Why MNCs struggling and quiting India ????

A few  big names like  Metro AG, Holcim, Ford,  General Motors ,  Royal Bank of  Scotland, Harley -  Davidson,   Citibank   have chosen to pull the plug on their operations in India or downsize their presence here in recent years. 

This is something to wonder about , at a time when India is trying to position itself as an alternative to China, &  where many MNCs are looking to diversify their supply chain.

While the reasons  could be  company-specific .  In  some cases such as restructuring to curb losses, failure to crack the price-sensitive Indian market,  replicating western business model  blindly rather than   adopting  to a local model. Several have also given up on India due to regulatory flip-flops, high tariff barriers, red tape, perplexing land policies, infrastructure issues and others tied to the ease of doing business.

Ease of doing business in India has definitely improved over the last five years. However, to bring about this improvement, the government is constantly making regulatory changes which have taken some time to get used to. 

 

To make things worse, there are 26,134 imprisonment clauses in India’s business laws, according to an Observer Research Foundation report that highlights the risks faced by entrepreneurs and corporations in doing business in India.

To be sure, many  western MNCs, especially carmakers, had to leave India because of their own inability to crack the world’s fourth-largest auto market, resulting in poor sales.   There is definitely a lack of planning or understanding of the Indian markets among MNCs that have failed.  The competition is also very high and most foreign companies struggle to meet customer expectations. Cultivating brand loyalty in the Indian market is also very difficult, especially when companies succumb to product modifications i.e., making cheaper substitutes.

 

 

 DH article link

Mumbai World's Second Most Honest City, Finds 'Lost Wallet' Social Experiment

 

A survey was conducted by Reader's Digest magazine where they dropped wallet in 16 cities  to check how many of them were returned.

Each dropped wallet   contained things like  a name with a cellphone number, a family photo, coupons,  business cards, plus cash  equivalent of $50.

 

The cities in question were Amsterdam, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Helsinki, Lisbon, Ljubljana, London, Madrid, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Prague, Rio De Janeiro, Warsaw, and Zurich.

 

During the survey, it was found that Helsinki of Finland is the most honest city. Mumbai which secured second place has returned nine wallets out of 12 dropped wallets.. However, Lisbon in Portugal was the bad performer as out of 12 dropped wallets only one returned. To top it off, who returned the single wallet, were not from Lisbon visitor from Netherlands.

 

 Well done Mumbai & Mumbaikars.

 

On a personal front I  had lost my wallet in Mumbai airport parking  place  few years back.  An  Airport employee  found it  and returned the same to me . I am still Thankful to the person, as   a wallet in general, not only contains some cash but contains credit cards and several   other  important documents DL,  Aadahar  and the list is long.

 Link of RD

FDA allows emergency use of drug remdesivir for COVID 19

The US Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized Remdesivir (a nucleoside ribonucleic acid (RNA) polymerase inhibitor) an experimental antiviral drug, for emergency use to treat Covid-19.

The authorization allows the intravenous drug to be distributed to doctors to administer to patients with severe disease.

Many health experts have had high hopes for the drug, which was initially developed by Gilead Sciences to treat Ebola. In past,it was also  used in experiments to treat the coronaviruses SARS and MERS. That early testing gave remdesivir a head start in the race for a treatment to Covid-19.

The NIH trial, called the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial, included 1,063 patients. The results showed that the median time to recover for patients who randomly received the placebo was 15 days while patients who received remdesivir had a median recovery time of 11 days. Remdesivir also lowered the mortality rate compared to the placebo group, from 11.6 percent to 8 percent.

These results, however, are preliminary. There are at least 19 studies on remdesivir around the world underway or in planning stages, some recruiting thousands of patients. It will be several months before they yield definitive answers, but they will, hopefully, bring the world closer to a working treatment.

Earlier  a randomized trial of the drug in China recently published in the Lancet  found that there was no statistical benefit to taking the drug. The study  was based on a true randomized controlled trial from Wuhan, China, with 237 patients. The study was also peer-reviewed by other scientists. Initially, the authors wanted to include up to 450 patients, but the lockdown imposed in the city meant that patients stopped arriving.

The FDA on 28^th March, 2020  had approved  emergency use authorization to a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, after President Donald Trump repeatedly promoted it as a possible treatment for COVID-19. 

Here is the link to the announcement.

US FDA announcement