand name of the Astra Zeneca vaccine licensed, manufactured, and sold by
Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker. It is also the one
currently being manufactured at the largest volumes in India, compared to Covaxin
(developed and manufactured by Bharat Biotech) and Russia’s Sputnik (currently only
being imported).
The price at which Covishield is sold by SII to private hospitals or players is Rs 600 per
dose. Which, including taxes and transportation, comes to around Rs 650.
the-ken.com-What are Indians paying to get vaccinated 1/2 919

Once hospitals or procurers add in their own costs and profit margins, that ends up
costing Indians anywhere from Rs 850 to Rs 1800.
Not only is that a huge variation, it is also largely opaque. Prices are fixed between
hospitals and bulk buyers like companies (who want to vaccinate their employees) or
resident welfare associations (who want to vaccinate residents in their communities).
Through this survey, The Ken hopes to shine some much-needed light on the sources,
prices, and methods prevalent in the private sector vaccination space. We hope to be
guided in our journalism by the data that is thrown up, and the questions it forces us to
reckon with.
the-ken.com-What are Indians paying to get vaccinated 2/2 920

What do startup boards look like? We analysed the
leading 30
the-ken.com/story/what-startup-boards-look-like
July 17, 2017
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Setting up a board can be incredibly challenging and getting it right is critical to ensure
the growth of any business. We studied 30 leading Indian startups across health, tech, e-
commerce and logistics among others to get an insight into their board’s compositions.
The prisms for analysis were – (a) composition & structure, (b) the gender ratio and (c)
the number of investors on a board.
The health of a startup board hinges, to a large degree, on adequate composition and
diversity.
These startup boards range from as low as two members to as high as 10 members.
According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), a private company is required to
have a minimum of two members on its board and one director in case of a one-person
company. We categorised these startups based on the range of members on the board.
The range is further divided on the basis of composition to study the founder vs investor
ratio and the number of startups, which hire independent, nominee and employees on
their board. Eighteen startups have investors on their board, fourteen have employees on
board, four have nominee directors on board and only two startups have independent
directors on their board. Twenty-five out of the thirty startups studied have one or more
founder on the board. Most of these startups are also comprised of only founders and
investors.
Hover over the three range categories, which are further divided into the name of the
startups falling in that range, further sub-divided into their individual compositions:
the-ken.com-What do startup boards look like We analysed the leading 30 1/3 921
1:7
The ratio of women to men in startup boards is dismal. For every seven male board
members there is one female board member. The trend continues down to women
independent directors, nominee directors and women employees occupying board
positions. Eighteen out of the 30 startups analysed have no women on their board of
directors.
Hover over the names of the startups to know the male to female ratio of their boards:
Investors galore
Twelve of the 30 startups analysed have two or more investors occupying a board
position. In most cases, it is the same venture capital firms, which have stakes in multiple
startups. We ranked the startups based on the number of investors occupying positions on
their board.
What happens when regulators decide to play God
the-ken.com/story/what-happens-when-regulators-decide-to-play-god-mobile-wallets-payments-banks
May 24, 2018
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India may be one of the world’s most active fintech markets, with EY’s Fintech Adoption
Index 2017 even rating India as the nation with the second highest rate of fintech
adoption. But behind the arc lights, there’s a bottomless void filled with many players.
In March, mobile wallets saw their value of transactions plummet 23% in just one month.
Though official data isn’t available for the month of April, anecdotal conversations paint a
gloomy picture for mobile wallets as usage continues to plummet on account of the
Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) norms.
Then there are payment banks, a curious new lifeform artificially engineered by the RBI in
2014—banks that could collect deposits, but not lend. An initial stampede for licenses by
India’s largest business groups in 2015 led to 11 licenses being granted that year. Fast
forward to 2018: just three have been operational for more than six months. And they too,
are still searching for their raison d’être.
To try and trace back the policy paternity/maternity behind floundering mobile wallets
and payments banks, we have to go all the way back to 2013. That was when the RBI
constituted a committee under Nachiket Mor, a wunderkind banker who now heads The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Called the Committee on Comprehensive Financial
Services for Small Businesses and Low Income Households, its job was to study and
recommend policies to aid financial inclusion in India.
When it came to mobile wallets (part of what are called Prepaid Payment Instruments, or
PPIs in RBI-ese), the committee wasn’t a fan. Money stored in wallets didn’t appear to fall
within the ambit of RBI’s deposit insurance cover.
the-ken.com-What happens when regulators decide to play God 1/2 924

To address this, the regulatory framework required wallets to escrow the value
outstanding from customers with a sponsor bank on a 1:1 basis. But the committee
believed that this nested set-up exposed both parties to reciprocal risks.
The solution? Create a new kind of financial services player under the direct regulatory
oversight of the banking regulator—payments banks.
While this reasoning was debatable, the RBI accepted the recommendation to create a
new regulatory category termed ‘payment banks’ in 2014. This was a subset of the broader
push towards differentiated banking that articulated a disintermediated (unbundled) view
of banking.
Payment banks could offer what might be termed as deposit-side banking and up-sell
other financial sector products for fee-based income. But most importantly, they could
not engage in lending and were subject to CRR and SLR covenants (stringent rules that
define a percentage of a financial institution’s deposits that must be kept or invested with
the central bank or government-backed securities).
Wallets, bad.
the-ken.com-What happens when regulators decide to play God 2/2 925

What is hurting Indian pharma more—misinformation
or price control?
the-ken.com/story/indian-pharma-misinformation-price-control
April 20, 2017
On 13 April, a day before the Easter weekend, many drug manufacturers went on their
breaks feeling a little agitated but mostly helpless. It was the day, the spokesperson of the
Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), representing its (invite only) members—over 20
large companies including Sun Pharma, Dr Reddy’s, Lupin and Cipla—went public with
his anger.
Dilip G Shah referred to the pricing policy roll-out as “arbitrary”, and compliance to
guidelines “difficult”. Shah claimed these two factors were adding to the “woes” of the
drug industry.
With their morning coffee, manufacturers and the drug regulator read Shah’s opinion
piece. They made calls, exchanged texts and shared tweets asking each other: Was the
regulatory mechanism for the price control of essential medicines hurting the industry so
much?
The answer was lurking in their own backyard. The IPA’s internal report, ‘Pharmaceutical
Sector Challenges and Opportunities – 2017’, was short. Just 21 pages. But it provided the
answer. Price control was the least of the sector’s woes.
The chatter to disband the drug pricing regulator—National Pharmaceutical Pricing

Authority (NPPA)—under industry pressure, which began six months ago, was grave
enough. The NPPA’s recent claim to fame in controlling the prices of stents by treating
them as essential medicine in the prime minister’s speeches has intensified the conflict.
In hushed tones, senior executives of some of the largest pharmaceutical companies say
that they want to work with the regulator and abide by the law but Shah has taken the
conflict very personally. He has scapegoated the regulator for unrelated ills.
the-ken.com-What is hurting Indian pharma moremisinformation or price control 1/5 926

The public posturing of the IPA, which is in sharp contrast to its own report, shows the
extent of the misinformation being floated. Instead of working out mechanisms to keep
the prices affordable and the industry healthy, not mutually exclusive goals, the anti-price
control drumbeating has diverted the attention from the real challenges of the
drugmakers. Even creating doubts in the minds of foreign investors.
The real culprits

The piece in The Economic Times and the letter that the IPA sent earlier this month to
think-tank NITI Aayog’s vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya, both authored by Shah, point
that the industry’s growth rate is declining. From 15% in 2015 to 11% in 2016 and further
to 9% ending in February 2017. And why is that so? Because of the “‘arbitrary and
unimaginative’ implementation of the drug pricing policy” by the NPPA and the policy
initiatives of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), Shah argues.
Senior executive at a pharmaceutical company
The aggressive tone, arbitrary selection of words and the argument are not backed with
any evidence. Price control is not one of the industry’s primary problems. It exists in one
form or anther globally
“The aggressive tone, arbitrary selection of words and the argument are not backed with
any evidence. Price control is not one of the industry’s primary problems. It exists in one
form or another globally,” said a senior executive at one of the largest pharmaceutical
companies based in Mumbai, part of the IPA.
“Further use of terms like nightmare, arbitrary, imaginative and trust deficit do not help
pharma companies—small, medium or large—in working with the government in any way,
and shift focus from the real issues plaguing the sector,” he added.
The Ken spoke with senior executives from three large Indian pharmaceutical companies
that have a majority market share in some of the price-controlled drugs and are among
the members of the IPA; members of the Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA),
which represents over 1000 small, medium and large companies, independent analysts
and government officials. All of whom chose to speak on the condition of anonymity. They
are critical of Shah’s current aggression but still rely on him for a strong voice on all other
issues—domestic and international.
All these people agreed that in the last three years, price regulation has affected them only
marginally, not nearly enough to reverse the growth. They all point towards the IPA’s own
annual report, which states that the pharma industry has been on a roll, doubling in size
over the last 6 years to reach $41 billion.
What, then is really affecting the industry?

Not paying attention to research and development (R&D). Traditionally, drug companies
worldwide have been the highest spenders on research. But not in India. According to the
IPA’s recent report, an industry that is worth $41 billion spends about $1.5 billion on

R&D, 3.6% of the revenue. Teva, the largest generics maker, spent 7.5% of its sales on
R&D in 2016.
Even the IDMA in its internal assessment, ‘Journey towards Pharma Vision 2020’, has
stressed R&D as one of the key factors that will determine the industry’s growth and
development. A member of the IPA noted that “while the companies are making in India,
they are not innovating in India”. The government is gradually withdrawing its financial
support in drug discovery and innovative formulation, which has affected the companies.
The IPA's internal report on growth
The second factor that is hurting the industry is the relentless inspection from the
American drug regulator, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). If the industry’s
prices are being monitored by the Indian regulator, its quality is under the scanner of
foreign regulators. The difference is in the approach the IPA is using against each—
conciliatory for the US FDA and head-on for the NPPA, remarked an independent pharma
analyst in Delhi, who doesn’t want to be named.
The IPA’s internal report on inspections by the US FDA
The inspections conducted by the US FDA in 2015 and 2016 have resulted in the closure
of plants over quality issues. A blow to not only the export market but also the local
industry as the profits from exports are ploughed back into the local market, said a senior
executive of an Ahmedabad-based pharma company, which is also a member of the IPA.

The IPA’s unpublished report, which The Ken has a copy of, resonates with the ground
realities of the industry. But the irony is that the larger issues are not part of the public
discourse. One wonders if they are at least being discussed with the decision-makers.
And that brings us to the much-talked about price control, which even Shah dismisses in
one graph of his 21-page report.
The impact of controlled prices

As the number of drugs under price control increased—from 348 in 2015 to 376 earlier
this month—the IPA under Shah kept the public opinion focused on it. It is widely
perceived that the drug companies are being squeezed on this account.
However, according to the calculations of a new document prepared by the NPPA, which
is not yet public, only overpriced brands face some degree of squeeze. With the 376 drugs
under some price control, until March 2017, “about 60% of the companies remain
unaffected because they were already selling their products below the ceiling prices on
their own, on account of market competitiveness”. For the remaining 40% brands, “the
price reduction compared to highest prices brand is 10% or less which is nothing, if we see
it in the context of exorbitantly high trade margins in the pharma sector,” states the
document.
“Margins are not being touched at all. We are slashing only the exorbitant trade margins,
and this does not affect the growth of the industry,” said NPPA chairperson Bhupendra
Singh.
To use another set of statistics, from an independent body named Pharma Track, 15.6% of
the Indian pharma market is under price control.
Extent of squeeze
An estimated 2-4% of revenue shrinks due to price regulation. The consensus is that the
majority of the market is out of price control
An estimated 2-4% of revenue shrinks due to price regulation. The consensus is that the
majority of the market is out of price control. But what does hurt within this is the present
inefficient mechanism. For instance, if the prices of innovative dosage forms of the listed
drugs are to be controlled, how much time should be granted to the manufacturers to
implement the controlled prices. Also, can controlled prices be applied on a pro-rata
basis?
Price control has limited impact on the revenues of the sector. But it is neither throttling
the industry nor is it as arbitrary as Shah has consistently projected it to be.
Why then is Shah upset with the regulator? The real bone of contention is the motivation
behind the price regulator’s overreach. It is an ideological war between pro-industry and
pro-consumer, which, frankly, is no war. The two parties can easily be on the same side.

The Ken tried but could not ascertain if the top honchos of the 20 member companies are
in sync with the stance that Shah has been taking.
Ideology clashes
Discontent with the price regulator has been brewing not just in the IPA, but within the
government departments too, as The Ken reported in November. On 28 March, it
surfaced again at a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office. The secretaries of the
Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and Department of Pharmaceuticals
(DoP) and additional secretary of health and the chief executive of NITI Aayog—who are
collectively referred to as ‘pro-market boys’ among Indian bureaucrats—took their
complaints of the “over performing” drug pricing regulator to the principal secretary.
But the principal secretary Nripendra Misra, like the prime minister, is tom-tomming
price control of drugs as a major public service. “After assuming office, mechanisms were
put to bring down prices of medicines even if that meant pharma companies are unhappy
with us,” said prime minister Modi at a hospital inauguration in Surat on 18 April.
Yet, the NPPA chairperson Singh was asked to defend the role of the regulator, which he
did. In a written reply, Singh has proposed a clear strategic vision balancing the twin
objectives of the government—affordable drugs and a thriving pharma industry. His
answer is a new ‘National Pharmaceutical Policy’.
To look into the matter, the DoP has set up a committee, whose objective is to ensure
enhanced access to drugs and a streamlined price control mechanism.
Unhappy earlier, angry now, Shah’s defence was that the IPA’s internal report was
prepared in February. “The new data was not available on the domestic market then. The
ET piece, thus, focused on the arbitrary implementation of the pricing policy leading to a
drop in the growth rate, based on more recent data,” he said. (He did not specify how
recent is the recent data.)
A one-man army, who knows the corridors of the government and the leaders of large
companies in the industry, Shah is the lone voice for the entire sector. Now, with the
gossip galore, small, medium and large drugmakers are seeking clarifications on where
does the actual power lie. Even the government has set up a committee focused on pricing
regulation.
Will the real issues be addressed with the same urgency?

What it really takes to go green: A story in numbers
the-ken.com/story/india-green-energy-charts
April 27, 2019
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Question: Can India shift entirely to sustainable energy? The short answer is yes. The long
answer is what you’re here for.
The brilliant British physicist, mathematician and renewable energy advocate David
MacKay has an excellent book called Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (from
which a significant chunk of the philosophy has been derived). Which is just what India
needs right now. But (surprise!) in the run-up to the ongoing general elections, both
major national parties’ manifestos have been sorely lacking in terms of a plan for India’s
energy policy.
The Congress’s manifesto mentions in passing that it “will formulate a policy on clean
energy in existing power plants that use fossil fuels, and promote green energy to enhance
the share of solar and wind energy in the total supply of energy”. Meanwhile, the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto aims to “achieve 175 GW of renewable energy capacity
and strive to achieve 10% blending of ethanol in petrol”.
Both are inadequate for a country that is estimated to be home to 1 in 6 people on earth by
2030, and is also one of the fastest growing economies of the world.
The case for a fully green grid (renewables plus nuclear) is straightforward. To avoid a
global catastrophe, the consensus is that we need to prevent global mean temperatures
from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We’re already at
08.-0.9 degrees.
the-ken.com-What it really takes to go green A story in numbers 1/4 931

To avoid the ‘2C limit’, as it’s often called, is a bleak challenge. One widely accepted study
predicts that 60% reduction in global CO2 emissions by 2050—which is a Herculean task
if you think about it—will most certainly still result in disaster. What we need is around
85% of emissions cut by 2050.
But coming back to our initial question, yes, we can—in theory—sustain future energy
needs completely with clean energy. But the devil lies in the details, and the reality is that
getting to 100% sustainability is a ridiculously difficult challenge. The real question is, just
how do we deploy our resources to do that.
In that spirit, I’ve embarked on a little exercise to break down the numbers and construct
a possible energy ecosystem for India. All calculations and references are provided at the
end. I encourage you to check that out and formulate your own energy mix. Without
further ado, let’s get started.
Into the rabbit hole

The US. China. India. Top three energy consumers in the world, at least, in aggregate. But
once we account for population, things look a little different.
India’s energy consumption then is roughly 20.3 kilowatt hours per day per person.
Looming deadline
The clock is ticking for India (and everyone else) to switch to

clean energy. But building a truly sustainable energy mix is
anything but easy
Vivek Aithal, 27 Apr 2019
It's estimated that even a 60% reduction in global CO2 emissions by 2050 will most
certainly still result in disaster—we need 85% of emissions cut
Thirty years may seem like a long time, and the Indian government, like many others,
has announced ambitious-sounding renewable energy plans
But look closely, and the current energy policy is decidedly inadequate when you account
for truly liveable standards of power consumption in the future
Here's a plan for switching to 100% clean energy—and it's incredibly difficult no matter
how you look at it. Bonus: Play with the numbers yourself, it's all there

What’s bugging Truecaller
the-ken.com/story/whats-bugging-truecaller
August 5, 2019
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“Delete Truecaller.”
These two words threatened the very existence of Truecaller, after a user’s chance
discovery went viral, last week. The app, which actively filters spam calls and messages for
more than 100 million smartphone users in India—and tens of millions more worldwide—
was found to enroll some users for UPI without their knowledge. UPI or Unified Payments
Interface is India’s mobile-based instant payments system.
It began with a seemingly routine update. But after the rollout, a number of users noticed
that Truecaller sent messages with garbled text from their phones to an unknown
number. Following this, ICICI Bank—Truecaller’s partner bank—sent messages notifying
users saying that their registration for UPI had begun.
Truecaller blamed the incident on a bug. A spokesperson told The Ken only its Android
users were affected. The spokesperson declined to disclose how many. The company also
assured that the bug only enrolled users—no transactions had been made. Nonetheless,
it’s worrying just how easily it could have led to a transaction.
Following the text from ICICI, the Truecaller app correctly identified users’ bank accounts
too. It could do this by simply using the message-access it already has to find which
accounts were linked to the number, said Ramanathan RV, founder and CTO of Juspay,
the company that made the BHIM app. In one case, Dheeraj Kumar—one of the users
affected—was nudged by Truecaller to link his HDFC Bank account to the company’s app.
Kumar uses HDFC Bank for making payments using BHIM, the government-backed
mobile payments app.
the-ken.com-Whats bugging Truecaller 1/2 935

How do you explain the SMS? There is no other app in that list that has permissions to send
a SMS. And it's with an institution you've partnered with! Also, I can't deregister, because
according to your own app, I'm not registered! pic.twitter.com/PzuyN8VxHs
— Dheeraj Kumar (@codepodu) July 30, 2019
Aashish Bansal, another user, was prompted to link his Indian Overseas Bank account to
the app. While neither Kumar nor Bansal suffered financial loss, the issue highlights the
gaps in India’s regulatory framework, where companies operate in the absence of a data
protection law, with users often becoming collateral damage.
There aren't any third party apps on this phone except for Truecaller. I log on to Truecaller
and I find that a UPI ID "with the bank's details" had been created for my account mapped
to this phone number. I quickly reset Truecaller to unlink the UPI from this app.
pic.twitter.com/n5G4WR28jX
— Aashish Bansal (@Unbelted) July 30, 2019
Truecaller seemingly has everything going for it in India—100 million daily active users
and that it’s the fourth most downloaded app, according to the Mary Meeker Internet
Trends Report 2018. It’s an app with near-limitless permissions to user data from
Google’s Play Store.
the-ken.com-Whats bugging Truecaller 2/2 936

What’s disrupting RBI’s forex disruption?
the-ken.com/story/rbi-retail-forex-disruption
July 23, 2020
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For Ritesh Kumar Singh, founder of research and advisory firm Indonomics Consulting
Pvt Ltd, getting paid by his clients—most of which are based abroad—comes with an
associated heartache. For every overseas payment that comes in, bank margins on the
foreign exchange (forex) prices result in him losing about 2-3% of his income.
In August last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank,
presented a solution for small business owners like Singh. It launched FX-Retail, a retail
forex trading platform that anyone—from individuals to small businesses and payment
banks—could log on to and book a forex price at or near market rates.
FX-Retail is akin to an exchange. Banks offer, bid, and compete on currency prices.
Customers buy and sell currency. Once a trade is confirmed, the final settlement occurs
bilaterally outside the platform, exactly as it would without the platform. Only, this time
around, the exchange rate is market-determined.
The RBI did this to make retail forex prices more transparent. In a discussion paper it
released back in 2017, it saw the retail trading platform as a way to ensure fair prices in
the retail forex market, ensuring low-volume customers weren’t disproportionately
penalised. This, the central bank said, was in response to frequent queries and complaints
from customers about unfair forex margins.
RBI has grand plans for the platform. FX-Retail is to have currency forwards soon, which
will help cross-border businesses hedge against currency volatility. Despite its novelty—
there isn’t a similar state-owned platform anywhere in the world—and ambition, FX-
Retail hasn’t drawn customers the way the RBI had hoped.
In the first week of March, well before the country entered a nationwide lockdown, the
platform was seeing around 31 trades each day. The daily average volume of trades was
nearly $3.3 million, according to data from the Clearing Corporation of India Limited
(CCIL)—a government-owned company that clears and facilitates transactions—which
built and now operates the platform. Since then, the number of daily trades has fluctuated
between 15 to 40, with daily volumes sometimes dropping as low as $1 million. In
contrast, the daily average volume of the forex market as a whole in India is about $33
billion .
GOT FOREX?
the-ken.com-Whats disrupting RBIs forex disruption 1/2 937

Last August, RBI unveiled FX-Retail, a foreign exchange trading
platform for retail customers. A year on, while India’s daily forex
volumes touch $33 billion, FX-Retail barely accounts for a few
million
Shreedhar Manek, 23 Jul 2020
The RBI sought to help small businesses who end up paying high forex margins by
introducing FX-Retail
Banks are reluctant to push the platform due to the discrepancy in margins offered; its
interface isn’t very user-friendly either
And CCIL, which built and now maintains FX-Retail, does not have the pedigree for a
consumer-facing platform
CCIL, still believing in “build and they will come”, is trying to introduce more features,
but the problems are structural
the-ken.com-Whats disrupting RBIs forex disruption 2/2 938

What’s in store for the Gates Foundation in India?
the-ken.com/blog/whats-in-store-for-the-gates-foundation-in-india
October 15, 2019
Odds are, you and Bill Gates don’t have the same idea of what constitutes charity. No,
not just in terms of the obvious discrepancy in your respective means. But in how you
define charity. To most of us, it’s about the simple act of giving. Gates, however, believes
in philanthrocapitalism. Not so much giving but rather investing in businesses that can
have a social impact. Hopefully, a sustainable one. And as a self-described impatient
optimist, he wants this change fast.
Little wonder then that the charitable foundation he started along with his wife—the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)—seeks to create massive impact in the shortest
possible time. And with $47.9 billion in assets and about $5 billion annual spending
across the developed and developing world, the Foundation’s ability to effect change is
immense.
In India, where BMGF has focused the vast majority of its efforts on access to
immunisation against preventable disease, its fingerprints are there for all to see. On one
side, it has given grants to multiple vaccine makers, allowing them to lower their
development costs and even pouring in tens of millions of dollars to fund clinical trials.
BMGF’s portfolio of grantees in India includes most vaccine makers, think tanks like
Public Health Foundation of India, industry bodies like FICCI, large NGOs including
CARE India and PATH, among several others. It also has another strategic investment
fund that offers equity investment, debt and volume guarantees. All told, it has over 60
companies and not-for-profits combined in its strategic investment portfolio.
And even as it enables production, it works to ensure a market for these vaccines.
Through Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation), BMGF helps the
government fund vaccine purchases for its immunisation programme.
the-ken.com-Whats in store for the Gates Foundation in India 1/2 939

It builds supply on one side and ensures demand on the other. A self-sustaining system.
One executive with an Indian vaccine maker spoke glowingly of the difference BMGF can
make with its investment. “You get a tag of reputation, higher brand value and an image
as a credible supplier in the market. In addition, there’s the high demand created by
Gavi,” he says.
The system seems flawless. But BMGF is currently fighting against the odds to ensure it
keeps chugging along once BMGF inevitably removes itself from the equation.
To do this, the Foundation has been on a charm offensive aimed at Indian Prime
Minister Narendra Modi. Just last month, Modi was felicitated by BMGF, with the
organisation giving him an award for his campaign to end open defecation in the
country. Incidentally, the Foundation passed on giving Modi the same award two years
ago, as per former BMGF executives, allegedly on account of his questionable human
rights record.
AUTHOR
Ranjan Crasta
A huge fan of the Oxford comma, Ranjan joined The Ken's edit desk after five years in
the badlands of digital journalism. Now, his life's mission is to bring story-telling and
accessibility to business journalism. Well, that and foisting cat adoptions on
unsuspecting passers by.
View Full Profile
the-ken.com-Whats in store for the Gates Foundation in India 2/2 940

What’s stalling Trai’s WiFi-for-everyone plan?
the-ken.com/story/whats-stalling-trais-wifi-for-everyone-plan
July 7, 2020
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The Indian government has a dream. Of 10 million public WiFi hotspots dotting the
country by 2022. It said as much in the National Digital Communications Policy, 2018.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) believes it knows how to make this
come true. It even goes a step further. Trai wants users to be able to transition seamlessly
between hotspots as they go about their days. On 5 June, Trai effectively accused the
Department of Telecom (DoT) of undermining its vision.
Trai’s recommendations to bring its plans to life have baked in India’s policy oven for
three years. They were sent to DoT in 2017. Called WANI, or WiFi Access Network
Interface, a key ingredient in this plan is the drafting of new rules to foster this wireless
revolution.
The telecom regulator wants to allow businesses to buy bandwidth from traditional
telecom operators and internet service providers, and resell this to cafes, kirana stores,
and even chaiwalas. This would effectively transform these small businesses into public
WiFi hotspots.
Crucially, these bandwidth aggregators and distributors—called PDOAs, or public data

office aggregators—would not have to conform to existing licensing norms the way a telco
like Reliance Jio or an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like ACT Fibernet must. After lying
in bureaucratic purgatory for years, DoT shot down its suggestion on 29 May. To exempt
PDOAs, it argued, would affect a “level playing field”.
For telcos and ISPs, this was a victory. The thought of businesses outside the purview of
the regulations that govern them offering public WiFi was unacceptable. They had even
banded together and, under the banner of the Cellular Operators Association of India
(COAI), offered to set up 1 million public WiFi hotspots by September 2019 as an
alternative to WANI. These never materialised.
Trai was incensed. If DoT’s licensing framework was conducive to the proliferation of
public WiFi, it said in its to DoT’s 29 May missive, India “would not have lagged so much
in exploitation of Wi-Fi technology for delivery of broadband services”. According to Trai,
a telecom market as large as India’s—which boasts a sixth of the world’s telecom
subscribers—should have 100 million hotspots by 2023. Instead, according to Trai’s
estimates, it currently has 0.1 million.
the-ken.com-Whats stalling Trais WiFi-for-everyone plan 1/2 941

Wired broadband connections are also scarce. In a country with 260 million households,
there are just 22 million wired broadband connections. All of this means that mobile
networks are under tremendous strain in a country where data tariffs have plummeted,
leading to a surge in data consumption. Network quality has suffered as a result, with a
routine occurrence.
“Mobile networks will never be able to meet demand for broadband. Video and high
bandwidth applications will continue to strain the networks.
Still Trai-ing
The Indian government wants 10 million public WiFi hotspots by

2022. Trai believes the country should have 100 million by 2023.
Right now? India has 0.1 million
Pratap Vikram Singh, 7 Jul 2020
In 2017, Trai recommended a framework to set up public WiFi hotspots across India
After sitting on this for three years, the Department of Telecom disagreed with key Trai
recommendations
This has left Trai's public WiFi dream in jeopardy but it doesn't diminish the country's
need for public hotspots
Even as Trai pushes back against DoT, nimble young startups are proving the business
viability of public WiFi
the-ken.com-Whats stalling Trais WiFi-for-everyone plan 2/2 942

When chemistry meets life: Searching for signals in
elephant dung
the-ken.com/story/chemical-ecology-northeast-india
February 9, 2019
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For three years, Jaya Narah canvassed the mercifully untouched, but criminally under-
researched eastern Himalayas with little more than a sweep net, airtight containers and
Boroplus. The ointment offered some respite from bumblebee stings—which she insists
weren’t that bad anyway. One, the pain subsides in a day or two. Two, bumblebees aren’t
as aggressive as their honeybee cousins. Three, Narah had greater obstacles to contend
with: unforgiving weather, landslides, transport bottlenecks.
Hers was a 614km quest to study bumblebee behaviour in India’s easternmost state,
Arunachal Pradesh—from the evergreen forests of Pasighat to the frigid Sela Pass. What
started as a project on how pollinators adapt to different altitudes has also become an
inflection point. The 26-year-old, you see, discovered 13 bumblebee species for the first
time in the state. Arunachal Pradesh was believed to have only eight; Narah’s project
bumped this count to 21 between 2015 and 2018. And this, she believes, could be just the
tip of a biodiverse iceberg.
A research scholar at Rajiv Gandhi University in Itanagar, the state capital, Narah hails
from tiny Jonai, a village on the Assam-Arunachal border. She’s one of 46 researchers—
22 supervisors and 24 fellows and scholars—participating in Study of Chemical Ecology,
Northeast India Collaboration, or SCENIC. The five-year, Rs 27 crore ($3.8 million)
project funded by the central government’s Department of Biotechnology is India’s first
collaborative exercise in chemical ecology.
the-ken.com-When chemistry meets life Searching for signals in elephant dung 1/3 943
The objective is to advance research and capacity building in northeast India, a region
that houses 70% of the country’s biodiversity hotspots, but remains scientifically
uncharted. The ecosystems there, from endemic medicinal plants to unexplored
mammal behaviour, have immense potential for biotechnology, agricultural science and
wildlife conservation.
There’s ongoing research on crop-raiding elephants. On endangered bees and rice

varieties found nowhere else in India. On how warming affects pollination patterns in
the Himalayas. On fungi that could make crops heat and salt-tolerant. On entomophagy,
or the practice of eating insects.
(Don’t let the last one feed your prejudice. One of SCENIC’s 24 projects has revealed that
silkworms, an important nutritive food for tribal people in Arunachal Pradesh, are more
protein-rich than their plant and animal counterparts. Namely, soyabean, meat and
eggs.)
What binds all life forms, from bacteria to whales, is communication. Not visual. Not
verbal. Not aural. But chemical.
SCENIC is a partnership between three premier institutions in Bengaluru (National

Centre for Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, University of Agricultural
Sciences) and seven in northeast India. And at its heart lies the interdisciplinary science
of chemical ecology.
Chemical ecology is the specific concept of how organisms use chemicals to interact. This
middle ground between chemistry and biology acknowledges that what binds all life
forms, from bacteria to whales, is communication. Not visual. Not verbal. Not aural. But
something more fundamental: chemical communication.
And as some preliminary findings from northeast India show, the chemical
underpinnings of the natural world are a rousing testament to the importance of
preserving local ecosystems.
AUTHOR
Roshni Nair
Roshni P. Nair joins us from Reuters, where she was an online producer. With a
background in weekend features at Hindustan Times and DNA, Roshni has written on
subjects ranging from India’s amateur UFO investigators to the provenance of sambhar.
When not pursuing story ideas, she enjoys reading, making a great cuppa adrak chai,
playing with street dogs, and avoiding large gatherings. Roshni will work out of Mumbai
and can be reached at roshni at the rate the-ken.com
View Full Profile
When in a pandemic, sell hygiene
the-ken.com/story/when-in-a-pandemic-sell-hygiene
April 23, 2020
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Hygiene will change after the Covid-19 pandemic the way security changed after the 9/11
terror attacks, says Anurag Katriar. He isn’t exaggerating either. Katriar, president of the
National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), has a ringside view of this paradigm
shift.
In a world with a highly contagious virus—one which has already infected over 2.5 million
people globally—safety is a top priority. Everyone wants to know how safe the restaurant
they’re eating at is, or how stringent their co-working place is about cleanliness. With
literal life and death stakes, however, businesses will have to go the extra mile to convince
patrons about their hygiene standards.
And that is where Mumbai-based Equinox Labs comes in.
A health ratings agency, 15-year-old Equinox audits and certifies the hygiene standards of
restaurants and offices in the country. These ratings—scored on a scale of five—are done
based on a yearly inspection. “The business of third-party inspection is set to skyrocket,”
says Ashwin Bhadri, Equinox’s founder.
Already, India’s two largest food delivery platforms, Swiggy and Zomato, are explicitly
mentioning the hygiene standards of the restaurants on their platforms. These include,
among others, social distancing on the workfloor, washing hands, temperature checks,
and sanitisation measures. Corporates, too, are ramping up their housekeeping
department or hiring external agencies which specialise in sanitisation.
The importance of these measures is already visible. Restaurants listed on Zomato with a
good hygiene rating have fared 20% better than those without hygiene ratings, a
spokesperson from Zomato told The Ken via email. As these ratings gain prominence and
show results, the demand for services like Equinox will only grow.
It is not that these guidelines didn’t exist before Covid-19. The country’s food safety
watchdog, Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), issued guidelines on
food safety and hygiene way back in 2006. At the time, Equinox was scarcely a year old,
having begun life as a water testing company. Over the years, it diversified into air and
food testing as well.
Offices and workspaces, meanwhile, have international certifications, like the United
States’ Occupational Safety and Hygiene Administration’s guidelines, commonly known
as OSHA.
the-ken.com-When in a pandemic sell hygiene 1/2 946

The problem, though, is that FSSAI’s regulations are voluntary and not enforceable in
their entirety. OSHA certification, while well-respected globally, is expensive and not
generally attempted by Indian companies. As both customers and employees begin to
demand safe business environments, however, compliance is no longer an option.
Over the coming months, companies will likely go to extreme lengths to minimise the risk
of Covid-19 infections. There will be reduced human contact and regular temperature
checks. The emphasis will be on cleaning everything—from doorknobs and keyboards to
arm-rests and even the very air that’s circulated within offices.
It isn’t just about enforcing new health standards.
The food-safety equinox
The rise of health scores, and with it, health score providers
Pranav Balakrishnan, 23 Apr 2020
In a post-Covid world, a health rating might mean 20% less impact on your business
It’s not just confined to restaurants; offices, cab companies, movie theatres, all want
ratings
They will have to go the extra mile to convince customers about their hygiene standards
Such intense focus on hygiene and safety will come at a cost—audits are pricey
the-ken.com-When in a pandemic sell hygiene 2/2 947

Where does the buck stop during a cybersecurity
breach in India?
the-ken.com/story/where-does-the-buck-stop-during-a-cybersecurity-breach-in-india
May 7, 2021
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It’s not difficult to predict India’s response to a cyber incident. The aftermath of a
September 2020 power outage in Mumbai is a textbook example.
First, denial. While Maharashtra’s cybercrime department suspected that the attacks
originated from China, the central government later denied that the security breach was
connected to the power outage.
Then, a reluctant admission that came after The New York Times broke the story in late
February. On 10 February, US-based cyber intelligence firm Recorded Future gave Indian
authorities a list of IP addresses belonging to a suspected command and control centre of
a Chinese hacker group. The addresses had communicated with the computer systems of
power utilities and ports in the country.
And finally, delayed action. “It took agencies 17 days to block the IPs. Ideally, action
should have been taken in 24-48 hours,” Sandeep Shukla, professor and joint coordinator
at IIT Kanpur’s C3I Centre, told The Ken. The centre is the only academic research entity
working on critical information infrastructure in the country.
Additionally, in its statement to news agency ANI, India’s Ministry of Power said that all
systems in the targeted organisations were scanned and cleaned by antivirus software.
The responses seemed naive, at best. The malware used were advanced persistent threats
(APT), which are far too advanced to be detected by mere antivirus programs.
This, though, is the norm. E-commerce platforms, power grids, nuclear power plants—
even India’s premier space agency, ISRO—have all been compromised by hackers in the
past. In each case, the government’s reactions played out in a similar manner.
In sharp contrast is the hack of US IT firm SolarWinds, which serves Fortune 500
companies and many government departments and agencies, including part of the
Pentagon and the US’ Department of Treasury. When Russian hackers broke into and
spied on SolarWinds’ clients for months, the US government asked every department and
organisation involved to do an impact assessment.
“That’s the depth one is required to go to when incidents happen. In India it begins with
denial. The immediate response is to always fix the problem, not resolve it,” Sivarama
Krishnan, Asia-Pacific cybersecurity services leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) ,
told The Ken.
the-ken.com-Where does the buck stop during a cybersecurity breach in India 1/2 948
Bugs in the system
India’s cybersecurity efforts are a hodgepodge of bureaucracy,

inadequate infrastructure, and a glaring absence of strategy. A
proposal is underway but the country’s response to cyber attacks
remains in the ‘fix-it’ category instead of monitoring threats
proactively
Pratap Vikram Singh, 7 May 2021
To revamp cybersecurity, India is proposing to centralise all controls and assign
funding of Rs 20,000 crore
This is a welcome first step; cyber and intelligence agencies operate in the complete
absence of accountability and delineation of roles and responsibilities
Alerts about cyber attacks have come from researchers outside India—a job assigned to
frontline organisations, CERT-In and NCIIPC
Having a cyber strategy is only a starting point. Beside stronger agencies at the top,
India needs to create institutions to monitor and execute cyber security downstream
the-ken.com-Where does the buck stop during a cybersecurity breach in India 2/2 949
Whose land is it anyway?
the-ken.com/story/whose-land-is-it-anyway
August 18, 2020
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In June 2020, when India decided to liberalise trade in produce, it was hailed as a game-
changer for agriculture. Farmers would no longer be constrained by the monopoly of
regulated agricultural markets. They could now sell to anyone within the country, and
long-locked doors would be thrown open for private investment .
But as important as allowing cultivators the freedom to choose their buyers is this
question: just how much land does each of them legally own?
It’s not just the fate of India’s agricultural reforms that hinges on finding the answer to
this. The allocation for India’s flagship welfare scheme for cultivators, PM-Kisan, was cut
by more than a quarter to Rs 54,370 crore ($7.3 billion) for the year ended March 2020.
This was partly because states did not have enough data on the potential beneficiaries.
The long-term success of a state-sponsored crop insurance scheme would also be at risk if
there was no clarity on which parcels of farmland to insure. The central and state
governments’ share of the Rs 12,980 crore ($1.7 billion) premium for this kharif cropping
season (June-October) is nearly 90%. This is part of farm subsidies for a range of things,
including fertilisers and irrigation. Not to mention, lending to a farmer against their land
would continue to be a punt. That is, unless one could conclusively prove that the land
belongs to them and hasn’t already been used as collateral by someone else.
The heaps of public money at stake make a strong case for a rejig of a gargantuan but
teetering 12-year-old government exercise. The Digital India Land Records Modernization
Programme (DILRMP) is supposed to digitise legally valid titles to plots—tied to their
exact location using satellite data—and make them available on the web.
the-ken.com-Whose land is it anyway 1/2 950

Digitisation, however, is not just about land coordinates, says SatSure co-founder and
chief executive Prateep Basu.
agriculture
Cartosat
Crop insurance
Digital India
Isro
satellite
Welfare scheme
the-ken.com-Whose land is it anyway 2/2 951

Whose troll is it anyway: India’s internet laws need a fix
the-ken.com/story/india-internet-laws
March 21, 2018
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Is the government of India going to become a “troll monitor”?
When asked this question in the context of social media at a media summit on 17 March,
Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Smriti Irani said:
“Instead of saying that you are a troll monitor, one can say that agencies that want to be
a part of news, and factually want to give, let’s say, not only because news today is also
very invested in views, it is not devoid of views – and that is a very fine line that certain
journalists or media persons tend to cross. So it is now incumbent upon the consumer to
have knowledge of what is pure information or what comes over as opinion, and that is,
like I said, something that the ministry is considering in terms of putting it in those
words which now reflect on broadcasting and advertorials – having a similar line of
ethics and a code of conduct in a free society that is incumbent upon the agencies to
abide to [sic].”
For those concerned with the regulation of content on social media, that word-salad of an
answer is unlikely to inspire much confidence in the government’s approach to regulation.
In the context of content regulation in the media, the Press Council of India and the News
Broadcasters Association are not very encouraging—they’re hardly the models of good and
effective self-regulation in the context of newspapers and television, respectively. At the
same time, content regulation specific to the internet in any way has been a disaster in
India. We’ve witnessed the chaos and trouble caused by Section 66-A of the Information
Technology Act, 2000 until it was struck down by the Supreme Court as being
the-ken.com-Whose troll is it anyway Indias internet laws need a fix 1/2 952
unconstitutional. What is definitely not needed is a toothless body with little power trying
to tame media outlets on social media. And we certainly don’t need another law trying to
define what is and what isn’t acceptable speech on social media.
Between the two extremes though, perhaps, there’s a third alternative.
From network effect to network enforcement

As 2018 rolled in, the Federal Republic of Germany brought into effect one of the most
hotly debated and paradigm shifting laws on the governance of the internet: the
Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or the “Network Enforcement Act” as it is known in
English.
What does it do? It makes social networks with at least two million users or more in
Germany responsible for taking down illegal content posted on them by users, and for
putting in place a mechanism where illegal content can be reported and acted upon.
Failure to put in place such a mechanism and meet the reporting obligations under the
law (for complaints received and action taken) could result in fines from anywhere
between 500,000 to 50 million euros.
the-ken.com-Whose troll is it anyway Indias internet laws need a fix 2/2 953
Why a lack of judicial reforms could kill India’s startup
story
the-ken.com/story/judicial-reforms-startup-story
June 21, 2017
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Entrepreneurship is being encouraged today throughout institutions, across the ranks.
But we know it is a messy process, particularly in commercial enterprises. So when
Stayzilla co-founder Yogendra “Yogi” Vasupal was arrested by Chennai Police earlier this
year, it took the entire startup community by shock, consternation, and eventually, a
furore erupted. Vasupal was accused of cheating Aditya CS, proprietor of Jigsaw
Advertising of Rs 1.69 crore. Here, it seemed, was an entrepreneur being persecuted for
not paying his bills on time—an obviously civil dispute being turned into a criminal case
at the behest of the aggrieved party. This was pretty much what Justice S Bhaskaran of the
Madras High Court said in court while granting Vasupal bail on the condition of him
depositing Rs 40 lakh with the Magistrate Court.
It’s important to note that Justice Bhaskaran also advised the parties to settle the matter
through mediation, although that suggestion does not seem to have been taken up. This
came after Vasupal had spent 28 days in jail when all the lower courts had denied him
bail.
Beyond the payment dispute between Stayzilla and Jigsaw, this case epitomises a deeper
problem with the Indian judiciary that could potentially torpedo the growth of Indian
startups as the sector goes through an already visible and difficult phase of consolidation.
The underlying problems with India’s justice delivery mechanisms might explain why
Aditya might have approached the police to resolve what is essentially a civil dispute, and
why this may not be the last time an entrepreneur faces such a dark situation.
A growing economy means rising civil cases, right? Wrong
the-ken.com-Why a lack of judicial reforms could kill Indias startup story 1/2 954
A look at the National Crime Records Bureau data published in its annual ‘Crime in India’
reports over the last decade shows that the annual number of cheating cases registered
with the police has doubled, from 58,076 in 2006 to 1,15,405 in 2015. No other economic
offence under the Indian Penal Code has seen such an increase; only robbery and offences
against women have registered similar increases. (The highest increase in this 10-year
period, where comparable figures are available, seems to be in abduction and kidnapping.
But that’s a story for another day).
The above numbers must also be seen in the context of another curious phenomenon—of
cheating cases being ‘settled’ out of court between parties and the FIR (First Information
Report) being quashed by the High Court on this basis.
This phenomenon is bizarre because a cheating case, punishable under Section 420 of the
Indian Penal Code, 1861 is not a “compoundable offence”. That is, it is not an offence
where prosecution can be dropped at the instance of the victim. Take, for instance, this
case: Sandesh Subhash Pawar v State of Maharashtra decided by the Bombay High Court
on 28 November 2016.
civil litigation
civil suit
criminal suit
jigsaw advertising
Stayzilla
Yogendra Vasupal
the-ken.com-Why a lack of judicial reforms could kill Indias startup story 2/2 955
Why don’t oral vaccines work well in India?
the-ken.com/story/why-dont-oral-vaccines-work-well-in-india
November 21, 2016
On a cold, misty February morning in 2013, three medical researchers got into a car in
New Delhi to travel to a highly anticipated meeting. Gagandeep Kang, a microbiologist
from Christian Medical College of Vellore, Maharaj Kishan Bhan, then secretary to the
Department of Biotechnology, and Nita Bhandari, public-health researcher at Delhi’s
Center for Health Research and Development had been part of a two-year study to gauge
the efficacy of India’s first indigenous vaccine against rotavirus diarrhoea, which kills
between 80,000 to 100,000 children every year. The study results, which would show if
the vaccine worked, were to be announced at the meeting.
Kang wasn’t betting big, quite literally. In the car, the researchers began wagering on how
effective the vaccine would turn out to be. Kang’s bet was 50%. The performance of two
precursor rotavirus vaccines in the market, GlaxoSmithkline’s Rotarix and Merck’s
Rotateq, had shown that seemingly potent rotavirus vaccines in developed countries
somehow lost their steam in poorer nations. If Rotarix and Rotateq prevented rotavirus
diarrhoea over 90% of the time in countries such as the USA, they did so about 45-50% of
the time in Nicaragua and Malawi. Kang, who won the Infosys Prize for life sciences on
Friday, admits that even though she bet 50% during the February car ride, she hadn’t
ruled out an efficacy as low as 30%.
So when Mathuram Santhosam, an epidemiologist from USA’s Johns Hopkins University

and the chairman of the data monitoring group for the study, announced that the vaccine
had prevented diarrhoea in 56% of children, the number was higher than Kang had
prepared for. And yet, it hadn’t bucked the trend. Rotavac, the much-awaited local
alternative to the existing prohibitively priced brands was apparently suffering from the
same problem as its counterparts.
the-ken.com-Why dont oral vaccines work well in India 1/7 956

The problem of oral vaccine inefficacy isn’t new to India; the polio vaccine was a
precedent. During the late ’90s and early 2000s, the low efficacy of the oral polio vaccine
in India was a big reason why we missed two of our polio-eradication deadlines. Cholera
vaccines do the same volte-face in poorer nations—while they work perfectly in developed
country settings, their efficacy drops off a cliff in Asian countries.
It’s a double whammy for these nations. On the one hand, they suffer high mortality from
cholera, rotavirus diarrhoea, and historically, polio, and on the other, vaccines fail to do
their job. Why do vaccines act so selectively? “That’s a very important scientific question,”
says Soumya Swaminathan, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research
(ICMR). “We really don’t understand why this is happening in our children.”
But researchers such as Kang have begun making headway in understanding the
overlapping factors that drive vaccine failure, most of which have to do with the
environment children grow up in. How exactly poor sanitation affects vaccines is still
moot, though.
India introduced rotavirus vaccine in its national immunization programme in March;

four states will be covered in the first phase.
Poor sanitation is a two-fold blow

The link between the environment and vaccine-performance has grown stronger since it
was discovered in the polio vaccine. Researchers have observed that poor sanitation and
contaminated drinking water, deliver a two-fold blow to children: They cause illnesses to
spread, while also making children’s bodies less responsive to oral vaccines. Vaccines
work by introducing a weakened or dead pathogen into the body, which doesn’t cause
disease but boosts immunity. But when a child’s intestines are under constant attack from
assorted bacteria and viruses every single day because of a dirty environment, they grow
inflamed, enter a hyper-immune state and fight off even the bugs in the vaccines.
It is this phenomenon, known as environmental enteropathy, which researchers

hypothesise to be key in explaining poor vaccine performance. Enteropathy is an insidious
condition, that doesn’t always make people sick. Instead, it manifests as stunted growth
or low weight and height for one’s age. But enteropathy isn’t the only way in which an
unhygienic environment interferes with vaccines. Full-blown viral infections can also out-
compete vaccines by latching onto the immune receptors that vaccines rely on. Even
breastfed children, who do not drink or eat contaminated food, bear the brunt of
environmental pollution. This is because, when the mother is exposed to pathogens, her
antibodies pass on to the child through milk, blunting vaccine response.
Public health professionals believe the Swachh Bharat campaign would make a significant
difference to the cholera burden.
Apart from environmental reasons, children in low-income countries also suffer

nutritional deficiencies. Some of these nutrients, such as zinc and vitamin A, are critical
to the body’s vaccine response.

Which of these factors affects the rotavirus vaccine the most? It isn’t clear yet because
each of them has been shown to affect vaccine performance only inconsistently. And the
results differ from place to place, country to country. “Vaccine response is mediated by
something in the environment,” says Kang, “but whether it is enteropathy or a
combination of enteropathy and other things—we don’t know.”
The early omens

It was in the early 2000s, when no rotavirus vaccines were available in India yet, that
Kang and her team had their first inkling of the problems that would beset future
vaccines. The prevalent belief then, based on a Mexican study, was that two infections
from rotavirus protected children from severe future episodes of gastroenteritis. The
Mexican study suggested that a vaccine that mimicked such natural infections would be
protective against childhood diarrhoea.
Gagandeep Kang at work in CMC Vellore. Kang’s first rotavirus project was to search for a biological
indicator of immunity against rotavirus diarrhea. “Twenty years later, I am still looking,” she says.
Kang set out to replicate the Mexican findings in India but was in for a surprise. The
children she studied in Vellore had gotten repeated diarrhoea from a common rotavirus
strain, and yet, weren’t protected. “We realised looking at our cohort that the story that
we had been told about Mexico wasn’t holding in children here,” she recalls.

It was an early omen that India was an anomaly when it came to vaccine efficacy. And it
came at the heels of a previous discovery at Christian Medical College that the oral polio
vaccine was an under-performer in India too. Veteran virologist Jacob John, Kang’s
professor when she was pursuing her master’s degree at the college, was among the first
to document the polio problem.
Much before India launched its official polio eradication drive, John and British
paediatrician John Webb, were administering the polio vaccine to children in the 1960s.
They found that some children developed polio despite receiving the stipulated three
doses. Then, when India kicked off its Expanded Program of Immunisation in 1978, the
problem grew starker. For nearly a decade since, India’s polio burden did not drop. Not
knowing the root cause behind it, John and Webb termed this phenomenon a “geographic
variation.”
Against this background, Kang’s team published a paper in 2007, arguing that a rotavirus
vaccine candidate being developed then by the Indian Institute of Science wouldn’t work
as expected because it used a rotavirus strain similar to the one which did not protect
children in Vellore. The Infosys Prize particularly mentions this work.
Her prediction was met with skepticism. A slim 54-year-old with a pixie haircut, Kang has
a tendency to look amused when describing the hurdles that often turn up in her research.
“At that time, the rotavirus field was unwilling to admit that this was going to happen. I’d
say, ‘But look at the polio vaccine,’ and they’d say, ‘but rotavirus is different’,” she laughs.
By the time Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech’s Rotavac came up for testing in 2011, the
results of effectiveness trials from Rotarix and Rotateq in low-income countries were out.
Kang’s predictions turned out to be correct. It was time to haul out the tool-kit and fix the
problem.
Lessons from the oral polio vaccine

John’s work on the polio vaccine in the ’90s set a valuable precedent for researchers
looking to improve the rotavirus vaccine. One of the first tactics John tried was increasing
the number of doses from the three that conferred near 100% immunity in countries like
the US to five. It worked.
Despite these measures, states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar remained stubbornly
endemic as late as 2005. Children sometimes received 15 doses of the vaccine, and still
developed polio. Among the three serotypes (categories identifiable by their antigens
which produce the immune response) of the poliovirus that were combined in each dose
of the vaccine, immune response was the poorest to the first and third serotypes, and
highest to the second. So even if children were protected from infections of the second
type, they remained vulnerable to the other two.
To combat this, two monovalent vaccines, effective against first and third type of viruses,
respectively, were introduced. Mono, bi and tri refer to the number of serotypes a vaccine
works against. Later, these monovalent vaccines were combined into one bivalent vaccine.

With the second serotype absent in the bivalent vaccine, the first and third vaccines
worked better, a strategy John credits with the elimination of the last Indian polio
reservoirs. “Bluntly put, UP and Bihar would not have eliminated wild polio virus 1 and 3
with trivalent oral polio vaccine; the monovalent vaccine and bivalent vaccine did the
trick,” says John.
What will it take to improve rotavirus vaccines?

The rotavirus vaccine researchers have borrowed a page from the polio playbook by
adding supplemental vaccine doses. Results so far are mixed. A three-dose schedule,
instead of two, seemed to improve immune response in children in South Africa and
Malawi, but not so much in India and Pakistan. Kang now wants to experiment with
changing the timing of additional doses, adding a neonatal dose, for children less than
four weeks age or a booster at nine months. But these trials won’t begin for some time
now.
The trick
The rotavirus vaccine researchers have borrowed a page from the polio playbook by
adding supplemental vaccine doses. Results so far are mixed. A three-dose schedule,
instead of two, seemed to improve immune response in children in South Africa and
Malawi, but not so much in India and Pakistan
In the interim, Kang’s team has a list of other tactics that they are checking off. These
include antibiotics to treat enteropathy, zinc and vitamin D for nutritional deficiencies
and interrupting breastfeeding during vaccination. “Pretty much almost everything we
have on the list of interventions, we have already tried,” Kang says. But answers are not
forthcoming yet.
Her team’s experiment with azithromycin, an antibiotic, showed that even though
azithromycin improved three biomarkers—or measures of enteropathy such as proteins or
genes that can be detected in blood and faecal matter—it did not improve the efficacy of
the polio vaccine. While this could mean that enteropathy isn’t a factor in polio vaccine
response, it could also mean that longer courses of azithromycin will work.
The reason Kang’s team used the polio vaccine for the azithromycin study, even though
their focus was the rotavirus vaccine, was the lack of an early indicator of vaccine efficacy
in the case of rotavirus. Researchers can predict if a polio vaccine dose will prevent
disease in a child by measuring blood antibodies, or immunogenicity. But
immunogenicity does not predict efficacy against a disease for rotavirus. The only way to
test efficacy then is an expensive trial that tracks children for years till they develop
diarrhoea. This is one of the biggest challenges in rotavirus vaccine trials.
“Immunogenicity and efficacy correlate well in developed countries but less well in
developing countries,” says James Church, a researcher at Queen Mary University of
London and part of a study to improve vaccine responses in Zimbabwe.

Despite such fundamental challenges, around five major trials have sprung up around the
world to understand how the environment affects vaccines. In 2014, Kang’s team at
Vellore got onboard an eight-country study to understand vaccine underperformance,
known as Mal-ed (pronounced Mal-ee-dee). As part of this, they set up a cohort of 240
expectant families, who they will track for five years from childbirth to study the link
between factors such as enteropathy and vaccine response. Another two-country study in
India and Bangladesh looks at similar questions.
While Mal-ed and the India-Bangladesh study will only observe children to tease out the
relationships between environment and vaccine response, the study that Church is part of
in Zimbabwe, known as SHINE, is taking a bold bet on a solution. Church’s team will
implement wide-ranging sanitation interventions—soap, water purifiers, toilets and even
a plastic play yard to keep newborns away from soil—in 700 expectant families to see if
they can boost vaccine response. The idea is for the child to be born in a family where
pathogen transmission has stopped.
Most vaccine manufacturers such as Merck and GlaxoSmithkline do collaborate with

improvement trials but aren’t leading from the front. One reason is that efficacy problems
plague vaccines equally, regardless of manufacturer, says K Vijayraghavan, secretary to
the Department of Biotechnology. “If one vaccine works significantly better than another
in the same class and at the same price point, then a manufacturer has an incentive to
improve performance,” he says. As of now, however, there is no rotavirus vaccine that
outperforms others greatly, taking away such an incentive. Ross Colgate, a scientist from
the University of Vermont who is coordinating a part of the India-Bangladesh study, adds
that understanding enteropathy is really the purview of basic scientists, rather than
manufacturers.
The imperative
“If one vaccine works significantly better than another in the same class and at the same
price point, then a manufacturer has an incentive to improve performance,” says K
VijayRaghavan
So, until the results of trials emerge, rotavirus vaccines are on their own.
Time to worry?
As researchers struggle for answers to the inefficacy problem, is there cause for worry?
John says there are ways to address the rotavirus vaccine problem.
The most promising among them is to vaccinate as many kids as possible, so that even
those who don’t respond to vaccines aren’t exposed to the virus because those who do
respond will stop spreading it, a phenomenon known as ‘herd impact’. But Kang argues
that we don’t know yet if a herd impact will be seen in India; there aren’t enough studies
yet. Moreover, she points out that rotavirus continues to be an important diarrhea-
causing pathogen in low-income countries even after vaccination has been introduced,
possibly due to vaccine ineffectiveness. “So we will wait and see what happens,” she says.

More importantly, says Swaminathan of ICMR, understanding the mechanism of vaccine
inefficacy for polio and rotavirus will throw light on the pitfalls newer oral vaccines may
face. As of today, several oral vaccines in development are of interest to India, such as
vaccines against the shigella bacteria and against norovirus, both major causes of
diarrhoea which kills 300,000 Indian children every year. Already there is evidence that
oral shigella vaccines are bedevilled by the same issues as oral polio and rotavirus
vaccines. This is a problem because oral vaccines are preferred over injectable ones in
developing countries, where trained nurses to administer vaccines are in short supply.
Oral-vaccine improvement programs remain critical for India, “for the principle of it,”
says Swaminathan.
The best way to sum up what drives researchers to study vaccine inefficacy doesn’t have to
do with polio, rotavirus or shigella vaccines, however. When I ask John why one would
improve the polio vaccine even after polio has been eradicated in India, he paraphrases
the response of British mountain climber, George Mallory, to a reporter asking why
Mallory climbed mountains. “People climb Everest because it is there,” says John. People
improve vaccines because it is good science.
Priyanka Pulla is a freelance journalist based in Bengaluru.

Why India should not buy Bitcoin
the-ken.com/story/why-india-should-not-buy-bitcoin
February 16, 2021
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Balaji S. Srinivasan, the former CTO of crypto startup Coinbase and former General
Partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently wrote a blog post titled “ Why India
should buy Bitcoin ”.
Calling out to the Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Srinivasan exhorted the Indian
government to “support crypto as a pillar of its foreign & domestic policy”. The
justification was that Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, “defends national security
by preventing deplatforming, deters fraud via on-chain accounting, and offers a
decentralized alternative to a new Cold War”.
This post was noteworthy for three reasons.
First, given his antecedents, Srinivasan is an influential voice in the crypto and investor
communities. He is also a multidisciplinary thinker whose early pronouncements on the
pandemic earned him the moniker of “ The Man Who Called COVID ”. Given his Indian
roots, Srinivasan’s recommendations to the Indian government were all the more worthy
of attention.
Second, Bitcoin has been on a tear in recent times. It is the world’s largest cryptocurrency
and has gone up nearly 5X in the past year and 10X since March 2020, approaching the
US$50,000 mark. There has never been higher interest in crypto, and with popular
leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey putting their voices behind the movement, it
wouldn’t be an exaggeration to believe that Bitcoin’s moment in the sun is nigh.
the-ken.com-Why India should not buy Bitcoin 1/2 963

Finally, in dire contrast to the global bullishness around Bitcoin, the Indian government is
poised to completely ban and outlaw crypto in all forms, making even holding it a
cognisable criminal offence.
Against this backdrop, it came as no surprise that Srinivasan’s post was met with
overwhelming support both by the press and by the broad startup community in India. It
was hailed as being revolutionary and radical.
On the surface, the call for the Indian government to buy into Bitcoin is a strange
exhortation given that the core imperative behind crypto is to establish a currency that
goes beyond maximalist regimes and functions outside governmental control.
Be that as it may, the essay goes on to list purported benefits of Bitcoin for matters related
to national security, monetary policy, foreign policy, and foreign investments.
Balaji
bitcoin
blockchain
crypto currency
Cryptocurrency
India
national security
Policy
Sriivasan
the-ken.com-Why India should not buy Bitcoin 2/2 964

Why India’s drug price regulator’s fate hangs in the
balance
the-ken.com/story/why-indias-drug-price-regulators-fate-hangs-in-balance
December 9, 2016
Pat came the reply, even before the question was posed.
“It is up to the government to decide,” said a composed National Pharmaceuticals Pricing

Authority (NPPA) chairman Bhupendra Singh.
It was almost as if he knew what the question was. The chatter is constant, and
speculation galore, that the power to regulate or cap drug prices in India is being wrested
from NPPA and passed on to the Department of Pharmaceuticals.
For over two decades, NPPA has regulated the prices of drugs in India. As of today, about
17% of drugs in the market are under price control. The Authority gets mixed remarks in
its report card: the industry is unhappy, whereas consumer organisations believe NPPA
has done a fair job of keeping prices under check.
17%
The percentage of drugs in the market currently under price control in India
So in October when he read in morning newspapers that the government was considering
a proposal to disband NPPA, Singh, an IAS officer, was mildly shocked. After all what was
all over the press, but was never communicated to him, implied a total revamp of the drug
control and pricing regime in the country. It’d impact the Rs 111,022 crore industry and
the public health of hundreds of millions of people. Singh was neither privy nor party to
what was brewing within Niti Aayog.
On October 19, at a meeting where top bureaucrats, the three secretaries – Jai Priye
Prakash, CK Mishra, and Ramesh Abhishek – of the Departments of Pharmaceuticals,
Health, and Industrial Policy and Promotion respectively met with Amitabh Kant, CEO of
the-ken.com-Why Indias drug price regulators fate hangs in the balance 1/5 965
Niti Aayog. What they agreed upon is this: the national list of essential medicines would
no longer be drawn only by the Central Drug Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO)
and that the NPPA would have to find a home for itself in the pharmaceutical department,
maybe even a new raison d’être.
According to a person in the knowledge of

these events, not a single attendee had any
objection; the decision was unanimous.
“They kowtowed to Kant without much
thought,” he added. “No one was consulted
nor were any stakeholders informed.” In the
words of a former pharmaceutical secretary,
“this intervention was setting the stage for a
Screenshot of the minutes of the 19th October
proposed government control”. meeting
The Ken reached out to multiple officials

within Niti Aayog over the last week through phone calls and over email. There was no
response.
“There were two meetings and the NPPA was not a party to them. Both meetings were
held at short notices. This has been a rushed decision. For any policy change, there needs
to be consultation. I understand the file is currently with the Minister of Chemicals and
Fertilizers for approval,” Singh told The Hindu recently.
The signs of a major pharmaceutical regulatory overhaul were already there, even if
nobody was reading them loud and clear. It was only a matter of time.
The first hints came in September 2014, when the NPPA was nudged by the government
to withdraw an internal guideline it had issued in May that year after industry groups
protested against it. The guideline allowed the NPPA to monitor and fix prices of non-
scheduled drugs in areas like cancer, diabetes, TB and HIV if the MRP exceeded 25% of
the simple average of those medicines.
To put this in context, NPPA has powers to fix the ceiling price of a drug outside of the
essential medicines list under extraordinary circumstances, including public interest.
Prior to the guideline being withdrawn, the NPPA had capped prices of 108 non-essential
drugs (anti-diabetics and cardiovascular), a move that clearly didn’t go down well with the
Indian pharmaceutical industry. The two industry associations, OPPI and the Indian
Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), challenged the capping of prices in the Delhi and Bombay
High Courts respectively. In both cases, the courts refused to stay the NPPA order. The
IPA filed an appeal in the Supreme Court, only to be quashed by the bench.
In nutshell, the industry is not happy but the courts see no problem with price caps.
The ease of doing business
Going by the October 19 minutes of the meeting, a new drug policy is in the works. A
policy that would also cut some bureaucratic flab.
“There was a feeling among those in power that the current [pricing] regime wasn’t best
suited to attract investment and encourage innovations, which is why this revamp has
been initiated,” says S Srinivasan, a member of the consumer body, All India Drugs Action
Network (AIDAN). “The NPPA itself has been functioning well and doing its job by
increasing the number of drugs under price control.”
In India, currently, 17% of drugs in the market are under price control. For perspective,
European countries like France and Italy also have price control mechanisms in place.
However, the exact percentage in these countries is unknown. Others like Japan and
Germany control prices, but they follow the social reimbursement model, where
affordable medicines are paired with universal healthcare.
“If you see over the last three-four years, the NPPA has drawn the ire of the industry. The
perception was that it was very pro-consumer. A lot of companies complained about the
regulator, and this includes multi-national companies,” said the former pharmaceutical
secretary quoted earlier.
Then there is a complex bureaucratic web that any company has to cut through to get any
approval.
NPPA → Department of Pharmaceuticals → Ministry of Fertilizers and

Chemicals
Apart from these three actors, there is health ministry whose only role is to approve the
drugs to be included in the essential list, which in turn is controlled by the CDSCO. It’s a
maze. And wait, there’s some more complexity. When patented drugs have to be
regulated, the Commerce Ministry and the Department of Industrial Promotion step in.
“There are too many heads involved in the process, too many power centres in play. It is
important for the process to be streamlined and get everyone on the same page, even
under one body. Now whether the NPPA is shifted elsewhere, or the Niti Aayog does it is
immaterial. What is important is that that pricing control must exist and that the
consumer should come first,” Srinivasan said.
S Srinivasan, Aidan
'What is important is that that pricing control must exist and that the consumer should
come first'
Even within the ministry, there is a difference of opinion. “Some officials in the
Department of Pharmaceuticals clearly bat for industry. How can you have a regulator
reporting to the Department? Where is the independence? They’ve been doing a
remarkable job so far, but at times when, say, the NPPA fixes prices and the company gets
unhappy and files a review, as it is entitled to, the Department has almost always upheld
the company’s plea, as against the regulator’s decision,” he added.
In other words, a bureaucratic cesspool.
Whatever role the industry may have played in NPPA’s current existential crisis, no one
wants to wager what will happen. The industry body IPA is equally diplomatic in its
response: “As far as we know, there is no proposal to scrap the NPPA. However, they did
exceed their brief in fixing the prices of certain drugs. We, at IPA, never represented for
the winding up of the NPPA. We only want them to follow the rule of law, as mandated by
the DPCO 2013,” said its secretary-general DG Shah.
DG Shah, secretary-general, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance
We only want them to follow the rule of law
The pall of uncertainty

If the NPPA is scrapped, it could come as a major relief to the industry, a culmination of
over two decades of marching up the government for simple regulatory structures. In
terms of reducing the drugs under price control, they almost succeeded in 2001, when
they sought to bring the number of essential medicines from 370 to 25. Since then, their
chorus has only grown louder.
“We may not see a significant change in the process of price control itself. The consumers’
interest, rest assured, will never be sacrificed by the government. They can never do that.
But from what it appears, they feel that industry should also be given the comfort feeling,”
said the pharmaceutical secretary quoted earlier.
On the consumer side, much would change if the price control is delinked from the
essential list. This list today consists of 467 medicines, including 59 for cancer treatment.
Delinking will be a departure from the current practice where a drug, when included as an
essential medicine, becomes subject to price control. The new proposal gives “the right of
regulating prices as per need” to the government. This could essentially redefine what
constitutes an “essential drug”, which for industry implies flexibility, while for consumer
groups, it means “whims and fancies” of the government.
467
The number of drugs in the updated National List of Essential Medicines
The momentum, as is evident, is on the government’s side. Except, that the Supreme
Court decided to butt in briefly. In a 21 October ruling (PDF), the apex court said that the
NPPA was justified in “clamping ceiling prices on drugs even without first fixing the
rules.” The court was ruling on an earlier case where the Authority claimed Rs 3500 crore
from drug companies for overpricing and one which many companies had challenged in
different courts of the country.
The Authority may have won that case but it may lose its power to the new drug policy.
Sources say the ministry’s decision on its fate could come “as early as next week.”
Since successive governments have not increased health care spending, nor is there any
inkling of it even now, a new drug policy is what people will pin their hopes on.
Why rural women in e-commerce are up against
Amazon, Myntra
the-ken.com/story/shgs-ecommerce-amazon-myntra
April 19, 2018
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A few weeks back, The Ken wrote about Kudumbashree. An organisation that started 20
years ago with the aim of mobilising women and making them financially independent.
One part of their programme works with small units of around five women each—Micro-
enterprise (ME) units. These women produce handmade, homemade products, which
they then sell door-to-door, in bazaars and at exhibitions. And now, Kudumbashree wants
to sell online, join the world of e-commerce by selling on kudumbashreebazaar.com.
While a notable effort, I thought The Ken’s piece was incomplete. So, I said, let me take a
shot at it, and, well, put out the bigger picture.
Not long back, I was visiting Kutch, in Gujarat. On work. When my sister reminded me to
pick up a chaniya choli (embroidered blouse) for her. A garment of that kind comes with
its own set of specifications, and I didn’t want to disappoint. When I asked for it at a
nearby shop, I heard the most insane words I have heard in a long time—Rs 3,500 ($53).
The shop is a medium-sized store, larger than the ones in Mumbai, in a small town of
Anjar in the rather large district of Kutch. These are locally made handcrafted garments
with pretty intricate and elaborate work, and I would’ve happily paid around Rs 5,000
($76) for this in Mumbai. So, that got me thinking. How much of this money actually goes
back to the women who sew this?
Yes. My story actually started with chaniya choli. With an opportunistic thought: what if I
could somehow buy directly from them and sell it to customers, and make a good profit
out of it? Could I get Self-Help Groups (SHGs) registered on an e-commerce portal? So, I
the-ken.com-Why rural women in e-commerce are up against Amazon Myntra 1/2 970
asked a friend at Flipkart, one of the largest e-commerce companies in India. What do you
think?
What’s an SHG
A group of women who work in the socio-economic space—Personal Development
(Capacity Building), Skill Development/taking up Municipal Contracts, or even the Mid-
Day Meal Scheme.
Her answer: No.
It was time to move out of the drawing room and understand why not.
Here’s how the cookie crumbles. There are many SHGs across India which work in
making artefacts. Most either get the machinery, input material and the market linkage
for the output from an organisation. But since everything is provided for at the doorstep,
the profitability factor of this venture isn’t high. For instance, say you need a necklace
made of beads. You get in touch with a non-profit of the region or any local contact that
has formed or manages these SHGs and set up a meeting with them.
the-ken.com-Why rural women in e-commerce are up against Amazon Myntra 2/2 971
Why the Human Eye is the Window to AI in Healthcare
the-ken.com/story/human-eye-window-artificial-intelligence-healthcare
July 1, 2018
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Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe? O
mighty process… what talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as this? What tongue
will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Truly none!
Leonardo da Vinci broke into this rhapsodic praise for the human eye after having
copiously documented his experiments. On the substance, shape, and function of the eye.
The Renaissance artist’s memorable observation from his theory of vision—‘How the eye
has no share in the creation of the colours of the rainbow’—illuminated many a scholarly
work that followed. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colour and, much later,
Ewald Hering’s Theory of Colour Vision leaned on da Vinci. His observations are even
considered a precursor to Newton, whose theory of the spectrum of white light postulated
that light is made up of seven colours.
Before da Vinci, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and prior to them, Alcmaeon and
Democritus, all studied the eye and proposed advanced theories of vision. The eye,
popularly a window to the soul for poets and writers, was clearly a window to scientific
exploration as well.
the-ken.com-Why the Human Eye is the Window to AI in Healthcare 1/13 972

More than five centuries later, the human eye has once again become a window. This time
for artificial intelligence (AI), with neural networks seeking out patterns when fed with
data. Such networks have been in use for decades, but lately, as if by a global conspiracy of
breakthroughs, they have led to an explosion of applications. Image recognition
(Facebook recognises faces almost as well as humans), self-driving cars, Go-playing bots,
surveillance and many more. AI is on a roll. And since eyes have always been amenable to
photography, their images have become data troves for algorithms looking for patterns
and signs of diseases.
What is IDx?
IDx-DR is intended for use to automatically detect more than mild diabetic retinopathy
(mtmDR) in adults ages 22 years of age or older diagnosed with diabetes who have not
been previously diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy.
In April, the American drug regulator approved the first ever AI-based device, IDx-DR,
for the automatic diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. It’s the first significant application of
AI in healthcare, having crossed all regulatory hurdles to reach the clinic. It can diagnose
more than a mild level of the disease, which affects over 125 million people worldwide.
Several more eye diagnostics are in the works, from startups, large tech companies,
academics, and care providers.
All this action has changed the discourse. From the front of the eye to the back of the eye,
from the more visible and high-volume burden of cataract to peering into the retina.
That’s because the orange orb that lies at the back of the eye is the only place in the body
where one can look at blood vessels in their naked form. Naturally, many are looking.
So, what is it that algorithm-aided cameras can now tell us?
"Big companies haven’t moved close to approvals but they certainly did
evangelise AI in eye care"
Kaushal Solanki
Founder & CEO, Eyenuk Inc
What’s wrong with your eye, heart, blood pressure, kidney, foot, brain. It can tell your age
and gender. Even one’s body mass index. If you are a smoker or not. Or whether you are
optimistic, curious, agreeable, conscientious, extroverted, or maybe even neurotic.
Sensors integrated with AI study pupil dilation and predict facial (micro) expressions. It’s
the end of poker face, you could say.
All this is true and wades into pop science. More seriously, in eye care, federalised AI on
smartphones looks very real. Much like Google maps that people have come to use even
offline.

Still, so far, says Kaushal Solanki, founder and chief executive of Eyenuk Inc., big
companies haven’t moved close to regulatory approvals. But, he agrees, their presence
certainly evangelised AI in eye care. They made it popular; you can hear the buzz, he says,
referring to Microsoft, Google and IBM’s initiatives.
From eye images, algorithms can tell your age and gender. Even one’s body mass index. If
you are a smoker or not. Or whether you are optimistic, curious, agreeable, conscientious,
extroverted, or maybe even neurotic
Deep learning in the retina

“Retina, in some respects, is an extension of the human brain,” says Sameer Trikha,
founder and chief medical officer of Visulytix Ltd, a London startup building AI tools for
eye care. Nerve tissue is visible at the back of the eye and algorithms can identify changes
here years before diseases such as, say, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis
manifest elsewhere.
Can we identify patients who are at risk of these diseases?
“The best part about AI is you don’t need to know the relationships, it
finds the relationships"
Sameer Trikha,
Founder & CMO, Visulytix Ltd.
Yes, we can.
“The best thing about AI is that you don’t need to know relationships, it finds those
relationships,” says Trikha. As datasets get cross-linked, from genetic information to
epidemiology trends, algorithms find associations, a feature that is getting better with
each passing year.
The practical use of AI didn’t really take off until the early 2010s. It was the time an
annual computer vision competition, ImageNet Challenge, was gaining traction. Under it,
a vast visual dataset was thrown open to developers to see which algorithms could identify
objects in the dataset images with the lowest error rate. Two years into the competition, in
2012, its final results stunned the AI world. Winners from the University of Toronto had
built a neural network architecture called AlexNet which beat the field by a whopping
margin, with an error rate lower than a human’s. (Since then AlexNet has become a
popular neural network to categorise photographs, to tell whether they are of cats, dogs,
objects, or people.)
Man vs Machine
71.8% Algorithm Accuracy in 2010
97.3% Algorithm Accuracy in 2017
94.9% Human Accuracy

In no time, ImageNet, with millions of categorised images, had become a benchmark to
evaluate image classification.
More interestingly, people discovered that their algorithms worked better if they trained
them on ImageNet datasets. Naturally, people across the world began using it to
jumpstart other recognition tasks, and AI startups proliferated.
The ImageNet Challenge ended in 2017. Its founder Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University
professor, is now the chief scientist at Google Cloud. But in just seven years, the accuracy
of ImageNet-winning algorithms at classifying objects in the dataset rose from 71.8% to
97.3%, surpassing human accuracy rate of 94.9%. The competition convincingly showed
that bigger datasets indeed led to better and more accurate decisions in the real world.
In 2017, just when ImageNet ended, Google threw open its library for serving machine
learning models. Its library has served not only its own TensorFlow framework but third
party models as well. “Google has been a trailblazer,” says Trikha. It is a giant, he says,
which has the ability to build infrastructure and popularise AI.
Ophthalmology and other crazy words
“Out of 100 diabetics, about 20 will have some problem in eye, of which 5
would be referred to an eye doctor for urgent care and the remaining 15
would need close follow-up”
Dr R. Kim,
CMO, Aravind Eye Hospitals
As a speciality, ophthalmology is data and image dependent. And as a disease burden,

most eye disorders impact hundreds of millions. Google and others chose to focus on
diabetic retinopathy for obvious reasons. It is the most common cause of vision loss
among diabetics—again, a highly prevalent lifestyle disease—as high levels of blood sugar
lead to damage in retinal blood vessels.

Diabetic retinopathy prevalence may vary—18% in urban India, 10% in rural India, about
33% in the US—but once the disease strikes, it manifests in exactly the same way. It
doesn’t matter whether the person is a Caucasian or Indian, says Dr Rajiv Raman, a
consultant surgeon at Sankara Nethralaya. This is not exactly the case in cancer or
cardiology.
The Big 'uns

IBM IBM's Watson Health is applying cognitive computing to improve diabetes care
and prevention through a partnership with the American Diabetes Association
Microsoft Microsoft's MINE, a global network, wants to help eyecare providers to
closely monitor cases of myopia, find the patients who are at high risk of eventual
blindness and implement anti-myopia strategies
Google Google is working with several hospitals to test its deep learning based
eyecare solutions and has already moved from detecting eye diseases to monitoring
cardiac health
Machine learning has been used for automated classification of eye diseases for more than
a decade. Dr Raman, who worked with IIT Madras on this, says the earlier approach was
piecemeal—looking for a red lesion here, a yellow lesion there. It was called ‘feature
learning’, which computed explicit features as specified by experts.
At Aravind Eye Hospitals, its chief medical officer Dr R Kim says, the hospital group had
developed their own software for diabetic retinopathy which would grade the disease
based on the doctors’ inputs. “Because retinopathy cases are identified only late stage, our
idea was in the doctor’s clinic, the patient could get one more test done, of the eye. We
called it ‘opportunistic screening’,” says Dr Kim. Out of 100 diabetics, about 20 will have
some problem in the eye, of which five would be referred to an eye doctor for urgent care
and the remaining 15 would need close follow-up. Doctors don’t know who of these 100
would need urgent care, so screening is important. “At least you catch early. We call this
preventing ‘needless blindness’.”
Noble intentions no doubt, but the specificity of the software in such places wasn’t great.
The WHO guidelines for using AI tools for screening requires sensitivity (how often it
detects the disease correctly) and specificity (how often it correctly identifies patients
without the disease) greater than 80%. Hence, none of the early devices, including
Aravind’s, could be used.
Ever since deep learning algorithms arrived, things have sped up. Both Dr Raman and Dr
Kim collaborate with Google as part of their respective institutional tie-ups with the tech
giant. And one of the things they, like practitioners elsewhere, are happy about is the
consistency that AI brings. “If you show me an image today and then five days later, I, as a
doctor, could give you different readings. An error can creep in. That kind of error is
unlikely in AI. The more you train, the better it gets,” says Dr Kim.
“I, as a human doctor could give you different readings 5 days apart. Error can creep in.
That kind of error is unlikely in AI”

Dr R Kim
Ophthalmologists were farsighted

Back in the 1960s, a group of doctors met in Virginia, USA, to discuss diabetic
retinopathy. One of the outcomes of that meeting was a standard classification of the
disease. Over the next few years, the classification evolved as large clinical studies were
done. Grading centres emerged. These would objectively grade images of the fundus—the
part of the inner eye opposite the pupil. Using stereo photographs, 3D-images that is,
image-based grading became the gold standard for developing treatments, for many,
many years. Large datasets like EyePACS, which store images graded by retinal
specialists, became available for product development.
So, when people began looking for AI applications, diabetic retinopathy happened to be at
the shallow end of the (deep) pool.
“The data was clean, and grading of the disease was universal,” says Lily Peng, a product
manager with Google’s deep learning AI research team, Google Brain.
By just looking at images of the fundus one can detect the exact stage of the disease. In
addition, training and control data was in abundance. And the potential to impact the
world was, well, eye-popping, since at least a fifth of all diabetics need careful follow-up
for this disease. Yet the ball was lobbed into the ophthalmologists’ court because few
diabetologists or general physicians were willing to invest in expensive retinal cameras.
"As a doctor, I can’t figure out the gender looking at the images. That’s
what deep learning does, find associations which clinicians can’t”
Dr Rajiv Raman, consultant surgeon at Sankara Nethralaya
“At Aravind, we developed our software when there was no AI or machine learning; we
were looking for something which could lead to conversions [from screening to medical
intervention],” says Dr Kim.
When Google came knocking in India, doctors were ready. In eye care, the standard of
care is good. Thanks to visionaries like Dr SS Badrinath (founder of Sankara Nethralaya),
Dr GN Rao (founder of LV Prasad Eye Institute) and Dr G Venkataswamy (Aravind Eye
Care System), there is nothing that is not done in India and for which you have to go
abroad, says Dr Raman. Dr Raman initially saw the project with Google as “yet another
machine learning effort”. But a year later, when he saw that the algorithm had detected
gender in 90% of cases and the disease in more than 95% of cases, he was astounded. “As
a doctor, I can’t figure out the gender looking at the images. That’s what deep learning
does; it finds associations which clinicians can’t.”

Is diabetic retinopathy, then, the low hanging prize which got taken, with other retinal
disorders harder to crack?
“Not necessarily,” says Peng. “If you look at diabetic retinopathy, one of the biggest
reasons AI is successful there is because it requires universal screening. In glaucoma,
there’ll be [similar] AI offerings.” Peng, who co-founded a medical device startup before
coming to Google, believes their neural net framework can be retrained for different
diseases. “The model is optimised for one task now, but it can be optimised for different
tasks.”
"Whenever doctors are doing a high volume, repetitive task, there’s a risk
that the quality of eye care could suffer. By using AI, we reduce the bias
and we reduce clinical variability”
Sameer Trikha
That’s a big draw. One of the reasons Trikha, a medical doctor for 14 years, set up
Visulytix is because scalable models are not being built in healthcare. In just about two
years, close to 200 million people will have macular degeneration, 80 million will suffer
from glaucoma, 125 million will have diabetes-related eye problems, he reels off statistics.
Whenever doctors are doing a high volume, repetitive task, there’s a risk that the quality
of eye care could suffer. “We, as humans, are fallible. By using AI, we reduce the bias and
clinical variability.”
Initially, AI system learning is slow. Trikha was surprised by how long it took Visulytix’s
algorithm to identify the left eye from the right eye. “As humans, we don’t need to look at
a thousand images to figure that out. But now, I am surprised the other way—how quickly
AI deals with complexity. It can pick up subtle signs and uncover hidden relationships, for
example, the gender of a patient or glycaemic control, which a clinician looking at the
retina would never know.”
The eye has always been seen as a potential source of biomarkers for systemic conditions.
Biomarkers are quantitative indicators that can be extracted from retinal images with
minimal or zero user intervention and are strongly indicative of diseases. It’s another
matter altogether that biomarker discovery requires a large collection of cross-linked
data.

Window to the body
In the retina, says Solanki of Eyenuk, you can see the central nervous system, its smallest
blood vessels. “And once you see anything going wrong in there, you can see things going
wrong in the heart, kidney, foot…you go beyond the vision loss.” Solanki’s Eye-Art was
one of the first deep learning based AI eye products when Eyenuk unveiled it during
EASDec conference in Europe in 2015, with over 91% sensitivity and specificity, and
98.5% sensitivity for vision-threatening conditions.
In March, Peng and team at Google published a paper showing they could predict
cardiovascular risk factors by looking at photographs of the retinal fundus. The algorithm
could tell, fairly reliably, the age, gender, BMI, blood sugar level, and smoking status.
Elsewhere, researchers are discovering personality types from retinal images.
Heaven only knows what algorithms will be able to detect in the future.
Do you worry about where we are headed? I asked Peng.
“At the end of it, these are important parameters, and there’s a large amount of data that
is processed to get there. But by themselves they are not useful or interesting for us,” she
says. As a trained physician-scientist (MD-PhD as they are called), Peng has her
perspective on the information overload and wants to have as little to do with it as
possible. “As clinicians, we train for years and years and deal with so much information.
Everything is not useful… Now, we have to be careful how we use that information.”
Is that why deep learning is still some years away from making a meaningful intervention
in disorders other than that of the eye?
In cardiology, or even neurology, doctors make big decisions through years and years of
experience, says Trikha. If there are cancer lesions in a chest CT, how will you validate an
algorithm against a radiology test? These are not easy decisions, AI will be supervised by a
radiologist, he believes. “From a payer point of view, cardiology, cancer and others are

difficult to penetrate. In the real world, all AI systems will have to provide compelling
clinical and economic evidence about the impact and money saved. Furthermore, there
will be a cultural barrier to overcome in many specialities.”
Heaven only knows what algorithms will be able to detect in future
Blindspots
Take a retinal selfie. Upload the image on Google Play (or any other app store). Go see a
doctor if the app classifies you as ‘referable’.
Here’s a scenario that collapses the distinction between humans and machines, and could
easily be a reality in the not too distant a future. However, a few things must fall into place
before such tech-enabled population screening comes to pass.
The hardware is still a question.
“Though the prices have fallen [from Rs 11-20 lakh ($16,700-$30,000) to Rs 3-4 lakh
($4500-$6,000], it needs to fall further for the diagnosis to move from an
ophthalmologist to a physician,” says Dr Raman. The costliest machine a general
physician today uses is an ECG which costs Rs 20,000 ($291). The ideal retinal camera,
he believes, should fall in this price range and be a smartphone accessory.
Retinal cameras have escaped true disruption, until recently. Their design and optics have
largely remained the same for nearly 40 years, says Anand Sivaraman, founder of
Remidio, a medical device company in Bengaluru that has built an iPhone-based retinal
camera. He doesn’t think retinal camera prices would come down to the price level of an
ECG, but he agrees, due to advancements in AI, there’s certainly a market for converting
existing ophthalmologists (~20,000) in India to retinal specialists (currently at ~1,500).
And then democratise it further to diabetologists, neurologists (retinal images are helpful
in stroke management), and others.
“To move the camera to these new contexts, they have to be designed from the ground
up,” says Sivaraman. “The beauty is, someone at Aravind Eye Hospitals in a village has the
same need as the nurse practitioner in the US who has never taken a retinal image.”
Sivaraman has a few patents around new optical designs for his portable camera, called
Remidio Fundus on Phone.
If you get past hardware, biases stand tall. They get induced in AI algorithms in a variety
of ways. One way to reduce it is to standardise the way data is collected. For instance, how
is the image taken? What is the orientation of the eye? The hardware itself introduces
biases. While the eye orientation may be the same, images can be big or small. Today the
camera field varies from 20 degrees to 200 degrees. Though the standard is 45 degrees,
says Sivaraman, newer cameras are going as wide as 200 degrees. (With wider field
images, more lesions in the eye are visible.)

To avoid biases, says Trikha, introduce as much heterogeneity in the dataset as possible.
Today, for some research or commercial groups, datasets often come from one institution.
So that data will be specific to that institution, and the AI tool will work well in that
institutional setting.
“Data sets by itself are not sufficient. The standards also need to be set in
algorithm development”
Kaushal Solanki
Looking at some of the global AI studies, Solanki claims there are statistical biases in
them. “What is the gold standard? You are not going to go to 20-30 ophthalmologists,
give them 30 seconds to decide and then take a majority vote for your diagnosis,” he
quips. Gold standards should be set in clinical settings. “Datasets by itself are not
sufficient. The standards also need to be set in algorithm development.”
As a company, Solanki’s Eyenuk has been building its AI-based diabetic retinopathy
screening product much before the field became popular. Solanki believes many
algorithms under development today do not have independent validations. Some may
even have been reverse engineered—where developers have access to all the images. But
that’s not the right way to test. “You can write your algorithm for the best performance,
but in the real world, they may perform very differently.”
Solanki speaks from a vantage point. He’s been working with the UK’s National Health
Services for a few years, and his Eye-Art has undergone 100,000 consecutive tests across
28,000 patients. In the UK, three algorithms were tested on the same dataset and Eye-Art
was the only one not impacted by the type of cameras, race, age, and so on, he claims. The
product is undergoing a prospective trial in the US.
Most of the AI tools today are for diabetic retinopathy. Since January, Aravind Eye has
begun using the tool it developed with Google as a decision support system. We are going
to expand it to larger groups, but my concern will be what if a person has other conditions
in the retina (apart from diabetic retinopathy), then the algorithm will miss that, says Dr
Kim.
Perhaps for that, there are platforms like Pegasus from Trikha’s Visulytix. It screens for
five eye diseases and is currently awaiting European regulatory approval.
So, between screening for five diseases and one, what is the trade-off?
“There is no trade-off in performance. There is only one trade-off—time. Algorithm

reading for one condition versus it reading for five conditions,” says Trikha.
Finally, after high hardware cost and biases, there’s this inscrutability of deep learning.

Looking into the darkness
AI systems have come under flak for being a black box. Even those who build it, with
layers of deep learning algorithm, rarely understand how it works. Which is why the
European Union recently proposed to introduce “a right to explanation” which lets
citizens demand transparency for algorithmic decisions. Another matter though, that the
legislators haven’t defined transparency yet.
What is the “Right to Explanation”?

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enters into force. How are multinational
companies that rely heavily on analytic software in their security and making adjustments
in the types of software solutions they use to analyze personal data
Solanki says his company is opening up this black box. “By pinpointing exact areas in the
images that are triggering the network, we show that networks are being triggered due to
actual lesions and not because of any part of the retina. That is one part. On the other
hand, we are showing that the algorithm really works well with hundreds of thousands of
patients. Together these should give clinicians [and regulators] sufficient confidence in
using this,” says Kaushal.
At Google, Peng says explainability is built into their project that seeks to predict
cardiovascular risk from images of the retina. “Our model shows what parts of the image
most contributed to the prediction. At ~9:45 in this video, I talk about the particular way
we’ve applied this to retinal fundus images,” she says.
Trikha, too, says his screening platform provides for a lot of granularity so that the user
can use it, question it, override it, learn from it, and teach people using it. “We believe
transparency will allow trust.” Pegasus is awaiting approval in EU; the US FDA approval
is some time away.
In healthcare, a few outside of the industry realise, regulatory approval is a big deal. It’s
not easy to validate such technologies in clinical trials.

What if Google makes its algorithms open-source?
That does not change a thing, believe some. Clinics are not going to download an open
source software and start using it. It’s free versus well-developed and maintained
software. “As an extreme example, there is free water, but bottled water sells very well,”
says Solanki.
In software, we always had Linux or Unix for free, but Microsoft was very successful with
its operating system. In healthcare, the hiccup is legal and regulatory. Who is going to
spend the time and money to do regulatory approval? And if they do, why will they give it
away for free? If you read open source licenses, they come with extensive liabilities. All
that said, even Microsoft is championing open source now. (In early June, it acquired
GitHub, the open-source code repository, for $7.5 billion.) Google is working with camera
maker Nikon and its sister company Verily Life Sciences to develop hardware and
software products in eye care.
“You give people these amazing tools and you know some business will
grow out of these amazing tools”
Lily Peng,
Product manager at Google Brain
It’s very unlikely that AI solutions ever be like building the flavour-of-the-month
smartphone app. Nor will they be like content, given for free with money made off
advertising.
“You give people these amazing tools, and you know some business will grow out of these
amazing tools,” says Peng, when asked how much of Google’s AI will be proprietary, and
how much of it will be given away free. “You can look at us as the sauce company which
makes the sauce which goes well with pizzas and burgers, but we don’t want to make all
the pizzas [or burgers] in the world.”

Over time, monetisation models will emerge. The learnings and tools are already spilling
over into cardiology and dermatology. From screening, AI will move into predictability—
predict how cataract will develop or how, post-laser surgery, the refractive error of the eye
will change for a person.
Da Vinci said, “The human being, creature of eyes, needs the image”.
Now, the intelligent machine, creature of data, needs the image too. Human eyes provide
pretty good ones.

Wide but not deep? Ashoka’s 3-year liberal arts course
dilemma
the-ken.com/story/wide-not-deep-ashoka-university
November 26, 2019
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Part 1 of the Ashoka University story was about the enterprise of higher education, and
what Ashoka’s doing differently from its peers. Part 2 breaks down how. Read Part I
here.
“Is toothpaste solid or liquid? When you squish it, it flows. On the brush, it holds shape
like a solid. What are all the states of matter that lie in between? This is how I explore the
field of soft condensed matter physics with my class. Materials are a disruptive area of
research, but largely ignored by traditional undergraduate courses in physics,” says
Gautam Menon, a professor at Ashoka, India’s first private liberal arts university.
Menon spent over two decades teaching at hardcore scientific research institutions like
Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
(TIFR). Ashoka, with its liberal arts wrapper, isn’t exactly the laboratory that Menon is
used to.
But it’s the kind he was seeking. “Science is liberal arts. There’s no confusion about that in
my mind,” says Menon. Ashoka’s given Menon a launchpad to prove that there’s a
scientific way of thinking about life, which isn’t stilted or boring. “It’s not just toothpaste,”
he grins, “there’s also LED crystals, shampoos and detergent to explain.”
With the autonomy to design his own courses at Ashoka, Menon weds theoretical Physics
with Biology, History and mathematical concepts. And this interplay of different
disciplines isn’t limited to his ‘Properties of Matter’ class at Ashoka. Quite the contrary.
Ashoka’s short but impactful five years have brought the conversation on liberal arts to
the mainstream. Its administration claims proudly to have stolen a march on older liberal
arts bastions in Delhi like St Stephens College, Lady Shri Ram College (LSR) and
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The traditional college system, says Chancellor
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, is just preparation for an exam. “We wanted to break this mould.
Students who are capable of thinking for themselves is what the job market requires.”
“History is not about dates, kings and empires. It’s about us. Once the students make that
imaginative leap into the past, they can get a lot out of it. Not all students may become
historians. But they will carry... tools of thoughts to understand their present better”
Aparna Vaidik, Ashoka University
the-ken.com-Wide but not deep Ashokas 3-year liberal arts course dilemma 1/3 985
Both in terms of content and form, Ashoka’s an outlier. It’s one of the few places in the
country where one could major in political science and minor in Indian classical dance.
But it isn’t just interdisciplinary for the sake of it. Ashoka wants to ground its graduates in
critical thinking—from topics as diverse as 20th century Marxism to 18th century Urdu
poetry to learning basic calculus, the three-year programme isn’t about choice, as much as
it’s for exposure.
Ashoka’s promise comes at a complex, yet opportune time.
Clipped wings
Ashoka, India’s first private liberal arts university, is a formidable

alternative to the broken public university system and the
engineering rat-race. Part Ivy league, part Oxbridge, its learning
goals are unique against the Indian clamour for “professional”
degrees. But regulations may have clipped its wings
Olina Banerji, 26 Nov 2019
Unlike the broken public university system, Ashoka gives its students a long runway.
Majoring in a discipline isn’t just about a degree
Stella Maris College and DU, for example, are being pushed to include ‘practical’ courses
like ticketing and tourism or Business Communication
But Ashoka, too, has had to squeeze its 4-year degree programme to three. A tug-of-war
between its foundation courses and major discipline ensues
Ashoka’s optional fourth year diploma is an unhappy compromise. Where does it leave
the students?
Will Google, Facebook fuel India’s public WiFi under
PM-WANI?
the-ken.com/story/will-google-facebook-fuel-indias-public-wifi-under-pm-wani
February 3, 2021
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On 6 January, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) kicked off a series of
meetings. The objective was to gather stakeholder inputs for the framing of India’s
spectrum policy for the coming decade. But while these consultations will undoubtedly
prove critical to the future of India’s telecom space, telecom operators Bharti Airtel, Vi,
and market leader Reliance Jio weren’t even invited.
As if to rub salt in their wounds, DoT saw fit to invite Big Tech firms—including Apple,
Facebook, Google, chipmaker Qualcomm, and Korean electronics major Samsung—to the
table for its first meeting. Telcos had to make do with being represented by industry body
Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI)—a contentious decision given that India’s
private telcos haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.
When the day of the meeting—a video conference with telecom secretary Anshu Prakash—
finally rolled around, Google, Apple, and Facebook didn’t even bother to turn up. Instead,
industry executives present on the call said that Prakash ended up placating angry telco
executives who gatecrashed the video call.
Telcos weren’t livid just because they were being sidelined, but also because Big Tech’s
views on spectrum licensing run contrary to their own. Telecom operators have spent
billions of dollars purchasing spectrum, as India’s telecom spectrum is among the most
expensive in the world. Big Tech, however, wants certain bands—specifically the E and V
bands—delicensed altogether. They argue this would serve the purpose of public WiFi, a
cause that the Indian government is now backing in a big way.
On 11 December, the Indian cabinet approved a national framework for the rollout of
public WiFi under the Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Initiative (PM-WANI). The
scheme envisions the setting up of public WiFi hotspots across the country, with small
businesses buying bandwidth from telcos and internet service providers (ISPs), and
reselling this to mom-and-pop stores and cafes. Crucially, these resellers will be exempt
from licensing fees.
An official in the telecom department told The Ken that the scheme would be soft-
launched by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi once 100,000 public WiFi hotspots
have been made PM-WANI compliant. In the last two months, only 136 access points have
been made compliant. The scheme aims to create 1.5 million new WiFi hotspots across the
country by the end of 2021—India currently has just ~500,000 hotspots.
the-ken.com-Will Google Facebook fuel Indias public WiFi under PM-WANI 1/3 988
While upcoming PM-WANI-compliant WiFi hotspots will operate in existing unlicensed
bands—2.4GHz and 5.8GHz—Big Tech is pushing the government to open up new
spectrum bands for unlicensed use.
It’s not that the existing spectrum bands in which WiFi devices function are insufficient
for most of India, say experts. The only exceptions to this are dense urban pockets in
major metros. Indeed, Facebook and Google know all too well that spectrum isn’t the
reason that public WiFi hasn’t caught on in India. Both companies have invested millions
of dollars into public WiFi initiatives in the country over the years.
Freeloaders and WiFi
Google tried and failed with a public WiFi play. Facebook is still in
the game but has struggled to scale. A new government
programme aims to rapidly scale public WiFi, but is it enough to
make WiFi hotspots viable?
The government's ambitious new scheme—PM WANI—wants to create 1,500,000
public WiFi hotspots in 2021
This is 4X the number of WiFi hotspots India currently has
Big Tech players like Facebook and Google—which have both dabbled in public WiFi in
India—could be pivotal to achieving PM-WANI's lofty goals
The government seems to understand that, making moves to bring them onside. Public
WiFi, though, will need more than good intentions and extra spectrum to catch on
Will India save its hospitals before they save India?
the-ken.com/story/will-india-save-its-hospitals-before-they-save-india
April 16, 2020
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On 8 April, representatives of more than 10,000 private hospitals across India got on a
call. All office-bearers of the Associations of Healthcare Providers Indian (AHPI), none of
them were in a position to pay staff their entire salary for April. With the 21-day lockdown
extended for another 20 days till 3 May, and possibly more extensions in the offing, the
situation only looks set to worsen.
Hospital earnings have been battered since the Covid-19 pandemic began picking up pace
in India. On 22 March, an advisory from the government urged private hospitals to forego
all non-emergency procedures. Instead, they were asked to prepare for a deluge of Covid-
19 cases, even as government hospitals with 500-plus beds in every state were readied as
primary centers for admitting Covid-19 patients.
Private hospitals obliged, but that influx did not materialise. At the time of writing this
story, over 11,000 people have tested positive for Covid. The overall Covid-associated
hospitalisation rate is 12.3 per 100,000 of those suspected to be infected.
As a result, private hospitals are eerily empty. Inpatient occupancy ratios have dropped by
as much 80%. With a nationwide lockdown currently in place, outpatient consultations
are practically non-existent.
“It’s a funny situation. We’ve shut down routine work. But without any accidents, no
consultations, and no surgeries, how are hospitals to pay salaries to doctors and nurses?”
asks a senior executive with one of the largest hospital chains in India.
In a report released on 25 March, credit rating firm ICRA estimated that without medical
tourism, big hospitals could lose as much as a quarter of their revenue over the coming
months.
While the sector as a whole has been adversely impacted, the severity of the situation isn’t
necessarily the same across the spectrum. Nursing homes—hospitals with under 30 beds
—are hardest hit. They account for over half of India’s 68,000-odd hospitals, both
government and private, according to an AHPI office bearer. Often owned and managed
by doctors and unable to compete with large hospital chains, these have been struggling
for years now . The present crisis could be the final nail in their coffin.
the-ken.com-Will India save its hospitals before they save India 1/3 991
With little visibility on earnings, hospitals have resorted to drastic measures.
Rock and a hard place
Occupancy ratios falling by nearly 80%. Dipping revenues.

Rationed PPE. Hospitals are in the frontline in the fight against
Covid-19, but they might also turn out to be its first casualty.
Ruhi Kandhari, 16 Apr 2020
Most private Indian hospitals are unable to pay the full April salary for their healthcare
staff
They don’t have adequate safety gear either, putting the lives of staff and those around
them, in danger
Small, single doctor-run nursing homes are the most at risk of shutting down over the
next quarter
Hospitals can weather this, but only if the Rs 2,000 crore owed by the government is
paid as promised
Will India’s focus on supply and not demand for water
spell its doom?
the-ken.com/story/india-water-crisis
June 27, 2018
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First, the taps dried out.
The tourist who brought in revenue was suddenly a social pariah. Warm smiles quickly
turned into direct rebukes. The price of drinking water skyrocketed. Schools shut down.
Slowly, the town emptied out.
This isn’t some dystopian drama on Netflix. This was the summer of 2018 in the erstwhile
summer capital and the north Indian hill station favourite, Shimla.
In many ways, Shimla is a petri-dish problem that reflects the larger issue. It has all the
ingredients of a crisis—drying aquifers, old leaky infrastructure underground and a
sluggish utility provider that woke up a tad late. (In the wake of the crisis, the Shimla
Municipal Corporation’s (SMC) website was updated an unprecedented number of times
with water supply timings and phone numbers of valvemen who turn on the municipal
water connection). Adding to this is the perennial issue of supplying water at a wholly
exorbitant and unnecessary subsidy of ~80% when at least some consumers can afford to
pay more. WHO sets the benchmark at 5% of total income of a family, whereas in India it
is about 0.6%.
the-ken.com-Will Indias focus on supply and not demand for water spell its doom 1/3 994
Average tariffs by GDP
Water charges as non-food consumption
But Shimla as an example is more worrying than if it were any other city. At a total
population of 200,000, and with five different water sources to choose from, Shimla
should have been a more containable situation than others. And yet, it failed. So, what
about cities with 4x its population?
To top this, the National Institute for Transforming India (Niti) Aayog has chosen to ring
alarm bells now about the ‘worst water crisis’ that India’s ever faced.
By 2030, reads the report, 40% of the country won’t have access to drinking water. That’s
currently 490 million people or the combined populations of Mexico, Bangladesh and
Indonesia. Already, close to 600 million people face acute water shortages. By 2050, India
is predicted to lose 6% of its GDP to water shortage issues, provided things continue as
they are.
Staying afloat
Niti Aayog also published a new Water Management Index for 2016-17, where most states
share a middling score of ~50 (out of 100) for their performance across management
indicators.
The End Game

How is India dealing with this? Not too well. Instead of controlling demand, the focus has
been heavily supply-driven.
According to Niti Aayog’s wake-up call, the supply of water, as of 2008, is anywhere
between 1,123 billion cubic metres (bcm) and 650 bcm. The corresponding current
demand is 634 bcm, which means that our reaction to this impending shortfall should be
anywhere between mild panic to utter horror.
Yes Bank’s collapse exposes Indian fintech’s shoddy
plumbing
the-ken.com/story/yes-banks-collapse-exposes-indian-fintechs-shoddy-plumbing
March 10, 2020
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Twenty-four hours. That’s how quickly Walmart-owned payments unicorn PhonePe
migrated from Yes Bank to ICICI Bank. Originally Yes Bank’s first payments app partner,
PhonePe transitioned swiftly as the beleaguered bank lurched into darkness. Some
would even say too swiftly.
After all, partner banks and third-party apps are incredibly intertwined. From payments
infrastructure to taking care of settlements during payments, the relationship is an
intricate tapestry. And, of course, there’s also the regulatory obstacle course that’s more
snakes than ladders.
But PhonePe had to act quick because Yes Bank was a sinking ship. One which had
slowly taken on water for months, but which was finally reaching the point of no return.
And the impetus to abandon ship came on 5 March at 8:58 PM, when the RBI
announced on its official Twitter channel that it had placed a moratorium on Yes Bank
Ltd.
In one fell swoop, Yes Bank’s customers were subjected to a one-time Rs 50,000 ($674)
withdrawal cap, cessation of loan activity, and a freeze on all current and savings
accounts of the bank for the next 30 days. In that time, government-run State Bank of
India (SBI) would resuscitate Yes Bank by pumping as much as Rs 10,000 crore ($1.3
billion) into the business for a 49% stake.
the-ken.com-Yes Banks collapse exposes Indian fintechs shoddy plumbing 1/2 997
What the central bank seemingly didn’t take into account, though, was the impact this
moratorium would have on India’s online businesses. Because—despite 7.39% of its
loans going bad, corporate governance failures, and a founder arrested for fraud—Yes
Bank was an invisible cog helping turn the wheels of India’s digital economy.
PhonePe was just one of the many businesses affected. Fellow payments startup
BharatPe was another. Yes Bank was a partner bank to both companies. Others used Yes
Bank’s API . These ranged from food delivery company Swiggy to online travel
aggregator MakeMyTrip and ride-hailing company Ola. Payments intermediary
Razorpay also relies on Yes Bank’s APIs to do business.
With Yes Bank, for all practical purposes, out of action, all these digital companies were
tripped up.
“We are now going back to doing merchant payouts manually,” said Jatin Mazalcar, CFO
of Meesho, a social commerce company. Payments aggregator Razorpay, meanwhile, has
paid merchants out of its own pocket as merchants’ money in Yes Bank is blocked.
AUTHOR
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the-ken.com-Yes Banks collapse exposes Indian fintechs shoddy plumbing 2/2 998
You can bring bullet trains from Japan, but not Artificial
Intelligence
the-ken.com/story/you-can-bring-bullet-train-from-japan-but-not-artificial-intelligence
October 30, 2017
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No books, no human intervention, no training data and yet it learns, from first principles.
Google-owned DeepMind showed last week that its artificial intelligence (AI) programme
Alpha Go Zero was able to learn what knowledge was from itself. That’s spooky.
Comparisons of AI to the invention of the steam engine or printing press for impact on
humans now seem understated.
Even though a lot of AI expertise resides in the top 10-12 tech companies, governments
are waking up to it as if it were an arms race. It may well be. In mid-October, the United
Kingdom came out with its AI strategy. This was barely two months after China sprung its
ambitious 15-year AI roadmap on the world. Last week, Taiwan said it’d spend $133
million on AI training. UAE just announced a minister for AI, whatever that may
symbolise.
India’s ministry of electronics and IT (Meity) woke up to these “emerging technologies”

this month. A few weeks earlier, journalists received emails that a “taskforce on the
Artificial Intelligence for economic development, constituted by the Government of India,
has invited public opinions”. It was from the ministry of commerce. It must be noted here
that asking common people to comment without any large scale awareness programme or
a broad stated vision amounts to a travesty. AI means different things to different people.
Three recent calls to action in big data and engineering have turned out to be
disappointingly muted. The AI call to action mustn’t fall into that category. AI has existed
for a long time but its applications such as speech/image recognition and search are
impressively successful only now. Still, it can’t be borrowed and deployed so easily.
Startups are starting to do experimentation. So, if startups, math folks and business
people get together, more can be done. Thus, awareness of opportunities and locating the
right people with right skills, and making use of them is an opportunity
Sriram Rajamani, MD, MSR India
“AI is not like bringing bullet trains from Japan. You need algorithms which are trained
on data. And data has context. You need to train algorithms on Indian data,” says
Nisheeth Vishnoi, a computer scientist at Ècole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne in
Switzerland. If you have a self-driving car, it may be trained extensively on data
elsewhere, but that’s a different context. “Developing AI is a completely different ball
game as compared to developing space, power or train tech.”
the-ken.com-You can bring bullet trains from Japan but not Artificial Intelligence 1/2 999
As the two ministries define their AI turf, it’s vital to remember that hundreds of millions
of people in India are exposed to algorithms, which perhaps already influence human
behaviour.
Reinforcement
Two ministries want to ride the AI wave. Do we know how much

data are we individually fuelling into it? Algorithms read, use, and
most alarmingly, assess our levels of stupidity (and vulnerability).
Especially on apps like WhatsApp
Seema Singh, 30 Oct 2017
Ministries of Commerce and Electronics and IT are claiming to build India’s roadmap
for AI development in ways which look fuzzy now. This, at a time when countries are
embarking on well-thought plans
Recent calls on big data and cyber-physical systems have been damp squibs. Will AI be
better given that less than 40 academics in India are doing serious AI research or have
the ‘the dark art’ to solve deep learning problems?
Developing AI is a completely different ball game as compared to developing space,

power or train tech. Algorithms need to train on Indian data. And who has data today?
It’s with big tech companies which are collecting and connecting data, even influencing
behaviour in ways that we hardly understand
the-ken.com-You can bring bullet trains from Japan but not Artificial Intelligence 1000
2/2
You can demand mental health now, it’s your right. But
be ready for surprises
the-ken.com/story/mental-health-right
May 31, 2017
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The outpatients’ room, MH-6, is sunlit and quiet even though the corridor outside is
chock-a-block. A man in his 50s walks in. The air thickens with his high-pitched rapid-fire
monologue. A dozen odd patients and attendants rush to witness the spectacle. The
middle-aged man from Mysore is proclaiming he is ‘like God’, ‘he could do anything’. But
for Dr Sanjeev Jain, placid and empathetic, he is just one of the many patients who need
to be admitted to the hospital. Promptly, he is sent for emergency admission.
One in three households will have some kind of mental illness; one in six households will
have a serious mental illness that will require hospitalisation for more than two weeks, is
the projection for India in three years. One in three such patients will not be able to go
back to gainful employment. In this context, the Mental Healthcare Act 2017, passed in
April, is highly significant.
The Act defines access to mental health as a right, makes it mandatory for all healthcare
facilities to improve psychiatric services, which was not possible otherwise. It will allow
any hospital or nursing home to set up psychiatry wards, which also was not possible
earlier and healthcare providers avoided psychiatry like the plague even though mental
health is the most expensive of all illnesses. Importantly, the Act mandates insurance
companies to cover mental health. So what can be possibly wrong about this new Right? It
seems it’s a highly fraught decision and there’s a furore in the medical circle.
Dr Jain, who was part of the team that contributed to the Mental Health Policy, which is
closely linked to the new Act, is a psychiatrist at the Bengaluru-based National Institute of
Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS). He has also been chronicling the history
the-ken.com-You can demand mental health now its your right But be ready for surprises 1001
1/2
of psychiatry in South Asia, most recently funded by the European charity Wellcome
Trust. And he believes the needs of mental health in India will increase as compared to
that of physical health. In the wake of the new Act, we ask him how will things change on
the ground.
The Ken: Why do we need a separate law for mental health when most
countries have done away with it?
Jain: The range of problems is so large that to expect a law to address those is not fair.
Still, let me cite two examples. Right now, we are trying to get treatment for a person who
is a senior corporate executive. He is under the delusion that the camera on his computer
is spying on him, the satellites are taking pictures and that his children are under threat.
He wants to pull them out of school so that he can protect them. There’s no way the family
can get him for treatment because he starts talking about his rights and that nobody has
any business to call him mad, tells the doctor that he is earning a salary twice that of [the
doctor] and wards off his wife saying.
the-ken.com-You can demand mental health now its your right But be ready for surprises 1002
2/2
Yourstory
the-ken.com/story/btn-yourstory-2017
November 13, 2017
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It is quite something, the number of things Yourstory has been up to. And no, not events.
If you have the time, it is quite possible to be subsumed by the copious number of articles
churned out by the company every day. There’s, of course, their bread and butter startup
coverage, and then on top of that, there are stories from social story, her story, Yourstory
TV and Yourstory German. And then something called Mystory, the company’s blogging
platform ambition. Like Medium. Like LinkedIn stories.
Total funding
$9 million
Yourstory
YourStory Media Private Limited
As per MCA records
Shradha Sharma
Founder and CEO
Bengaluru
Headquarters
Read more
Investors
Kalaari Capital
Ratan Tata
1/4
3One4 Capital
Read more
Competitors
ET Tech
Factor Daily
The Ken
Read more
What has YourStory been up to, in the last year?
If you’d read our Yourstory BTN last year, you’d pretty much be on top of this. So, in
2016-17, the company’s multiple language strategy played out okay. That and specific
domains like Herstory and Socialstory. But of all the things the company is doing, the
blogging platform idea is quite interesting. It is also something the company has been
pushing quite a bit. So you simply log in and publish a story in pre-defined categories, like
‘get inspired’ and ‘survival’, among several others. Earlier this year, the company also
raised money. About $3 million (Rs 21 crore) from Kalaari Capital Partners, Qualcomm
Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, 3ONE4 Capital Advisors LLP and UC-RNT Fund. The $3 million is
part of a $6 million Series B that was subsequently announced.
Results:
2/4
Rs 10.4 crore: That’s the total money Yourstory made. Rs 10 crore from operations and
the rest in other income.
Rs 3.8 crore: That’s the total money the company made from events. It is a decent step
up compared to last year’s about Rs 2.1 crore. It is interesting to note that Yourstory’s
event hosting charges though haven’t grown at a similar clip. As of March 31, 2017, the
company spent Rs 1.5 crore in event hosting charges, pretty much the same as last year.
Rs 6.1 crore: That’s the total money YourStory made from native advertisements.
Simply put, the Yourstory machine is an engine cranking out native ads. A native ad is
basically a story which looks and reads like a story but has been paid for by an advertiser.
Compared to last year, the number is pretty much stagnant. The math though makes for
interesting reading. Over a period of 350 publishing days, the company is making Rs 1.7
lakh every day from native advertising. And this is a good number because whatever the
company makes in native ads, it can almost, yes almost, cover the cost of employee
salaries and expense. That comes next.
Rs 6.8 crore: As of March 2017, this is the total expense of staff salaries and expenses.
Employee strength and pay have ballooned, year on year (was about Rs 4.4 crore as of
March 31, 2016). If Yourstory is paying twice as much money for its employees, the bang
for the buck is coming from events.
Rs 2.6 crore: That’s the total money Yourstory spent on freelancer expenses. We’d
mentioned this last year, too, because it kind of stands out in the financials. Last year, the
company spent Rs 3 crore in freelancer expense, and the year before that, only Rs 54 lakh.
Freelancer expense is the money the company pays for journalistic and authored articles
to people who are not on the company’s payroll.
Rs 2.4 crore: That’s the total amount of money the company spent on business
development and sales promotion. Compared to last year, March 2016 at Rs 68 lakh,
that’s a jump of about 4X. Clearly the company is trying to make itself more visible. It is
an interesting expense item though because media companies are lousy advertisers
themselves. This, of course, augurs well for technology companies like Google and
Facebook. Clearly, in the world we live now, the line that defines a media company is kind
of getting blurred.
Rs 7.9 crore: That’s the total loss made by the company. As of March 2016, the company
recorded a loss of Rs 5.9 crore. And the year before, Rs 19 lakh. Yourstory’s losses are
climbing. Fast.
What next?
The funding should last Yourstory a while. The company’s focus though is to grow the
native advertising business. On the events side, the company wants to grow beyond just
startup events. So, it wants to partner with the government and do joint events. For
3/4
instance, with entities like the Niti Aayog. So over a period of time, you will see Yourstory
selling the Indian startup story to the government and to companies outside India.
4/4
You’ve Got (Unwanted) Mail
the-ken.com/story/youve-got-unwanted-mail
November 6, 2017
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Two months, 400 spam emails. That does not fun math make.
In a fit of (what may seem like) masochism, The Ken undertook the daunting task of
tracking spam. For two months, we dedicatedly maintained a record of the sender, at
what time and date we received the mail, whether it had a link to opt-out or not, and if it
did, then what the opt-out status was. It was hard labour, especially for our colleague
Rohin Dharmakumar, as he was the first to embark on this crusade of sorts. Plus, he
compiled most of the data.
Spam, though, isn’t Dharmakumar’s problem alone. Data from Talos—the security
intelligence and research group of Cisco—shows that of the total email volume sent
worldwide in September 2017, 85% was spam. There is no hiding from spammers, they
eventually find and trap you in this never-ending cycle of nuisance.
If one were to look specifically at India, data from cybersecurity firm Trend Micro shows
that the spam rate in this country stands at 84%. (Spam rate is derived from the emails
that pass through the company’s network and the spam that is blocked by email
reputation companies.) Further, data from Kaspersky suggests that of the total spam
sent globally, 8.4% comes from India.
Spam haven
As per spamhaus.org, India ranks 8 in the list of ‘the world’s worst spam haven
countries’ for enabling spamming.

1/3
Yeah, 8.4% of all that spam in the world is ours. And you’d be surprised to learn that
most of your spam comes from otherwise reputed companies.
The who’s who

For starters, Dharmakumar encountered a spam vortex on Facebook. The social media
giant’s spam tactic reminds one of the famous Eagles song Hotel California—You can
check out anytime you like, but you can never leave… When one tries to opt-out from
one of Facebook’s mailing lists, they come back with a vengeance.
This phenomenon is best-illustrated with the help of the below visual. When
Dharmakumar tried to opt-out from a certain email notification, he kept receiving emails
from a list called ‘Recent comments from your friends’. After unsubscribing from there,
he continued to receive notifications from ‘People you may know’. After opting-out for
the third time (one would think that this might finally end), he started receiving emails
from ‘Recent photos from your friends’. It sucked him right back in. Every time.
Never ending notifications from Facebook
Some facts:
Over the two months, icicidirect.com sent us the most mails (48), followed by
m2i.in (28) and door2inbox.com (14). The last two are owned by Mify Solutions, an
email marketing company based out of Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
The most advertised companies were ICICI Direct and Citibank.
AUTHOR
Sidhartha Shukla

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Zomato, Swiggy and food delivery in the age of plastics
the-ken.com/story/food-delivery-plastic-problem
June 27, 2019
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Deep in the recesses of GPRA Complex, New Moti Bagh—an upscale, gated colony for civil
servants—lies a sewage treatment and waste management plant. This is Delhi’s first zero-
waste area, run by Green Planet Waste Management (GPWM).
Smack dab between GPWM’s wastewater treatment and composting centres is a shed
where non-recyclable plastic herded from GPRA Complex is turned to oil. This is done
through a process called pyrolysis. It’s where the dankest plastic goes to die: milk packets,
water bottle labels, torn, oil-stained styrofoam, and dust-laden carry bags.
About 10% of the daily 50-odd kilos of plastic fed to this pyrolysis plant are disposable
trays, food pouches, and cutlery, the kind Rajesh Mittal has seen more of in recent years
thanks to food delivery.
“It’s only around 10% here because this is a high-end colony and every household has a
cook,” says a bespectacled Mittal, GPWM’s managing director. “You’ll see more food
containers in places like Noida, or places with a relatively higher younger, unmarried
demographic. The kind of plastic generated varies from area to area and the local
demographic.”
You probably know this now: we’re living in what environmentalists dub ‘The Plasticene’
(Age of plastic). Plastic, relative to metal and paper, is a young material, first finding form
as Bakelite in 1907 and gaining ground because of the exigencies of war. Its affordability,
portability, and disposability, once our boons, are now banes bar none. As of 2017, the
world produced 350 million tonnes of plastic (excluding PET or Polyethylene
Terephthalate—reusable packaging mostly for liquids).
And in an increasingly-tired world, where longer working hours marry technology and
birth convenience, food containers are the new delinquents. As per a 2018 study
published in science journal Elsevier, door-to-door food delivery in China accounted for a
nearly-eightfold jump in packaging waste in just two years, from 0.2 million tonnes
(2015) to 1.5 million tonnes (2017). Closer home, in India, we don’t know how much
plastic we generate. That’s because the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB)
underreports such data. But we can hazard some guesses with food delivery.
the-ken.com-Zomato Swiggy and food delivery in the age of plastics 1010

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In October 2018, restaurant discovery and food delivery service Zomato claimed to fulfil
23 million monthly food orders. Its rival Swiggy, which does not disclose monthly order
numbers, is believed to fulfil up to 28 million orders as of March 2019. This amounts to
thousands and thousands of tonnes of food container and cutlery waste, at the least.
Small wonder then that Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bengaluru’s civic
body, wants to ban plastic food containers. Bans on single-use plastics in Maharashtra
and Tamil Nadu, meanwhile, are ineffectual due to inconsistent implementation.
Material World
Getting food delivered is quick, convenient and cheap. But will

the environment pay the ultimate price?

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India’s currently swimming in unrecycled plastic. A large part of this is due to the
growing popularity of food delivery, which is inextricably dependent on plastic
containers and cutlery
Plastic bans, across the country, have been knee-jerk and shoddy in implementation.
Without any real accountability, these bans are an eyewash
While delivery platforms like Zomato and Swiggy have made efforts to increase
sustainability, business realities limit the scope of these measures
Zomato and Swiggy could use their heft to enforce better packaging norms across their
platforms. But without any real alternatives to plastic, will their strategy work?

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