Newspaper Summary 150626

 SEBI board may restore open market buybacks

Akshata Gorde, Mumbai

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is expected to clear a fresh set of ease-of-doing-business measures at its June 19 board meeting, including the reintroduction of open-market buybacks through stock exchanges, a faster rollout mechanism for alternative investment fund (AIF) schemes, and simplified transmission norms for legal heirs. Among the key agenda items is the proposed revival of the stock exchange route for open-market buybacks, which was phased out in 2023 amid tax-related concerns.

Through consultation papers issued in April and May, SEBI proposed reintroducing the stock exchange route with tighter safeguards, including shortening the buyback window to 66 working days from six months and mandating the utilisation of at least 40 per cent of the buyback size in the first half of the offer period. The regulator also suggested restricting purchases from promoters and promoter-group entities during the buyback, enhancing disclosures, and aligning the framework with the T+1 settlement cycle.

Another major proposal is Garuda (Green-Channel: AIF Rollout Upon Document Acknowledgement), aimed at cutting the time required to launch AIF schemes from the current 30 days to around 10 working days. In certain cases, such as accredited-investor-only or angel funds, the mechanism could allow near-immediate launches upon acknowledgement.

The board is also expected to consider doubling the monetary thresholds for simplified transmission of securities to ₹10 lakh for physical holdings and ₹30 lakh for demat holdings, while easing documentation requirements for legal heirs and nominees. Separately, SEBI has proposed revising the base-price and price-band framework for ETFs by allowing exchanges to use a dynamic reference price linked to the indicative net asset value (iNAV) to improve price discovery.

Other proposals likely to come before the board include:

• Permitting online bond platform providers to distribute products regulated by the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) and 54EC capital gains tax-saving bonds.
• Changes to the pre-open call auction mechanism for IPOs and re-listed companies to improve opening price discovery.
• Streamlining buyback regulations by removing redundant provisions and reducing compliance timelines for listed companies.

The time to deploy thorium is now

Anil Kakodkar

India’s vast thorium resources offer a means for the country to become a global clean energy provider rather than remaining a major energy importer with the attendant vulnerabilities. The founder of the atomic energy programme in India, Dr Homi Bhabha, recognised this in the early 1950s and chalked out a three-stage strategy.

The first stage, comprising uranium reactors—specifically pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs)—has matured well and is about to exceed the 10 GWe capacity originally envisaged. Today, there is an unprecedented global urgency for nuclear energy driven by the need for clean energy and economic growth. However, global nuclear development is currently based on uranium, and known resources can support only around 500 GWe of capacity for a 60-year reactor life under the "once-through" mode.

With the World Nuclear Association projecting a need for 1,400 Gwe by 2050, resource depletion and supply-chain shocks are imminent within the next two decades. A shift to closed nuclear fuel cycles and fast-breeder reactors is inevitable, but this shift is hindered by proliferation concerns regarding plutonium.

Thorium is the clear solution to this conundrum. India cannot afford to miss this opportunity, given its lead in thorium and fast-breeder technology. The successful PHWR technology can serve as the workhorse for this mission, offering an ideal platform to irradiate thorium to produce uranium-233, which directly connects to third-stage thorium reactors. This is necessary because the capacity to irradiate thorium through fast-breeders is still decades away.

Thorium-HALEU fuel bundles, compatible with existing PHWR designs, can quickly enable large-scale thorium irradiation. Meanwhile, the development of the second stage (fast-breeder reactors) should continue as planned to augment resources until fusion reactors become a reality.

Key Challenges and the Way Forward The proposed strategy advances the third stage to immediately follow the first, allowing India to leverage uranium-233 before uranium supply challenges begin. However, the thorium fuel cycle has challenges, notably the hard gamma-emitting daughter products of uranium-232 that accompany uranium-233. While this provides proliferation resistance, it makes manufacturing solid fuel difficult.

Liquid fuel appears more manageable. India can leverage its expertise in reprocessing and radioactive waste immobilisation to develop thorium molten salt reactors (TMSR). Unlike traditional physics-heavy nuclear engineering, TMSR engineering is chemistry-heavy, requiring significant work in materials development and operational chemistry control.

A TMSR operating in the near-thermal spectrum could maximise sustained thorium-based power generation. Instead of following the general small modular reactor (SMR) trend, SMRs based on TMSRs offer a safer, more sustainable solution.

An intense R&D mission to deploy TMSRs within 10-15 years is a critical national necessity. In the near term, India must accelerate capacity build-up using mature technologies for diverse needs, including:

• Captive clean electricity.
• Leveraging brownfield opportunities at retiring coal plant sites.
• Clean hydrogen production through thermochemical water splitting or electrolysis.
• Micro-nuclear reactors for remote areas.

Launching the third stage of thorium reactors in time is essential to making India's energy security import-independent. Creating a conducive ecosystem to unleash Indian ingenuity through the SHANTI Act is now the need of the hour.

Wheels turn for $10 billion US tariff refunds to India

Amiti Sen, New Delhi

MONEY TRAIL. RBI eases banking hurdles; digital payment providers offer alternative channels. TARIFF FALLOUT. The refunds arise from tariffs levied under a US enforcement initiative launched in April 2025, targeting countries with large trade surpluses with that country.

The process of repatriating more than $10 billion in US reciprocal tariff refunds to Indian exporters has begun, following detailed administrative guidelines issued by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and a key clarification from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) aimed at facilitating the inflows. Cross-border digital payment providers have also entered the fray, offering exporters mechanisms to receive refunds without opening foreign bank accounts and at significantly lower costs than traditional commercial banking channels.

PAYOUT PROCESS However, exporters that paid the duties through freight forwarders face an additional complication. Since the forwarders acted as the legal importer on record, they will receive the refunds directly from the US Treasury and will subsequently have to transfer the funds to the exporters in compliance with applicable regulations. In cases where duties were paid directly by US importers, the refunds will be credited to the importing entities. Given that many Indian exporters had initially offered substantial discounts to share the tariff burden, industry expectations are that the refunds will also be shared.

“The systems are now falling into place,” a source noted, adding that while some smaller remittances have been processed, larger payouts are expected to be released gradually.

COURT REPRIEVE The refunds arise from a broad trade enforcement action launched by Washington in April 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), targeting countries running trade surpluses with the US. India faced a 50 per cent tariff on key exports after Washington imposed a 25 per cent reciprocal duty on August 7, 2025, and a further 25 per cent levy on August 27 over Russian oil imports. The US Supreme Court struck down the tariffs as unconstitutional on February 20, 2026.

According to various estimates, more than $10 billion in refunds are due on Indian exports shipped between August 2025 and February 2026. To address banking bottlenecks, the RBI has clarified that Indian banks without direct US correspondent banking relationships can establish specialised collection accounts through banks that maintain operational branches in the US. This clarification resolves uncertainty for domestic banks and detailed procedures are now being communicated to exporters.

A widening crisis for women

NFHS-6. With 43% urban women now obese, data reveals a crisis with a distinctly female face

J Mangaiyarkarasi

Women in Indian cities seem to be carrying more than their share of the weight — quite literally. The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6) data shows that nearly 43 per cent of urban women are overweight or obese — a steep climb from 33 per cent in the last survey. In short, the country is on the brink of a worrying demographic where half of all urban women aged 15–49 will have a body mass index (BMI) above 25. Men are adding the pounds, too (rising from 28.6 per cent to 36 per cent), but the divide is widening, with women bearing the brunt of this expanding crisis.

Obesity was once seen as a disease of affluence, but the numbers now tell a more complicated story, driven by changing food environments, rising chronic stress levels, metabolic diseases and the lingering effects of malnutrition. And as waistlines expand, so does the market for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which are flooding India after the expiry of semaglutide’s patent in March 2026, promising quick fixes to those desperate for relief. But experts caution that medication cannot outrun the structural drivers of obesity nor can it stand in for the deeper shifts needed in food systems and social norms.

“Obesity is often associated with overeating, but it can emerge from poor, non-diversified diets too,” said Dr Rama Narayanan, Senior Fellow, Nutrition and Health, at MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. The trend, she said, is being driven by lifestyle changes linked to urbanisation and a shift from traditional millet-based diets to refined cereals and ultra-processed foods. In the case of women, Dr Narayanan said, the vulnerability factors are compounded by what time-use surveys call the ‘poverty of time’. Women spend long hours on care work in addition to paid employment. Chronic stress, lower physical activity, poor sleep and reduced access to nutritious food all combine to increase obesity risk. Rural India is not far behind either, as ultra-processed foods seep into villages. And that becomes a cause for concern, say experts, as obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and several cancers.

LINGERING COVID EFFECTS The first National Family Health Survey after the Covid-19 pandemic, the NFHS-6 captures the aftermath of lifestyle changes from the lockdown era — reduced mobility, unhealthy routines and higher stress leading to more weight gain, said Dr Yashendra Sethi, cardiovascular researcher and editor, BMC Public Health. The rise of health fads driven by social media influencers (often not medically qualified) has added another layer of worry. Sethi noted that “women, with a higher baseline body fat percentage, are particularly affected because the structured leisure-time exercises remain logistically and socially harder”. Vishnu N Ramani, Health Economist at PHFI Institute of Public Health Sciences, agrees. In a country where many work in the informal sector, most women don’t have the privilege of going to a gym or for a walk or exercise in an outdoor park, he said, pointing to the cultural and social dynamics of gender shaping the obesity crisis. “A woman won’t get much time to go for exercise because she has to look after her domestic home,” he explained.

Then there are the commercial determinants of health. Ramani observed that high-calorie foods have become cheaper over the years, and more accessible compared to healthy foods. The rise of the platform economy has also reshaped food choices across income groups, accelerating the penetration of ultra-processed foods in urban and rural India. India’s obesity story differs from that of many fast-developing countries, as it faces “an overweight and obesity pandemic before undernutrition has settled”, added Sethi.

‘TRIPLE BURDEN’ Public health expert Dr Nirupama AY, who is with Hyderabad’s Indian Institute of Public Health, pointed to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) theory to explain that babies exposed to undernutrition during the mother’s pregnancy or in their infancy can develop metabolic adaptations that favour energy storage. When they later encounter improved diets and greater calorie availability, they may be more prone to storing fat and developing obesity, even without excessive food intake. “The population that was undernourished 20 years ago is now becoming obese... that’s where the numbers come from,” Nirupama noted.

Experts said India’s “triple burden” of malnutrition, obesity and undernutrition reflects a complex development trajectory, where old nutrition challenges have not disappeared even as newer ones emerge. Dr Narayanan called for the inclusion of more pulses, millets and healthier oil alternatives like groundnut oil in public distribution systems — providing the micronutrients and proteins needed in one’s diet, rather than carbohydrate-heavy options that feed the very crisis policymakers are trying to fight.

Blooming paradox: Flower industry soars even as North-East withers

Prabhudatta Mishra, New Delhi

India’s floriculture sector is in full bloom. The area under flower cultivation has touched a record 4 lakh hectares in 2025-26, recovering sharply from a low of 2.82 lakh hectares in 2021-22. Gross value added from the sector has surged from ₹39,287 crore in 2019-20 to ₹51,643 crore in 2023-24. Yet, one just has to travel to the mist-covered hills of Arunachal Pradesh, and a very different story unfolds. In 2009-10, the State was a leading producer, trailing behind only Mizoram; today, that bloom has all but vanished.

Farmers have drifted to other crops, and the anthurium, once the pride of Arunachal Pradesh’s hills, has migrated south and east, finding new enthusiasts in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Bihar, West Bengal, and Kerala. The national boom is being driven not by new frontiers opening up but by old ones holding firm; farmers in established growing States are maintaining the momentum. Sikkim, a leading grower of orchids, reported the total area under flower cultivation at 242 hectares and production of 16,509 tonnes in 2025-26, which has remained at the same level as a decade ago.

AREA & OUTPUT In 2015-16, Sikkim's area and output were also the same. On the other hand, the area under flowers in Mizoram has shrunk significantly to 50 hectares in 2025-26 from 240 hectares in 2017-18. Conversely, Nagaland has done exceptionally well, seeing an increase in its area under flower cultivation.

The government only began collecting data on flower area and production in 1993-94. Since then, the share of floriculture in overall horticulture production—which reached a record 377.78 million tonnes, exceeding foodgrain output—has jumped from 0.76 per cent in 2014-15 to 1.2 per cent in 2025-26. Among the top States in flower production during 2023-24, Tamil Nadu recorded the highest share at 19 per cent.

Flower production in 2025-26*

(2nd Advance Estimate)

Flower Variety	Area ('000 hectare)	Loose Production ('000 tonnes)	Cut Production ('000 tonnes)
Marigold	106.19	1,277.35	13.71
Rose	48.20	218.23	620.45
Chrysanthemum	41.19	962.78	42.80
Jasmine	31.61	322.10	0
Tube Rose	27.19	239.67	111.88
Gladiolus	11.78	10.74	177.19
Gerbera	5.66	9.742	6.76
Anthurium	3.09	0	8.97
Orchids	2.42	22.09	7.28
Carnation	2.24	0.13	15.49
Other Flowers	119.93	318.05	178.68
Total	399.52	3,380.87	1,203.22

Source: Agriculture Ministry

Indian Army drops colonial-era dress customs

The changes are elaborated in the newly issued Army Uniforms-2026 Pamphlet

Asian News International, New Delhi

The Indian Army has removed several colonial-era vestiges from its dress regulations, including the mandatory carriage of swords by reviewing officers and the use of pouch belts with certain mess dresses. It has also dropped the use of archaic terminology such as “Royal”.

These changes, detailed in the newly issued Army Uniforms-2026 manual, are part of a broader effort to align military traditions with India’s sovereign identity and national sentiments.

Indianisation Push

A key addition is the introduction of the indigenous Bandi jacket as part of formal civil attire for officers. This closed-neck coat is to be worn over a full-sleeved shirt with matching formal trousers and closed footwear.

Other significant revisions include:

• Pouch Belts: Removed from Mess Dress Nos ‘5’ and ‘6’.
• Swords: Carriage by Reviewing Officers is now optional. Furthermore, the manual narrows the occasions for carrying swords; they are now restricted to parade commanders, contingent commanders, and designated personnel during major ceremonial events like Republic Day, Independence Day, Army Day parades, and Guards of Honour.
• Terminology: The use of the term “Royal,” inherited from colonial military traditions, has been discontinued.

New Attire

Apart from these symbolic shifts, the Army has introduced a new winter working dress featuring a battle jacket. This new attire is scheduled to gradually replace the existing jersey-based winter uniform (Dress 3A) by June 2029. Additionally, the new regulations bar radical hairstyles.

Will employment rise in age of AI?

LINE & LENGTH TCA SRINIVASA RAGHAVAN

Everyone thinks there is only one gorilla in the room, namely, AI. Actually there are two. The second is the absence of policy instruments to tackle the massive unemployment that awaits societies because of AI. But while everyone is hyperventilating over AI, there is pin drop silence over the absence of options before governments.

Meanwhile, the companies that stand to benefit from a widespread use of AI are peddling all sorts of justifications. The most intellectually grounded of these is the Jevons Paradox. William Stanley Jevons was a 19th-century British economist who said that the invention of the steam engine, which used coal more efficiently, would result in higher coal production and consumption, not less. That is, less coal per steam engine would lead to more engines being bought.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella might not have heard of Jevons until recently, but he used the paradox to say that AI would have a similar impact and that unemployment would not increase. Instead, it would increase. Others are recalling Joseph Schumpeter who said this sort of thing was inherent to capitalism and that it was good.

This may well happen, eventually, even though the IT boom of the 2000s didn’t lead to any great and permanent increases in productivity that later led to greater employment. There are several studies that show this. However, even though the past need not always be an infallible guide to the future, we do need to ask: even if AI increases the efficiency of capital-use and that gives better returns to shareholders, what will it do to, and for, labour, especially in the medium term?. If 10 programmers are replaced by one AI application, the cost saving will increase the dividends to shareholders by some amount but what of the 10 people who are now wondering how to pay their bills?.

BYE BYE, MAYNARD John Maynard Keynes, the most influential macroeconomist to have lived after Kautilya, said governments must spend money even if they didn’t have it to create demand that would, in turn, create employment. But country after country gradually has forgotten that Keynes had a very specific situation in mind, namely, that of reviving deficient aggregate demand to utilise installed capacity.

As a result of this amnesia, led by the Left which has co-opted the religious Right, the Keynesian solution for reviving demand has gradually turned into massive welfare spending. This is not something that Keynes ever intended, although he is believed to have said that money should be put in people’s pockets even if it was just for digging holes in the ground.

To cut a long story short, because of this self-serving use of Keynes by politicians, we now have unsustainable levels of government debt in far too many countries. Debt now looms menacingly over the world. Before 1968, government debt and unemployment were not linked; now they are. For a while higher government debt did bring down unemployment, but not anymore. The goose that laid the golden egg for politicians has died.

The IMF has therefore been getting horror nightmares. It is mumbling away that there is no paddle to row out of this creek, but no government is paying a blind bit of attention to its grumbling. Finance ministers may occasionally warn the heads of their governments that their goose will be cooked, but it’s not having much effect. Deficit financing to win some political advantage over rivals remains very much the go-to solution.

NO MONEY LEFT The most devastating example of this came after the Atlantic financial crises of 2008. Globally, governments have spent a few trillion dollars that they didn’t have in the name of social security and welfare. Now even that option has vanished because it’s not going to help. It has become like firing blanks in the air: there’s a lot of noise and smoke but the problem doesn’t go away.

The world has over eight billion people now. Around half of them are of working age, but barely over a quarter of those four billion are employed on a full-time basis. The rest are self-employed earning basically subsistence wages. Even without AI, we are talking of at least two billion people who need income and other forms of support. This is Karl Marx’s "reserve army of the unemployed". They constitute not only an economic challenge but a social and political one as well.

In India, this situation will worsen quickly as we have already fallen below the population replacement rate. That is, India will almost certainly grow old before it gets rich. To meet these challenges a lot of money is needed—money that’s no longer available to governments. If 10 programmers are replaced by one AI application, the cost saving will increase the dividends to shareholders, but what of the 10 people who are now wondering how to pay their bills?.

The cockroach brief: Why virality is not a marketing strategy

SHUBHO SENGUPTA DIGITAL GADFLY

For roughly two decades — ever since “viral” migrated from epidemiology into digital marketing around 2007 — I have been the most unpopular person in the room whenever the word comes up.

Clients demand it. Agency teams promise it. Award juries celebrate it with trophies that look increasingly like Toblerone chocolates. The best campaigns prove my point quietly. Ariel’s ‘Share the Load’ went viral and moved market share — because the virality served a precise commercial and cultural goal. Zomato trends regularly — because every piece of content points toward one measurable outcome: App opens.

When virality serves a goal, it is a powerful amplifier. When virality is the goal, it is — as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) demonstrated so elegantly — an expensive and exhausting way to go nowhere. Though, to be fair to the cockroach, it did get to CNN.

In May, a senior judicial figure allegedly compared sections of unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society” in open court. By the following morning, Abhijeet Dipke — a 30-year-old political communications strategist and Boston University PR graduate — had founded, named and distributed the Cockroach Janta Party across Instagram.

Twenty million followers in 72 hours. Coverage on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. Street protests at Jantar Mantar, complete with cockroach costumes and mock manifesto slogans. Marketing academics will be studying this particular case for years — not entirely for the right reasons, but enthusiastically nonetheless. As a piece of communications craft, viewed purely as a marketing exercise, it was breathtaking.

Jonah Berger’s STEPPS framework — the most rigorous model of content spread available — identifies six conditions for virality: Social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value and stories. The CJP hit five of these with a precision most agency creative teams spend careers chasing and award show entries try reverse-engineering.

Let’s deep-dive:

• Social currency: Sharing a cockroach meme signalled political awareness, irreverence and humour simultaneously, at zero personal risk. It made the sharer look sharp without requiring commitment to anything.
• Triggers: The original remarks recirculated through news cycles for days, each repetition refreshing the outrage and re-exposing new audiences to the CJP brand without a single rupee of media spend. The movement did not need to sustain its own attention — the news ecosystem did it for free. This is what the industry calls earned media.
• Emotion: Anger and humour activated simultaneously in the same container — high-arousal emotions. Anger alone exhausts an audience. Humour alone trivialises a cause. Together, they are nearly unstoppable — as every successful political cartoonist from RK Laxman onwards understood.
• Public: Cockroach masks/costumes at Jantar Mantar gave the movement a visual identity that cameras could shoot and audiences could decode instantly — absurd enough to be funny, specific enough to be unmistakable.
• Stories: The underdog reclaiming an insult is one of the oldest narrative structures in human communication. The movement did not merely respond to being called cockroaches. It adopted the name, built a brand around it and turned the act of reclamation into the content itself.

The one missing condition was ‘practical value’ — there was nothing useful to do with CJP membership beyond feeling agreeably righteous while scrolling. No conversion path. No next step. No answer to the question every successful campaign must eventually face: And then what?

The only number that ultimately matters: 20 million Instagram followers produced a few hundred people on the street at Jantar Mantar. A conversion rate of approximately 0.001 per cent. No electoral registration, no policy platform, no formal political standing. The founder, it bears mentioning, was leading this revolution for unemployed Indian youth from Boston, Massachusetts, which is either deeply ironic or the most honest thing about the whole enterprise, depending on your appetite for contradiction.

The cockroach, as any entomologist will confirm, survives everything. Nuclear winters. Geological epochs. Even bad marketing strategy. Whether this particular movement survives its own virality is, at this point, an open question. Virality without a goal is not strategy. It is noise with excellent metrics, a very good costume and absolutely nowhere to go.

How logistics will package and deliver demand growth

Balfour Manuel

India’s demand story is typically narrated through income variables such as wages, remittances, and rural credit, yet a more revealing divide is emerging across the country’s demand map: “reachable versus hard-to-serve”. While private final consumption expenditure grew 7 per cent in Q1 FY27, led by resilient rural demand, the constraint on that growth has shifted from production capacity to distribution certainty. Distance, more than income, is now quietly determining where consumption can actually occur, and the story of the next demand cycle begins there.

This shift is part of a longer, deliberate policy arc where tax harmonisation has reduced internal trade friction and economic corridors have improved line-haul predictability. India’s ranking on the World Bank’s logistics performance index improved from 44th in 2018 to 38th in 2023. Additionally, two dedicated freight corridors are now operational across 2,843 km through states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Gujarat—regions where distance had long constrained market access.

Global supply chain disruptions have raised the stakes for domestic logistics, as lead-time predictability has shifted from a procurement preference to a strategic necessity. To succeed, companies require network depth, freight route diversity, and end-to-end logistics dependability, even under pressure. The gap between India’s manufacturing reputation and its logistics reliability directly determines whether the supply chains that have already shifted to the country stay shifted.

Inside India, these pressures are redrawing the domestic demand map by easing the “invisible tariff” of distance that once forced companies to carry excess safety stock due to replenishment uncertainty. Dedicated freight capacity and expressways are now supporting predictable overnight movement between manufacturing clusters. For small manufacturers and farm-gate producers with thin margins, predictable delivery changes the fundamental unit economics of expansion.

Firms are entering emerging consumption centres not because those markets have suddenly become [richer] but because they have become reachable, as better logistics is not merely about cost discipline. When replenishment cycles stabilise, production planning firms up, and capital released from buffers can move into deeper distribution. However, infrastructure efficiency on paper does not automatically translate into service on the ground, as urban congestion, land constraints, and driver availability remain daily operational realities. While logistics alone cannot substitute for income growth, it can accelerate the expression of income by declining friction between purchase intent and product availability.

The next consumption cycle may not announce itself through a sharp rise in income but rather as a quieter shift in markets that have become serviceable. It will appear in categories where purchase intent no longer waits on proximity. The decisive question, it turns out, was never just about income; it was also always about reach. Reliable supply is what births new consumption centres in every nook of the country.