UDIT KULSHRESTHA

World Business
The Alstom SA manufacturing facility in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, India. Photographer: Udit Kulshrestha/Bloomberg
INDIA
India’s government proposed easing rules for foreign investors, while pledging to boost infrastructure spending to help spur growth in the economy.
In her first budget speech to Parliament in New Delhi, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will consider further opening up foreign direct investment in aviation, while easing local sourcing nor...

The Ganges, India’s holiest river, is more polluted now than ever, despite an ambitious program launched in 2014 by the Modi administration to clean it up, a new analysis shows.
Human waste, burnt bodies, and religious offerings wrapped in plastic combine with all manner of industrial pollution to make the water unfit for drinking, bathing, or irrigation, the draft report from the government’s Central Pollution Control Board said.
The Namami Gange—obedience to the Ganges—program, aimed at cle...

(Bloomberg) -- Lenders to Essar Steel India Ltd., the biggest mill being sold under the nation’s insolvency process, are voting to finalize a bid from ArcelorMittal, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Arcelor has offered to make an upfront payment of about 395 billion rupees ($5.4 billion) to the banks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The Luxembourg-based suitor later plans to pay the lenders about 25 billion rupees from Essar Steel’s re...

Jaipur’s Diggi Palace is all set to host the city’s favourite schmoozefest, boozefest the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. The 2019 edition of the world’s largest literary carnival will see some of the most exciting names in international and Indian literature, including Andrew Sean Greer, Molly Crabapple, Ben Okri, Germaine Greer, Mary Beard, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Vikram Chandra, Ruth Padel, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Colson Whitehead and more. But if you tire of the chatter and the name-dropping...

India is set to overtake the US as the world’s second-largest consumer of steel, and companies including Posco and ArcelorMittal are keen to tap this market.
New Delhi: India has approached steelmakers such as Posco and Hyundai Steel Co. to partner its state-owned mills, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to stoke local production of high-grade steel and reduce import dependence, according to people familiar with the information.
The south Asian nation is offering iron ore supplies to attr...

New Delhi: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s glitzy campaign to promote India as the world’s next manufacturing hub appeared to receive a major boost last week as the widely-touted “Make in India” publicity drive came to a close in Mumbai.
Investment pledges soared on the final day to hit Rs15.2 trillion — more than triple the amount India has attracted through foreign direct investment since Modi came to office in May 2014. Skeptics, however, have questioned just how much of that cash wi...

Ikea spent 12 years studying India and visited 1,000 homes in major cities to see how its people lived. Today, as a few dozen early shoppers walked through the doors as the emporium opened in Hyderabad, the acid test began of whether the furniture giant understands what Indian consumers want.
“I have no plans to blow a lot of money today, maybe just buy some kitchenware, but this is going to be a destination for me,” said Rajani Venugopal, a businesswoman who waited about an hour and managed ...

Reduction of employment-generating tendency of economic growth has been especially marked in the last 15 years in India.
With one of the fastest growth rates in the world, it might be thought that India is leaving its historical problems of joblessness and privation behind. The growth is enough to lead to a doubling of income every decade. Unfortunately, the data on jobs in India suggest otherwise.
A recent landmark report on the State of Working India by the Centre for Sustainable Employment...

Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s third federal budget, which promised to meet daunting fiscal deficit targets without powering down the economy has been received with a mix of cheer, and disbelief.
Indian stocks have gained more than 5% in the past two sessions as optimism has grown that the central bank will cut interest rates as the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan’s pre-condition of a contained deficit has been met.
At the same time, critics who feared the government wou...

(Bloomberg) -- The European Union is bracing for President Donald Trump to open another front in his confrontation with the bloc, as the EU’s top negotiator prepares for the U.S. to impose either tariffs or quotas on metals imports from America’s closest allies.
Trump slapped 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum in March, but granted a reprieve to the EU, Canada and Mexico until June 1 for further talks to take place. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom met with...

Ikea plans to expand to about a dozen new markets in the coming years, including branching into South America, as the Swedish furniture giant aims to reach a total of three billion potential customers by 2025.
The company will in the coming years open stores in Chile, Colombia and Peru through a new Ikea franchisee called Falabella as part of its first foray into South America, Inter Ikea said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. Inter Ikea, which owns the Ikea concept and is the worldwide f...

Agra's Shoe Making Industry

Photograph by Udit Kulshrestha—Bloomberg via Getty Images
As part of a government effort to reduce public urination in India, Google is now mapping public toilets on smartphones.
Users can find their nearest clean public toilet by typing in “toilet” or the Hindi word for clean, swachh, into Google Maps on their smartphones, CNBC reports. There are more than 5,100 public toilets in Delhi alone, one of two cities where the feature was first rolled out on Thursday; the other is Madhya Pradesh. T...