businessline podcasts

CRISIL recently launched a sustainability yearbook to gauge India Inc.’s environmental, societal and governance -- popularly called ESG -- performance. What is in this Sustainability Yearbook? V Nivedita talks to Miren Lodha, Director, CRISIL Research. Listen to the podcast now!

On May 19, The Supreme Court held that the recommendations of the GST Council are not binding on the Union and States.  What does this mean for the Opposition ruled states and the concept of “one nation, one tax”.

Kerala Finance Minister KN Balagopal shares his thoughts.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the Goods and Service Tax (GST) council's recommendations are not binding on the Union government, and States only have a persuasive value as the country has a cooperative federal structure. What are non-BJP State governments saying on the SC ruling? Listen in.

The CPI inflation figures in April shot up to 7.79 per cent, an eight-year high. However, these rates are not uniform across India. It is 9.12 per cent in West Bengal, 9.02 per cent in Telangana and 8.9 per cent, while it is 5.08 and 5.37 per cent in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

So what is it that is helping these southern states? Parvathi Benu explains. Listen in.

Late on May 13 night, India banned wheat exports citing food security and rising domestic inflation as its prime concern; What was the cause for this surgical strike on wheat exports, and what is India’s Wheat situation at Present.

MR Subramani, head, Commodities and Agri-Business, Businessline explains!

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India is the global leader in IT-enabled services (ITeS) or more commonly referred to as the Business Process Management market. In FY 2021-22 Indian BPM sector earned $44 billion in revenues and directly employed 1.4 million with several multiples of that being employed indirectly. The addressable global BPM market this year is estimated at $254 billion and is estimated to grow to $336 billion by 2025.

The industry has undergone a paradigm shift over the few decades of its existence. While BPM 1.0 was all about cost-saving and labour arbitrage, in BPM 2.0 the emphasis was on operational excellence through efficiency and quality of processes. BPM 3.0 heralded the advent of deep technology and domain expertise. The new shift towards BPM 4.0 in the immediate aftermath of the receding pandemic wave, lays stress on enabling business outcomes and ensuring resilience plus agility.

To enable BPM 4.0 to become a reality where the scale of challenges is multi-fold and the skillsets required to deliver them are much more the Indian BPM industry needs to focus on training and deploying more of an Artificial Intelligence skilled workforce which means they need to be design thinking led, extremely data and digital-driven.

Sukanya Selvarajan, Innovation Head - CFO Operations at TCS, Prashant Achanta, CTO of Firstsource, and Amneet Chowdhury, who is VP and Global Head for Infrastructure Technologies at Sutherland Global Services spoke at a BusinessLine – Nasscom roundtable on the challenges and opportunities in the BPM 4.0 evolution.

Cognitive human bias is now an extensively well-researched subject and there is overwhelming evidence of how this plays out in all our decisions every day. Investment decisions are no exception. Investors need to take cognisance of this and bring in discipline and processes in investing. Else, decisions will be sub-optimal and in many cases, counter-productive.

Poor portfolio returns are more or less guaranteed in such cases. While luck might eclipse a poor investment decision in the short time term, it definitely wears off over time. The first step in solving a problem is to recognize it exists. In the latest episode of Portfolio Podcast, Kumar Shankar Roy and Hari Viswanath talk about how biases can impact your investment decisions and how you can counter them. Listen in!

Climate change has emerged as one of the biggest threats to the already low income of India's small farmers. Unseasonal rains, colder winters, hotter summers, and prolonged dry spells are confusing not just the farmers but also the crops they grow. The chemical agri inputs required to mitigate the impact of climate change add to the farmers' expenses and make them poorer. A young Pune-based startup called Bioprime may have a potentially game-changing solution to enhance the profitability of small-scale farmers. BioPrime says its goal is to offer relief to farmers worldwide, struggling with crop loss, temperature fluctuations, drought, resilient insects, and diseases. To achieve this, this startup born in a lab and founded by three plant science researchers from Pune university has developed effective and affordable next-generation agri biologicals with time-proven biomolecules, life-friendly chemistry, smart material, and less energy use. Bioprime says its patented agri biologics technology follows Mother Nature's way rather than tamper with it. 

To talk about the exciting innovations, TR Vivek is joined by BioPrime's CEO Renuka Diwan. Renuka is a rare woman entrepreneur in India's overwhelmingly male-dominated agribusiness space. Renuka a PhD in Plant Sciences from the University of Pune and a postdoctoral in genetic engineering. She has worked extensively on bioactives for over 13 years and has a patent filed for large-scale production of a certain class of metabolites. She also has over 15 years of experience in plant tissue culture and designs.  We talk to her not only about the challenges of being a woman entrepreneur but also about the transition from the lab to the market.

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In a statement issued on Sunday, G7 nations--- France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the United States --- have condemned Russia’s “unprovoked, unjustifiable and illegal military aggression against Ukraine” and promised to cut their dependency on Russian oil. What are the main promises in the statement? Listen in.

Demand for silver is strong but the prices remained suppressed. Many factors are in play in influencing the prices. Akhil Nallamuthu and Parv Shah discuss these factors and tell us what’s in store for the white metal.