Inflation remains key concern as global south shows higher confidence in future.

In the latest April wave of the Ipsos What Worries the World survey, India has retained its 4th position in global optimism, with 62% of Indian citizens expressing hope for a better future. The data reflects continued positivity in India, matching results from the previous wave, and highlights the growing confidence in several global south markets.

India is joined at the top by fellow Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries, with Singapore (85%) leading the pack, followed by Malaysia (70%), Indonesia (67%), India (62%), and Thailand (55%). Argentina also featured strongly, tying with Thailand at 55%.

Amit Adarkar, CEO of Ipsos India, provided insight into the findings, emphasizing India’s strategic position and internal strengths. “We have the global advantage of being geographically away from both Ukraine and Gaza, the epicentres of wars. India and the other global south markets have largely been driven by domestic consumption and domestic economy. And India also has the demographic dividend, leading to economic growth.”

He added, however, that emerging challenges were not yet reflected in this survey wave. “This survey was conducted before the Trump tariffs were announced (with a 90 day pause to reciprocal tariff) and before the Pahalgam terror strike took place. These events have heightened anxiety and fear among citizens which have not been captured in the current wave. India being a strong economy and a resilient market, it will continue to stay on grid. But the unrest at the borders and the looming reciprocal tariffs by the Trump govt could lead to a strong impact on India’s fortunes.”

Despite the buoyant outlook among the global south, the report reveals rising global pessimism, particularly in countries such as Peru, South Korea, and France. These nations showed a more negative outlook about the future, in stark contrast to the optimism seen across much of Asia and Latin America.

One key finding from the survey is the prominence of inflation as the top issue globally and within India. According to Adarkar, “Ipsos’ What Worries the World survey tracks public opinion on the most important social and political issues across 29 countries today. And inflation continues to impact both global and local citizens with high cost of living, as a consequence of global economic slowdown, wars in Gaza and Ukraine and now with tough measures by the Trump regime on the anvil, in terms of job cuts and reciprocal tariffs, we are bracing for tougher times ahead.”

He further stated, “With the terror strike in Pahalgam and India’s tough call, the citizens are likely to bear the brunt of these new developments, with increase in prices of essential commodities and slowdown in inbound travel of foreign tourists, impacting the economy.”

Adarkar concluded with a recommendation for policymakers: “Govts should focus on their local worries to provide reprieve to citizens, as these concerns weigh heavily on them.”

Survey Methodology

The 29-country Global Advisor survey was conducted between March 21 and April 4, 2025, via the Ipsos Online Panel system, polling 25,219 adults aged between 16 and 74, depending on country-specific ranges. In India, around 2,200 individuals were surveyed, with approximately 1,800 face-to-face interviews and 400 online.

The sample in India represents the urban population, including socio-economic classes A, B, and C across metros and Tier 1–3 towns. The findings were weighted to reflect recent census demographics and are indicative of the views of India’s more connected population segment.

Ipsos, one of the world’s largest market research companies, operates in 90 markets with over 20,000 employees, offering insights into global opinions, behaviours, and trends.

source/content: indianexpress.com (headline edited)

India is among the seven main members of the project and has played a key role in building some of its most critical infrastructure.

In a major milestone, scientists working on the world’s largest nuclear fusion project have completed its main magnet system with India playing a key role in building critical infrastructure.

This system will power the core of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) Tokamak reactor, which aims to demonstrate that fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars, can be used as a safe and carbon-free power source on Earth.

Unlike nuclear fission, which splits atoms and produces radioactive waste, fusion involves heating hydrogen gas to extremely high temperatures until the atoms fuse, releasing large amounts of energy sans nuclear waste.

India is among the seven main members of the project and has played a key role in building some of its most critical infrastructure, including the massive cryostat cooling systems and heating technologies.

The final part of the magnet system was the sixth module of the Central Solenoid, the main magnet that will drive plasma, the superhot gas in which fusion reactions take place, in the reactor.

Built and tested in the United States, this powerful magnet will soon be assembled at the ITER site in southern France. When complete, it will be strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier and form the electromagnetic heart of the doughnut-shaped fusion machine.

ITER, which stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is a joint scientific effort of more than 30 countries, including India, China, the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea and members of the European Union.

The goal is to prove that fusion energy can be produced at an industrial scale.

The magnet system just completed is critical to creating and controlling the ultra-hot plasma inside the reactor. At full power, ITER is expected to produce 500 megawatts of energy from just 50 megawatts of input.

This would make the plasma self-sustaining, a state known as “burning plasma”, which scientists see as key to unlocking fusion energy.

India has designed and manufactured the cryostat, an enormous 30-metre tall and 30-metre wide chamber that houses the entire ITER Tokamak.

India has also built the cryolines that carry liquid helium to cool the magnets to minus 269 degrees Celsius, the temperature needed for superconductivity.

It has also delivered the reactor’s in-wall shielding, cooling water systems and key parts of the heating systems that will raise the temperature of the plasma to over 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the Sun’s core.

Scientists say that if successful, fusion could offer the world a nearly limitless and clean energy source without the long-lived radioactive waste or carbon emissions of current technologies.

Thousands of scientists and engineers from member countries have contributed components from hundreds of factories on three continents to build a single machine.

ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi said, “What makes ITER unique is not only its technical complexity but the framework of international cooperation that has sustained it through changing political landscapes.” “This achievement proves that when humanity is faced with existential challenges like climate change and energy security, we can overcome national differences to advance solutions.

“The ITER Project is the embodiment of hope. With ITER, we show that a sustainable energy future and a peaceful path forward are possible,” he said.

With more than 10,000 tonnes of superconducting magnets, made from over 1,00,000 kilometres of special wire, ITER represents a global effort to push the boundaries of science and energy technology.

In 2025, ITER completed the insertion of the first vacuum vessel module into the reactor pit three weeks ahead of schedule. The rest of the components, contributed by different countries, are being assembled piece by piece in what is described as one of the most complex engineering projects ever attempted.

Private companies are also getting involved. In recent years, there has been a growing interest and investments from the private sector in fusion research.

ITER has launched new programmes to share knowledge and research data with private players to speed up innovation and development of future fusion reactors.

Under the current plans, ITER will not produce electricity itself but will serve as a large research facility to test the fusion process at scale. The data generated is expected to help build future commercial fusion power plants.

As the host of the project, Europe is bearing 45 per cent of the construction cost. The other six members — India, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US — are each contributing about 9 per cent. But all members will get full access to the research results and patents.

source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)

The company is developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks, said one of the the company’s two co-founders.

The government has selected Bengaluru-based start-up Sarvam to build the country’s first indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) amid waves made by China’s low cost model DeepSeek. The start-up, chosen from among 67 applicants, will receive support from the government in terms of compute resources to build the model from scratch.

Sarvam is the first start-up to get approved for sops under India’s ambitious Rs 10,370 crore IndiaAI Mission to build a model, with the government currently assessing hundreds of other proposals. Sarvam said its model will be capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, and it will be ready for population-scale deployment.

A senior official said in terms of government support, the company will receive access to 4,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months for the company to build and train its model. The model is not expected to be open-sourced, but will be fine-tuned particularly for Indian languages. The GPUs will be provided to Sarvam by companies separately selected by the government to set up AI data centres in India.

“This (Sarvam’s) model will have 70 billion parameters and many innovations in programming as well as engineering. With these innovations, a 70 billion parameter (model) can compete with some of the best in the world,” said IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

As part of Sarvam’s LLM proposal, the company is developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks, said Pratyush Kumar, one of the the company’s two co-founders.

The development comes amid the meteoric rise of DeepSeek, a low-cost foundational model from China, which shook up the AI industry. DeepSeek’s entry into the AI space – touted for being open source, its accuracy and claims that it has been built at a fraction of the cost as its US competitors – sent Nvidia’s stock on a downward spiral, since its R1 model was trained on inferior GPUs compared with the likes of OpenAI.

Sarvam’s model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India, using local infrastructure and developed by a new generation of Indian talent. This initiative aims to promote strategic autonomy, accelerate domestic innovation, and secure India’s leadership in AI for the long term, the company said in a press statement.

Vivek Raghavan, also a co-founder of Sarvam, said, “This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders”.

Earlier this year, the government had also selected 10 companies to supply 18,693 GPUs — high-end chips needed to develop machine learning tools — that can go into developing a foundational model. This is more than the initial aim of the IndiaAI Mission, under which the government was looking to procure 10,000 GPUs.

The companies empaneled to provide the GPU services include Jio Platforms, the Hiranandani Group-backed Yotta, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, NxtGen Datacenter, CMS Computers, Ctrls Datacenters, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Orient Technologies, and Vensysco Technologies.

source/content: indianexpress.com (headline edited)

Kasturirangan, a celebrated space scientist who also served as member of Rajya Sabha and a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, passed away in Bengaluru on Friday morning. He was 84, and ailing for the last two years due to age-related complications.

Chandrayaan-3 was scheduled to make its landing on the Moon on August 23, 2023. A day earlier, The Indian Express had reached out to K Kasturirangan, the charismatic former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), seeking an interview to mark the occasion. Having suffered a heart attack a month ago, and not in the best of health, Kasturirangan was reluctant, and sent a message that the best he would be able to do would be to send a few lines of written responses.

But a day later, just ahead of the landing, he indicated that he would like to talk, and appeared on a video call from his Bengaluru home where he was recovering.

“I have not been keeping well, and did not want to do interviews. But you have asked a very interesting question about Vikram Sarabhai, and I wanted to talk about this. After all, I am amongst the last few remaining who is proud to have known and worked closely with Sarabhai,” Kasturirangan said, and went on to have a conversation that went on for more than half an hour.

Kasturirangan, a celebrated space scientist who also served as member of Rajya Sabha and a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, passed away in Bengaluru on Friday morning . He was 84, and ailing for the last two years due to age-related complications. His condition had deteriorated last month, and he had been under palliative care at home.

The question that had aroused his interest on the Moon-landing day related to Sarabhai, widely considered the father of India’s space programme, and a man he admired deeply. Former Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, in his tribute, wrote that Kasturirangan would often tell him how profoundly he had been impacted personally and professionally by Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan, another space stalwart.

Sarabhai also happened to be the teacher under whom Kasturirangan completed his PhD, in cosmic X-rays, at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad.

Sarabhai, while talking about the role of space programme in a developing country like India way back in 1968, had famously remarked that he did not have the “fantasy” of India competing with other advanced nations in the exploration of Moon, other planets, or manned missions, and would much rather see ISRO working for the benefit of common people, and help in providing solutions to the country’s problems.

When asked if ISRO was finally diverging from Sarabhai’s vision now that it not only had a full-fledged exploration programme but was also planning to send humans into space, Kasturirangan had said, “I am glad you asked this. And this is important to understand the role that India’s space programme plays. It is true that Sarabhai saw space technologies as a tool to fulfil India’s developmental requirements. He was of the view that in a developing country like India, space technology could ensure optimal utilisation and management of the limited resources. He used to forcefully argue that timely, accurate and precise information about our critical resources was essential. We had primitive communication systems at the time. We needed massive improvements in education and health systems. We needed good information in meteorology which could predict rains so that we could plan our agricultural activities.

With his passionate advocacy, he managed to convince the government to invest in space technology. And thus, India became the only country — probably Japan was another — to start a space programme with an entirely peaceful approach to uses of space technology, and focussed totally on developmental needs,” Kasturirangan had said.

“Sarabhai unfortunately died in 1971 but all his successors at ISRO, Prof MGK Menon, Satish Dhawan and U R Rao, continued to work on his vision. ISRO built capabilities in remote sensing, communication, broadcasting, meteorology, earth observation, satellite technologies. By the time U R Rao left office (in 1994), much of Sarabhai’s vision had already been realised,” he said, arguing that the logical next step in carrying forward Sarabhai’s legacy was to utilise the capabilities built in the previous three decades. The foray into space exploration thus was an obvious choice.

“India’s space programme is still serving the country, and its people. In many more ways now, because of our enhanced capabilities,” he said.

Kasturirangan himself had a pivotal role to play in the transformation of ISRO into a formidable space exploration agency competing with the best in the world. It was during his nearly decade-long leadership of the organisation (1994-2003) that the Moon mission was conceived, and the first conversations on a possible human spaceflight were laid on the table.

In the book ‘Space and Beyond’, Kasturirangan revealed that in the proposal put forward to the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, he and his colleagues had named the lunar programme as ‘Somayaan’. It was Vajpayee who changed it to ‘Chandrayaan’ since he considered it more apt. Kasturirangan has also written that at the Indian Science Congress event in 2003, Vajpayee had asked him about the possibility of sending humans into space. He had told Vajpayee that it was possible but would take some time.

Kasturirangan guided ISRO during a rather tumultuous period. This was the time when India faced tight international controls on technology, which became worse after the 1998 nuclear tests. India had been denied the crucial cryogenic technology without which a well-developed space programme could not be built. It was during Kasturirangan’s time that ISRO embarked on self-reliance and indigenisation, which delayed the programmes a bit but eventually paid off handsomely in creating in-house capabilities. Kasturirangan also had to deal with the infamous spy scandal case, one of the worst crises that ISRO has faced.

After his retirement from ISRO, where he served for more than three-and-a-half decades, Kasturirangan was nominated to Rajya Sabha by the Vajpayee government in 2003. After that stint was over, the Manmohan Singh government appointed him as a member of the Planning Commission in 2009 where he served till the change of government in 2014.

He headed two committees whose reports have led to major policy changes. His report on the ecology of the Western Ghats, essentially a review of an earlier report by a committee headed by environmentalist Madhav Gadgil, is the basis on which human activities in specific areas of the Western Ghats are sought to be regulated. Kasturirangan also headed the committee that recommended the New Education Policy.

source/content: indianexpress.com (headline edited)

SAMHI will primarily use the sale proceeds to reduce its debt, and a small portion allocated to cover transaction expenses.

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, is acquiring a 35% stake in three subsidiaries of SAMHI Hotels — Courtyard & Fairfield by Marriott (Bengaluru ORR), Hyatt Regency Pune and the recently acquired Trinity Hotel in Whitefield, Bengaluru– for an investment of Rs 752 crore. The total enterprise value of these three subsidiaries stands at Rs 2,200 crore.

SAMHI will be mainly utilising the sale proceeds for paying off its debts. “Rs 603 crore from the deal will be used upfront to reduce the debt across the company’s portfolio and a small amount will be used towards deal expenses,” the company said.

The balance, Rs 149 crore, will be used over next two years to part fund the capital expenditure for the Westin Tribute Portfolio Bengaluru Whitefield dual branded hotel. 

SAMHI expects a Rs 580 crore reduction in debt and a 15-20% upward impact on profit after tax on account of this transaction. “The transaction follows our stated strategy of capital recycling and will lead to significant reduction in debt and partnership with a global investor of GIC’s stature for funding further growth. Net Debt-to-EBITDA at closing < 3.5X; accelerated path to < 3.0X in the next 12 months without compromising on growth,”  stated the company. 

The company also said the partnership will be incubated with five of SAMHI’s hotels with more than 1,000 rooms (the seed assets) valued at Rs 2,200 crore.

The hotels include the Hyatt Regency Pune, with 301 rooms (and upcoming 22 apartments), the Courtyard by Marriott – Bengaluru, ORR with 176 rooms, the Fairfield by Marriott – Bengaluru, ORR with 160 rooms, the Trinity Hotel – Bengaluru, Whitefield with 142 rooms which will be converted as part of Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio and an under development 220 rooms Westin Hotel, which is being added to the existing Trinity Hotel in Bengaluru.

“We are pleased to announce this transformational partnership with GIC. We have a strong track record in the hotel sector in India and GIC brings unparalleled institutional capabilities for us to benefit from. In addition to helping us strengthen our balance sheet, this partnership gives us tremendous firepower to grow our portfolio,” said SAMHI Hotels MD and CEO Ashish Jakhanwala, in a media release on Thursday.

source/content: newindianexpress.com (headline edited)