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You may not be victim to any more power cuts and could even halve your <keyword id="100242" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Electricity-bill">electricity bill</keyword>, thanks to <keyword id="6356755" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="IIT-Madras">IIT Madras</keyword>' new solar rooftop installation. It's both smaller and cheaper than present installations. Priced at Rs 20,000, it can run tubelights, fans, charging points and a TV. If you go for a higher model, it will be able to run all essential load except washing machine and air conditioners. As a part of <keyword id="6354502" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="CSR">CSR</keyword> and government sponsorship, the rooftop plant has been installed in 15,000 rural homes. It was successful in facing a three-day power cut during Chennai floods in December 2015. Now, to install a rooftop of the present technology, a middle-class family would require 1kWh solar rooftop and storage costing about Rs 1.2 lakh and a space of about 100 sq ft. On Thursday, the <keyword id="70990" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Solar-power">solar power</keyword> system was recognised by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), New York, as 'Technology of the year 2017 in the service of humanity'. The solar inverterless DC system is cost and energy-efficient as unlike other solar power systems, it does not convert direct current produced by a solar installation into alternate current. The system comes with a full DC wiring. Each time a unit of AC is converted into DC, there is a 15 per cent loss of energy. A DC system is 2.5 times more efficient than the AC system and hence requires lesser space. While a 125W rooftop solar, a 0.5kWh lead acid DC battery, and few DC electrical appliances will cost approximately Rs 20,000, a basic 500W solar power and 3 kWh lead acid storage will cost a bit over Rs 40,000 without taxes. It is believed that a solar-DC microgrid can help break the logjam that the domestic power supply currently faces in India. Even as its a great start, data with REC shows that about four crore households are yet to be electrified in India.

This made-in-IIT solar plant is illuminating thousands of rural homes in India

Saturday night will see a clash between the master and the apprentice. MS Dhoni, who is on the last bend of his career and has been turning up only for <keyword id="13886" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Chennai-Super-Kings">Chennai Super Kings</keyword> (CSK) since his retirement from international cricket last year, will lead the three-time champions against Delhi Capitals (DC), who will be captained by Rishabh Pant, his long-term successor as India's first choice wicketkeeper. Pant has said in the past that he wants to emulate Dhoni but seems to be carving his own niche. While his power-hitting has already been well-known, his batting went a notch higher since the last Indian Premier League (IPL) as he helped India win the Test series in Australia and against England at home. His wicketkeeping skills came as a pleasant surprise during both series and now it will be his captaincy skills that will be put to test. Pant replaced the injured Shreyas Iyer, who is nursing a shoulder injury. The last year's runners-up have also added Steve Smith to their squad. Their pace bowling attack, comprising Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje, <keyword id="149050" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Umesh-Yadav">Umesh Yadav</keyword> and Ishant Sharma along with all-rounders Chris Woakes, Tom Curran and Marcus Stoinis, is among the best in the league. Experienced and acclaimed spinners like off-spinner R Ashwin and leg-spinner Amit Mishra make up a very strong bowling line-up that will test the CSK batting line-up that performed very poorly in the last edition. The CSK batting will rely a lot on Faf du Plessis but the return of Suresh Raina, who missed the last season, will be a boost for the three-time champions as they look to do better this time than the seventh place finish they got last season. India's Test batting stalwart Cheteshwar Pujara too has been included in the CSK line-up for his first IPL in seven years. The India No. 3 batsman was seen using a higher back-lift and hitting sixes in one of the net sessions. CSK blundered last year by not reading the pitches well and not playing their spinners early enough. They realised their mistake and started to give Mitchell Santner and Imran Tahir matches. But it was too late by then. One man who could make a difference is Shardul Thakur, who has done exceedingly well for India since the last IPL. He would be leading their pace bowling along with Deepak Chahar or Aussie Jason Behrendorff, who has come in for Josh Hazlewood. But essentially, CSK's fate on Saturday will depend on how their batting stands up to DC's bowling. DC squad: Rishabh Pant (captain/wicketkeeper), Shikhar Dhawan, Prithvi Shaw, Ajinkya Rahane, Steve Smith, Sam Billings, Shimron Hetmyer, Ishant Sharma, Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje, Umesh Yadav, Tom Curran, Avesh Khan, Lalit Yadav, Pravin Dubey, Ripal Patel, Lukman Hussain Meriwala, M Siddharth, Marcus Stoinis, Axar Patel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Chris Woakes, <keyword id="3788898" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Vishnu-Vinod">Vishnu Vinod</keyword> (wicketkeeper), <keyword id="128070" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Aditya-Tare">Aditya Tare</keyword> (wicketkeeper) CSK squad: MS Dhoni (captain/wicketkeeper), Suresh Raina, Narayan Jagadeesan, Ruturaj Gaikwad, KM Asif, Karn Sharma, Ambati Rayudu, Deepak Chahar, Faf du Plessis, Shardul Thakur, Mitchell Santner, Dwayne Bravo, Lungi Ngidi, Sam Curran, Ravindra Jadeja, Imran Tahir, Robin Uthappa, Moeen Ali, <keyword id="2102949" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="K-Gowtham">K Gowtham</keyword>, Cheteshwar Pujara, M.Harisankar Reddy, K.Bhagath Varma, C Hari Nishaanth, R Sai Kishore <h4 style="color: rgb(44, 44, 45);">SEE ALSO:<a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/mobile/news/nokia-x20-specifications-nokia-new-phones-price-in-india/articleshow/81981039.cms">Six new Nokia smartphones announced – price, specifications and availability details you should know</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/startups/news/founders-take-note-heres-why-most-startups-fail/articleshow/81981138.cms">Founders, take note: here’s why most startups fail</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/google-phone-app-now-lets-you-record-calls-automatically-from-unknown-numbers/articleshow/81982791.cms">Google Phone app now lets you record calls automatically from unknown numbers</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/startups/news/adar-poonawalla-serum-institute-of-india-has-bought-stake-policybazaar/articleshow/81985425.cms">Serum Institute of India buys into IPO-bound insurance unicorn PolicyBazaar, as True North sells part stake in secondary sale</a> </h4><h4 style="color: rgb(44, 44, 45);"></h4>

It's master vs disciple: Dhoni takes on Pant in today's second IPL match as CSK clashes with DC

NEW DELHI: <keyword id="1575" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Congress">Congress</keyword> and <keyword id="14666" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="BJP">BJP</keyword> are engaged in intense negotiations to hammer out an understanding over the creation of <keyword id="68884" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Telangana">Telangana</keyword>. 
 BJP has assured the government that it would not waver from its commitment to the creation of Telangana but is insisting on a specific pledge of financial support for Seemandhra region as the condition for supporting the <keyword id="37102" type="COMPANY" weightage="40" keywordseo="Andhra-Pradesh">Andhra Pradesh</keyword> Reorganization Bill, expected to be introduced in Parliament on Wednesday. The Union home ministry on Sunday sent a recommendation to President Pranab Mukherjee for introduction of the Telangana bill in Parliament. 
 
Sources said BJP is demanding a commitment for extending financial assistance worth Rs 17,000 odd crore to Seemandhra region through the Consolidated Fund of India to meet the revenue gap it will be saddled with, based on projections for the previous and current fiscal years, because of the transfer of resource-rich Hyderabad to Telangana as the capital of the proposed state. 
 
The party also wants the government to ask the Finance Commission to find ways of helping Seemandhra region with adequate funds on a long-term basis as a compensation for Hyderabad which generated Rs 24,000 crore in revenue. 
 
It also wants specific commitments in the coming fiscal year for projects that the two sides feel should be created in Seemandhra region for its development. 
 Congress sources confirmed that there have been several rounds of talks between party representatives including Union ministers from Andhra Pradesh and BJP <keyword id="19496" type="POSITION" weightage="60" keywordseo="leader">leader</keyword> and former party president M Venkaiah Naidu. 
 
When contacted, Naidu confirmed that he had been talking to Congress representatives and that he had made it plain that BJP will support the AP Reorganization Bill if the government commits itself to take measures for the development of Seemandhra region. 
 
"BJP in principle favours the creation of Telangana. That has been our consistent stand. But at the same time, we want to ensure that the interests of Seemandhra region are also safeguarded. There is no conflict of interest between the people of the two regions. They are all Indians and they are all Telugus,” Naidu said. 
 
He claimed that while the Centre and the Congress agreed about the need to take special steps in Seemandhra region, they were reluctant to back up their statements of intent with commitments of financial support. "They are not ready to make a commitment for the provision of assistance to Seemandhra through the Consolidated Fund of India to help it bridge the revenue gap. They want to leave the matter to the Finance Commission which is not acceptable to us,” Naidu said. 
 
Naidu also demanded commitment of support for projects the two sides have agreed on like upgrade of existing airports at Vizag, Vijaywada and Tirupati to international standards, creation of an industrial corridor between Vizag and Chennai along the lines of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor and setting up of branches of central institutions located in Hyderabad such as DRDO, IIM and others. 
 
"I told them empty gestures of hand will not do. Put money on the table,” the BJP leader said. 
 Both sides said that while sticking points remained, they were in agreement on provisions of <keyword id="250148" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="40" keywordseo="The-Bill">the bill</keyword> such as declaring Rayalaseema region as backward and providing special incentives including tax holidays and exemption from central exercise for industry, creation of reservoirs in Seemandhra as part of the Polavaram project on Godavari, swift completion of six irrigation projects -- four in Rayalaseema and two in Telangana -- linked to Krishna river and a provision in the bill that education and employment opportunities in Hyderabad will remain open to people from both regions until Seemandhra gets its own capital. 
 
Naidu has also demanded creation of power plants of 4,000 mega watts capacity in the Telangana region. 
 
On the inclusion of Anantapur and Kurnool districts from Rayalaseema in Telangana, BJP is learnt to have said that it can be considered if the two regions agree.

BJP Seeks Financial Package For Seemandhra In Return For Telangana Support

Chennai, India's swashbuckling wicketkeeper-batsman <keyword id="3142448" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Rishabh-Pant">Rishabh Pant</keyword> said he will donate his <keyword id="1928574" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="match-fee">match fee</keyword> towards <keyword id="6388465" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="rescue-operations">rescue operations</keyword> for the glacier burst in <keyword id="44522" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Uttarakhand">Uttarakhand</keyword> and also encouraged others to come forward and contribute. A glacier broke off at Joshimath in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district on Sunday, leading to a massive <keyword id="6369083" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="flood">flood</keyword> in the <keyword id="2553291" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Dhauli">Dhauli</keyword> Ganga river and causing large-scale devastation in the upper reaches of the ecologically fragile Himalayas. Pant was born in Roorkee, a town in the state's Haridwar district. "Deeply pained by the loss of life in Uttarakhand. Would like to donate my match fee for the rescue efforts and would urge more people to help out," Pant wrote on his Twitter handle. In an earlier post on Sunday, the 23-year-old wicketkeeper expressed his grief over the loss of lives in the natural calamity. "My sincere condolences and prayers for the families of those affected by the Uttarakhand flash floods. I hope that the rescue operations underway are able to help those in trouble," he had written. Pant tweeted soon after making a breathtaking 91 in the ongoing opening Test between India and England at the MA Chidambaram Stadium here. More than 150 labourers working in a power project are missing, officials said. Homes along the way were swept away as the waters rushed down the mountainsides in a raging torrent. There were fears of damage in human settlements downstream. Many villages were evacuated and people taken to safer areas on Sunday. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/heres-why-you-arent-being-able-to-apply-for-brookfield-reit-ipo-through-zerodha-groww-angel-broking-and-other-stockbroking-apps/articleshow/80686457.cms">Here's why you aren't being able to apply for Brookfield REIT IPO through Zerodha, Groww and other stockbroking apps</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/analysts-explain-why-indigo-paints-shares-fell-with-a-thud-just-like-burger-king-and-mrs-bectors-and-what-to-do-with-it-now/articleshow/80704864.cms">Indigo Paints joins the league of Burger King and Bector's — frenzied IPOs that fizzled out</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/the-india-stack-that-bill-gates-and-sundar-pichai-so-love-is-set-to-get-much-bigger-thanks-to-the-indian-governments-new-blockchain-strategy/articleshow/80718403.cms">The India stack that Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai so love is set to get much bigger – thanks to the Indian government’s new blockchain strategy</a>

Rishabh Pant to donate match fee towards rescue operations in Uttarakhand

<ul><li>In Chennai, <keyword id="4899766" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="SunnyBee">Sunnybee</keyword> retail chain has opened a contactless check-out service at a grocery store.</li><li>Major retail outlets like Adidas, Puma, Decathlon too are encouraging contactless payments at their stores.</li><li>With the coronavirus pandemic, the idea of <keyword id="9188349" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="contactless-shopping">contactless shopping</keyword>, dining and payments has taken over. </li></ul>With the coronavirus pandemic, the idea of contactless shopping, dining and payments has taken over. Startups and businesses are bringing out new products that promise low or no contact for a safe experience. Chennai’s Sunnybee retail chain has opened contactless check-out service at a grocery store. Sunnybee has made a name for itself for its farm to store produce. Two years ago, in Kerala’s Kochi, a retail store Watasale had introduced the cashier-less shopping service. And in the times of the coronavirus pandemic, this seems to be the future of Indian retail. According to an EY report, <keyword id="6513856" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="kirana-stores">kirana stores</keyword> are now more inclined than ever to adapt technology. At Sunnybee’s store in Besant Nagar, Chennai, consumers at the shop can just scan and pay themselves instead of paying by cash or even interacting with a cashier at the counter. The <keyword id="6621728" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Self-Checkout">self checkout</keyword> counter has a touchscreen panel and a billing printer too.The solution was put in place as consumers remain wary about multiple interactions at a store. “The self-checkout solution was designed, developed, and implemented in 15 days despite the lockdown. The initial response from customers is very positive and this is evident from their excitement to use the self-checkout counter every time they walk into the store,” said Sriram Sridharan, Business Head, SunnyBee Market. The hardware and software solution was built by WayCool Labs – the technology arm of the agritech startup WayCool Foods &amp; Products. But grocery is not the only sector adapting to technology. As malls open up across cities, <keyword id="395327" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="retail-stores">retail stores</keyword> too are opting for similar products. Decathlon has also introduced a <keyword id="9577236" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="scan-and-go">Scan and Go</keyword> option for consumers in many of its stores in India. As a part of its newly launched experiential retail stores, Puma in India too is offering an ‘all digital experience’. In Bengaluru, Adidas has installed a self checkout counter where customers can scan the barcode to pay. “We are planning to expand it to more stores. This technology can be extended to small cities because consumers are actively using digital wallets and UPI platforms which have democratised contactless payment in all parts of the country," Manish Sapra, senior marketing director, Adidas India <a href="https://www.livemint.com/industry/retail/covid-19-impact-seasoned-sport-brands-turn-to-contactless-shopping-11592991043239.html">told Mint.</a> Mandar Agashe, MD of Sarvatra Technologies (a banking technology provider) believes that this digital transformation and self checkout stores will see more rapid adoption. “Building proper awareness and education around contactless payment besides undertaking other preventive measures can help us collectively combat the risks involved. This will also encourage India to bring a shift in their everyday habits, facilitating financial inclusion at a macro level,” said Agashe. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/ecommerce/news/walmart-powers-flipkart-with-more-capital-to-battle-google-facebook-and-amazon/articleshow/76960607.cms">Walmart powers Flipkart with an additional $1.2 billion⁠ to help e-tailer battle Google, Facebook, and Amazon</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/mukesh-ambani-next-goal-seems-to-be-the-retail-king-of-india/articleshow/76953716.cms">Mukesh Ambani’s next goal seems to be the ‘retail king of India’</a>

Scan and go stores crop up in India as contactless becomes key to shopping

Sensex sees 2 weeks of gain wiped out in half a day – plunges by over 1,400 points

<ul><li>New income tax slabs: 10% tax on income between ₹7.5 lakh without exemption compared to 20% right now.</li><li>15% tax on income between ₹7.5 lakh and ₹10 lakh without exemption compared to 20% right now.</li><li>20% tax on income between ₹10 lakh and ₹12.5 lakh without exemption compared to 30% right now.</li><li>25% tax on income between ₹12.5 lakh and ₹15 lakh without exemption compared to 30% right now.</li><li>Cost to the exchequer ₹40,000 crore; Removed 70 tax exemptions and deductions. These new rates are available to those who forego exemptions, deductions, and rebates.</li><li>Dividend distribution tax will be abolished, it will be taxable in the hands of the recipient. Cost to exchequer: ₹25,000 crore</li><li>SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/news/union-budget-2020-live-updates-news-and-highlights/liveblog/73824572.cms" data-type="tilCustomLink" target="_blank">Business Insider India live blog</a> on Budget 2020.</li></ul>Finance Nirmala Sitharaman presented her second annual budget speech. The top highlights from the budget 2020 proposals include the government's plan to sell stake in state-iowned insurance giant Life Insurance Corporation of India, sweeping changes in the income tax slabs, as well as the abolition of the dividend distribution tax at the end of the corporates. Aside from theses, startups with revenue up to ₹25 crore can avail 100% tax deduction in any three years over a period of 7 years, according to the latest Finance Bill presented by Sitharaman. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 <div type="image" title="Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman" msid="73828645" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;quot;As per tradition, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman calls on President Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhavan before presenting the Union Budget,&amp;quot; the official handle of the President&amp;#39;s office tweeted today.&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div>


































 Following are the key highlights of the budget speech: <ol><li>Only through higher growth, we can have our youth gainfully and meaningfully employed.</li><li>Fundamentals of the economy are strong, inflation has been contained, banks have been cleaning up the accumulated loans of the past decade. </li><li>An average household now saves about 4% of its monthly spends due to lower incidence of tax under the GST regime.</li><li>Welfare schemes with direct benefit transfer embedded in them, preventive healthcare via programmes like sanitation, healthcare via central schemes, housing scheme via Prime Minister Awas Yojana (PMAY) etc changed the established order of a few individuals cornering most of the benefits. </li><li>During 2014-19, Indian economy grew at an average of 7.4% with low inflation. India's foreign direct investment was $284 billion between 2014 an 2019 compared to $190 billion in the preceding five-year period.</li><li>India's government debt fell to 48.7% of GDP as of March 2019 compared to 52.3% as of March 2014.</li><li>Three themes of Budget 2020: 'Aspiring India', 'economic development', and 'to build a caring society'. </li><li>We shall aim for seamless delivery of services by leveraging technology. </li><li>6.11 crore farmers insured under Prime Minister Fasal Bima Yojana - a centrally-sponsored insurance scheme. Farm markets need to be liberalised.</li><li>16 action points: 1: Encourage state governments that will implement the following model laws that have already enacted by the centre. 2: Propose comprehensive measures for 100 water-stressed districts. 3: Expand outlay for solar pumps to 20 lakh farmers, another 15 lakh farmers to pumpsets to solar grid. Farmers if they have barren lands, they can set up solar power plants and sell it to the grid. 4: Balanced use of orgnaic and inorganic fertilisers. 5: Provide viability gap funding for setting up warehouses. Food Corporation of India can set up warehousing on their land too. 6: Push to reduce storage costs for farmers. 7: Promotion of women self-help groups. 8: To launch refrigerated trains to transport food items from the farm to other parts of the country. 9: Horticulture exceeds the production of foodgrains. 'One product for one district' to promote focussed development of horticulture. 10: Integrated farming system in rain-fed areas. Multiple crops, bee-keeping solar pumps in rain deficient area. 11: Financing on negotiable warehousing receipts will be linked to e-NAM. 12: The NABARD refinance scheme will expanded. The agriculture credit target for FY21 will be expanded to ₹15 lakh crore from ₹12 lakh crore. 13. To eliminate foot and mouth disease by 2025. To double milk production to 108 million metric tonnes by 2025. 14. Blue economy - development management of marine resources. Target ₹1 lakh crore in fish exports by 2025. 15. By FY23, propose raising fish production to 200 lakh tonnes, will also promote algae, seaweed.</li><li>16. Under Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana, self help groups will be expanded beyond the current 58 lakh.</li><li>Allocation for agriculture: ₹2.83 lakh crore, this includes ₹</li><li>Mission Indradhanush has been expanded to include 12 new diseases and 5 new vaccines. A very focussed water and sanitation programme to reduce the burden of diseases on the poor. There are 20,000 hospitals empanelled under the PMJAY, this has to rise. Propose to set up hospitals under the private-public partnership, the 112 districts identified as 'aspirational' will get priority in the setting up of new hospitals. </li><li>Proceeds from taxes on medical devices will be used to support the programme to build the infrastructure.</li><li>Reiterate India's commitment to eradicate tuberculosis by 2025. </li><li>Allocation for health: ₹69,000 crore including ₹6,400 crore for PMJAY.</li><li>By 2030, India is set to have the world's largest working-age population. They need education, skills, and employment opportunities. Our education system needs more money to attract better teachers and to set up better labs. Open the education sector to external commercial borrowing. </li><li>In order to provide quality education to the under privileged, a full-fledged online courses will be launched from the top 100 institutions in India.</li><li>Under 'Study In India' programme, a new INSAT exam to be launched for foreign students to enroll into Indian universities. </li><li>Every medical college will be linked to a nearby hospitals under the public-private partnership mode.</li><li>Total outlay for education sector: ₹99,300 crore and another ₹3,000 crore for skill development.</li><li>150 top education institutes to start offering apprenticeship programmes.</li><li>Propose to set up an investment clearance cell for end-to-end services including information on land bank and facilitating the approval process etc. </li><li>It is proposed to develop 5 new smart cities in collaboration with state governments in PPP mode. </li><li>Electronics manufacturing industry is cost competitive and India has shown its potential. To attract large investments in electronic manufacturing -- including electronic equipment, smartphones -- a new policy will be announced soon.</li><li>A National Textile Mission to work for next four fiscal years with an estimated outlay of ₹1,480 crore.</li><li>A new scheme Nirvik, for higher insurance cover, reduction in premium for small exporters, and simplified claim process, including digital refund process to help exporters.</li><li>Every district must become a hub for exports.</li><li>Unified procurement scheme: Propose ₹27,300 crore for development of industry and commerce in FY21.</li><li>National Infrastructure Pipeline will bring in generic and sectoral reforms in construction and maintenance of the infrastructure. Propose a project preparation facility that will employ economist, management graduates to execute projects.</li><li>A National Logistics Policy will soon be released to clarify the roles of Central government, state governments, and the regulators.</li><li>The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway and two other projects will be completed by FY23. The Chennai-Bengaluru expressway project will also started by then.</li><li>Government will monetise 12 NHAI highway projects.</li><li>Setting up a large solar power capacity alongside the rail tracks on the land owned by the railways, is a proposal under consideration.</li><li>150 trains under the PPP mode. More Tejas type trains will connect iconic tourist destinations. </li><li>Central government will give 20% of the funds needed for a suburaban rail transport system in Bengaluru.</li><li>100 more airports will be set up in the next five years.</li><li>₹1.7 lakh crore allocated for transport infrastructure.</li><li>Propose to replace traditional meters with digital meters in the next three years. This will allow consumers to port out of a service provider (selling power) just like they port out of mobile service provider.</li><li>Fibre to home connections through Bharat Net will connect 1 lakh villages this year itself. Propose to provide ₹6,000 crore for Bharat Net programme.</li><li>Quantum technology: An outlay of ₹8,000 crore over the next five years.</li><li>₹22,000 crore allocated for the power sector including renewble energy sector.</li><li>No manual cleaning of sewers will be allowed, new technology will be roped. Centre in conversation with civic bodies.</li><li>Provision of ₹85,000 crore for scheduled castes and other backward classes.</li><li>Provision of ₹53,700 crore for scheduled tribes in the country.</li><li>5 archaeological sites would be developed as iconic sites with on-site museum -- Rakhigarhi (Haryana), Hastinapur (UP), Dholavera (Gujarat), Shivsagar (Assam), and Aditya Nallur (Tamil Nadu).</li><li>Propose ₹35,500 crore for nutrition-related schemes.</li><li>Allocation for Ministry of Culture: ₹3,500 crore. </li><li>Propose ₹2,500 crore to promote tourism.</li><li>Propose ₹9,500 crore for senior citizens and specially abled.</li><li>Proposed total allocation for women-centric programmes ₹28,600 crore.</li><li>Propose ₹4,400 crore allocation for clean air. </li><li>Companies Act will be amended to abolish 'criminal liability' for 'civil offences'.</li><li>A National Recruitment Agency will be set up. It will conduct a common entrance test for non-gazetted positions in the government and public-sector enterprises. </li><li>Propose a new national policy on national statistics will push for use of AI to collect data real time.</li><li>India will host G20 Presidency in 2022; the government proposes to allocate ₹100 crore to start the preparations.</li><li>Governance reforms proposed for PSU banks: Robust mechanism is in place to monitor the health of all banks and the money of depositors are safe. Insurance of bank deposits raised to ₹5 lakh from ₹eposit insurance and credit guarantee scheme.</li><li>Government will sell its remaining stake in IDBI Bank to private investors. Stock jumps over 13%</li><li>MSME entrepreneurs can avail 'subordinate debt' from banks and the loan will be fully guaranteed by a Trust. This will be treated as quasi-equity stake.</li><li>Government has asked RBI to extend deadline for MSME debt restructuring by one more year. </li><li>FY20 fiscal deficit seen at 3.8% of GDP and at 3.5% in FY21.</li><li>Non-resident Indians will be allowed to invest in certain categories of government bonds.</li><li>Currently, foreign portfolio investors are allowed to buy a maximum of 9% of the outstanding corporate bonds. Finance Minister proposes to increase the threshold significantly to 15%.</li><li>An international bullion exchange will be set up in GIFT City in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.</li><li>Government to sell stake in LIC. </li><li>Receipts for FY21 estimated at ₹22.46 lakh crore, estimate expenditure: ₹</li><li>Borrowing plan for FY21: ₹5.36 lakh crore, capital expenditure will rise over 22%.</li><li>Dividend distribution tax will be abolished, it will be taxable in the hands of the recipient. Cost to exchequer: ₹25,000 crore</li><li>Dividend and capital gains made by foreign funds on investment in infrastructure space will tax free.</li><li>Startups with revenue up to ₹25 crore can avail 100% tax deduction in any three years over a period of 7 years.</li><li>Small retailers with revenue up to ₹5 crore need not get their books audited by accountants.</li><li>New scheme to end tax disputes: If someone agrees to pay the disputed tax amount by March 2020, there will be no interest and penalty. There are 4,83,000 tax disputes pending at various forums.</li><li>FY21 disinvestment target ₹2.1 lakh crore, doubled from the ₹1.05 lakh crore target in FY20.</li><li>Propose a cash incentive for customers demanding invoice, to boost compliance with GST</li><li>Imported footwear, furniture, and medical equipments will get more expensive as customs duty will be increased.</li></ol> SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/personal-finance/news/new-income-tax-slab-tax-savings-for-salaried-people/articleshow/73835816.cms">You'll save ₹78,000 more under new income tax slabs if you earn less than ₹15 lakh</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/news/indian-government-infuses-22000-crore-in-power-and-renewable-proposes-freedom-to-choose-supplier/articleshow/73835587.cms">Indian government infuses ₹22000 crore in power and renewable, proposes freedom to choose supplier</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/income-tax/news/check-out-new-income-tax-slab-of-2021/articleshow/73830824.cms">New income tax slabs 2020</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/news/there-will-be-no-manual-cleaning-of-sewers-anymore-announces-nirmala-sitharaman/articleshow/73835265.cms">“There will be no manual cleaning of sewers anymore,” announces Nirmala Sitharaman</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/news/union-budget-2020-live-updates-news-and-highlights/liveblog/73824572.cms">Union Budget 2020 Live Updates</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/budget/news/indian-taxpayers-expectation-from-the-budget-2020/articleshow/73804969.cms" data-type="tilCustomLink" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/defense/news/indias-budget-allocation-for-defence-has-remained-fairly-static-for-the-past-five-years/articleshow/73153930.cms" data-type="tilCustomLink" target="_blank"></a>

Income tax cuts, stake sale in LIC and other highlights from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's budget speech

In 2006, two freshmen from IIT-Delhi gathered enough spunk to knock at the door of Kalyanaraman Srinivasan, Amazon’s <keyword id="2463621" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="global-technology-head">global technology head</keyword> for retail, who was in India to set up a development center at Chennai and a regular at the Bangalore office of the global ecommerce biggie. The duo requested fifteen minutes of ‘we-time’ as they bubbled over a few ideas they considered path-breaking. They wanted to know which one they should focus on. “I took 1.5 seconds and said if they really wanted to be entrepreneurs, they must replicate Amazon in India and be patient about it,” says Srinivasan, in a southern accent cradling a Midwestern twang. The duo turned out to be Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal who founded Indian ecommerce giant Flipkart the very next year, recently raising a billion dollars from investors to take on Amazon’s Indian foray. 
 Srinivasan’s advice bode well for the youngsters and made them very rich indeed but the operative word was “patient”. Despite zero signs of profitability in the ecommerce eddies, Srinivasan remains positive. After all, more than 20% of the GDP of the world comes from emerging markets with barely 3% of capital investment therein. In other words, there are not many tradable liquid securities out here, he reasons, adding that companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal and <keyword id="761157" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Infibeam">Infibeam</keyword>, where he has personally invested, will raise the tide. 
 
“The rising tide will raise all the boats first and every company will get irrational valuations but those who focus on customer experience in the long term, will stay there and go higher, and those who don’t, will fall off,” says Srinivasan. As a precursor, he points to the dotcom boom in the US in 1999-2000. “Trillions of dollars went into valuations there but the customer experience only got better…so the irrationality of valuations is relative,” he points out, observing the Indian ecommerce market potential to be in the $100-200 range and with only $6 billion active market, excluding train and flight tickets, Flipkart’s valuation of $5 billion makes perfect sense. 
 Today, the 44-year-old Kalyanaraman Srinivasan is Chief Operating Officer, <keyword id="384914" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Groupon">Groupon</keyword>, a portmanteau for group coupon, and at one time, the fastest growing company in the world that grew from $1 million in seed money to $1 billion in two years. On a whistlestop tour covering Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and India, he met up with CD in the Delhi office of Groupon, housed in a rundown commercial complex in the southern part of the capital city. That’s where, over cuppa and crackers, he deconstructs the journey of a 15-year-old from poverty to power, politics at the workplace, lessons from Sam Walton, problem-solving from Amazon to startups, and how somewhere in between, he came to be known as Kal Raman. 
 
Education is salvation 
 
Born and raised in Mannarkoil in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, down south of Chennai, Raman’s father, a tehsildar, passed away when he was all of 15. The family of four siblings struggled through the odds on his mother’s monthly pension of Rs 420. She was, however, uncompromising on her children’s education. That explains how liberally Raman uses this phrase—“Education is salvation.” 
 
After high school, Raman got through both medical and engineering college. While the medical college stood in his district, he opted for engineering in Chennai where he knew nobody. “I wanted to see how far I can fly,” he reminisces. Till today, Raman has a knack of making the tougher choice. It’s as if he’s conditioned that way. “The longer it takes to get something, the longer it stays with you….most of the things that look easy, are not good in the long term,” he says. 
 
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Not quite okay, Tata 
 
Raman’s first job was in Mumbai with Tata Consulting Engineers, where he landed up in slippers on his first day at work, sending his boss into a fit of rage. Upon hearing his story, he was not only given money to buy shoes but also fixed up at his friend’s Mumbai residence. Within a month, his boss sent him to Bangalore where he computerized the entire office administration. Thus started Raman’s steady rise in the world of information technology, and he did a lot of learning on his own, including ‘C’ programming. Just as he was about to get confirmed, he gave in his resignation since he signed up with TCS at Chennai. As a code jock, he ended up in Edinburgh servicing the Scottish Equitable Insurance Company and that’s where the first signs of friction with his boss became evident. 
 
As Raman deep-dove into the world of insurance, he figured the mathematical model of the company was completely flawed—if the company had more than 15% reimbursement, the resultant number would be a big negative, while the marketing documents of the company said that people would get 23% redemption. He tried explaining it to his boss but got cold shouldered. 
 
Raman would come in late and work well into the night. Being the last to leave, he was noticed by someone by the name Chris, who asked him why he stayed up so late despite being a programmer from an outsourced company. Upon being told of a questionable business model, Chris got curious and stayed up with Raman till 2 am one morning. A few days later, as Raman came in to work, his boss was pacing up anddown the room and glanced at him menacingly. He said that the European general manager of TCS had been called by the company and they were all going to see the management and that it concerned him. “If I were you, I would have packed my bags for India,” the boss said. Eventually, the trio entered a room with suits and at the head of the table, Chris sat in bespoke CEO attire. Before a word was uttered, Raman’s boss started making excuses and virtually disowned him, labeling him as a rotten apple in the TCS pantheon of “good and loyal workers”. That’s when Chris got up and silenced him, explaining why TCS needed to hire more people like Raman. “What my CPO and CIO couldn’t solve, a 22-yearold has done, and I thought it to be pertinent to acknowledge it in front of his bosses,” he said. 
 
The American Dream 
 For Raman, there was no looking back. With the help of Chris, he applied to companies in the US and got through <keyword id="46675" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Wal-Mart">Wal-Mart</keyword>, where he rose to become the giant retailer’s technology director within a year. In fact, he admittedly got promoted 18 times that year from the lowest employee to the top rung, catching the eye of Wal-Mart promoters Sam and Rob Walton. He also picked up the invaluable lessons of long-term planning and customer-centricity from Sam Walton, the father of modern retail. That’s where Raman learnt business execution under his mentor, Doyle Graham, who again passed away at 45, exactly the age his father had died. Orphaned twice, Raman had no will to forge on. He hung around for six months before signing up with Blockbuster, the biggest DVD rental company then and as he predicted its doom, which eventually paved the way for newbies like Netflix, he started out afresh as CEO of drugstore.com. At Drugstore, he had an enviable board of directors, which included among others, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Bill Gates’ wife and philanthropist Melissa Gates, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. 
 
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He ran Drugstore through the tumultuous 9/11 years as corporate America took a beating and share prices tumbled. When his recovery plan was rejected by the board, Raman knew it was time. However, Bezos sought him out and wanted him to go to Seattle to take a shot at some of the problems at Amazon. Raman, of course, chose the toughest one to crack—the non-media businesses were growing faster than media and Amazon was losing $200 million worth of free cash flow back then. He identified the problem and automated the entire retail infrastructure to solve it at one go. At that juncture, there were 6,000 people working at Amazon and he had 3,000 under him. Mission accomplished, Raman moved on to start his own venture Global Scholar with venture capitalist Michael Milken until selling out in 2010 and signing up as COO of Groupon in May 2012. “Now I joined Groupon when everyone wrote the company off and I love being the underdog,” he says. 
 
Galvanizing Groupon 
 
In 2012, Groupon’s international business was crumbling and it was left to Raman to steady the ship. Today, along with the domestic US business, the international division is in the black. “We are building a category, we are not building a company…. what Groupon is now, Amazon was in 2001,” he says. 
 
As he pumps in adrenaline to the business, Raman has a roadmap. He’s applying all that he learnt at Wal-Mart, keeping the merchant community engaged and customers happy by offering the lowest prices and an efficient delivery mechanism. Will he be able to pull it off? “We’re more worried about the long term and so we’re trying to get more efficient by passing off the savings to our merchants and customers so that they become more loyal to Groupon and check our website first before they go for any other transactions….we have about 1,600 people in technology to do that out of 12,000 worldwide,” he says. At $2.5 billion revenue and with zero debt, Raman’s optimism is well-founded. And while valuations like $8 billion scorch the terrace, he maintains a straight face and waits for the tide to raise the boats. What then, after he steers Groupon to the safe shores of supra-growth and profitability? “I’ll do something very big in education in India, with or without Groupon,” he says.

Meet Kal Raman, Groupon COO & Mentor To Flipkart’s Bansals

<div class="image-container float_right"><div class="image">REUTERS/Adnan AbidiA model poses with the new <keyword id="6354716" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Nokia">Nokia</keyword> "E90 Communicator" phone during its launch in New Delhi June 28, 2007. </div></div>SINGAPORE/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - <keyword id="10387" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Microsoft">Microsoft</keyword> Corp's acquisition of Nokia's handset business gives the software behemoth control of its main Windows smartphone partner, but leaves a question mark over the bigger business it has bought: Nokia's cheap and basic phones that still dominate emerging markets like India.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said he sees such phones - of which Nokia shipped more than 50 million last quarter - as an entree to more expensive fare.
"We look at that as an excellent feeder system into the smartphone world and a way to touch people with our services even on much lower-end devices in many parts of the world," he said in a conference call to analysts on Tuesday.
But analysts warn that's easier said than done.
The problem, said Jayanth Kolla, partner at Convergence Catalyst, an India-based telecom research and advisory firm, is that Microsoft simply lacks Nokia's retail and supply chain experience in the Finnish company's most important markets.
"The devices business, especially the non-smartphones business in emerging markets, is a completely different dynamic," he said.
Kolla pointed to the need to manage tight supply chains, distribution, and building brands through word-of-mouth. "Microsoft doesn't have it in its DNA to run operations at this level," he said.
India is a case in point. Nokia has been there since the mid 1990s and the country accounted for 7 percent of its 2012 revenue while the United States generated just 6 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Its India roots run deep: it has a presence in 200,000 outlets, 70,000 of which sell only its devices. One of its biggest plants in the world is in the southern city of Chennai.
For sure, Nokia has slipped in India as elsewhere: After nearly two decades as the market leader it was unseated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in overall sales last quarter.
But it still sold more of its more basic feature phones.
As recently as last October, market research company Nielsen ranked it the top handset brand. The Economic Times ranked it the country's third most trusted brand.
<h3>LOYALTY RUNS DEEP</h3>
In a land of frequent power cuts and rugged roads, the sturdiness and longer battery life of Nokia's phones have won it a loyal fan base - some of whom have stayed loyal when trading up.
Take Sunil Sachdeva, a Delhi-based executive, who has stuck with Nokia since his first phone. He has just bought his fifth: an upgrade to the Nokia Lumia smartphone running Microsoft's mobile operating system.
"Technology-wise they are still the best," he said of Nokia.
But Microsoft can't take such loyalty for granted. Challenging it and Samsung are local players such as Karbonn and Micromax, which are churning out smartphones running Google Inc's Android operating system for as little as $50.
Such players are also denting Nokia's efforts to build its Asha brand, touchscreen devices perched somewhere between a feature phone and a smartphone.
Nokia shipped 4.3 million Asha phones globally in the second quarter of this year, down from 5.0 million the previous quarter.
"The sales performance of the Asha line has been quite poor," said Sameer Singh, Hyderabad-based analyst at BitChemy Ventures, an investor in local startups. "With increasing competition from the low-end smartphone vendors, I'm unsure how long that business will last."
That leaves the cheap seats. Singh estimates that the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa accounted for two-thirds of Nokia's feature phone volumes in the last quarter, at an average selling price of between 25 to 30 euros ($32.99 to $39.59).
"I don't see how Microsoft can really leverage this volume," he said. "The market is extremely price sensitive and margins are racing into negative territory."
<h3>TOO BIG TO IGNORE</h3>
The quandary for Microsoft is that while the basic phone market may be declining, it may simply be too big to ignore.
"If you look at markets like India and Indonesia, more than 70 percent of the volume comes from the feature phone business," Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner said. "It's still a significant part of the overall market."
That means that if Microsoft wants to herd this market up the value chain to its Windows phones, it needs to keep the Nokia and Asha brands afloat - while also narrowing the price gap between its smartphones and the feature phones and cheap smartphones.
Microsoft has hinted that lowering prices of smartphones would be a priority. The Windows Phone series includes the top-end Lumia 1020, which comes with a 41-megapixel camera, while it also sells simpler models such as the Lumia 610 and 620 aimed at first-time smartphone buyers.
"The lower price phone is a strategic initiative for the next Windows Phone release," Terry Myerson, vice president of operating systems said on the same conference call, while declining to provide details.
An option for Microsoft, analysts said, would be to shoe-horn services like Bing search, Outlook webmail and Skype, the Internet telephony and messaging application, into the lower-end phones as a way to drive traffic to those services and make the devices more appealing.
"So you can bundle services with these low-end products and that way you can reach a wider audience," said Finland-based Nordea Markets analyst Sami Sarkamies.
But in the meantime Microsoft needs to brace for assault on all fronts as emerging market rivals see an opportunity to eat further into Nokia's market share. In India, said Convergent Catalyst's Kolla, cheap local Android brands have been held back by Nokia's strong promotion of its mid-tier Asha brand.
"Now, I expect them to pounce," he said. ($1 = 0.7577 euros)
(Reporting By Jeremy Wagstaff in Singapore, Devidutta Tripathy in New Delhi, Bill Rigby in Seattle, Ritsuko Ando in Helsinki; Editing by Emily Kaiser)

Microsoft's Cannot Ignore Nokia Phones That Dominate In Emerging Markets

<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:480px"><div class="image"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151066952961023&amp;set=a.10151066950656023.484797.103155091022&amp;type=3&amp;theater">NYSE Euronext / Valerie Caviness</a></div></div>One Sunday evening in the spring of 1864, messenger boys employed by the London District Telegraph Company appeared on the doorsteps of several MPs and other prominent figures across the capital. Each boy carried a telegram in a sealed envelope, and an urgent message, at so late an hour, naturally prompted alarm. "Having only arrived from the country on the previous day," one recipient later recalled, "I feared that a fire or some other casualty had occurred subsequent to my departure." But there was no fire, nor any national crisis. As Matthew Sweet tells the story, in his book Inventing The Victorians, the telegram was from Messrs Gabriel, a sketchy firm of dentists and purveyors of a tooth-whitening powder "as used by Her Majesty". The message was a friendly reminder of their opening hours. "I have never had any dealings with Messrs Gabriel," an anonymous correspondent bellowed in a letter to the Times the next day, "and beg to ask by what right do they disturb me by a telegram which is evidently simply the medium of advertisement?" Today, the letter is included in the archives of the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, and with good reason: that telegram was arguably the first example of what would come to be known as <keyword id="35616" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="spam">spam</keyword>.
It's tempting to think of email spam as a largely historical phenomenon, too. Sure, messages touting knock-off V!@gra do still arrive, along with pleas from the daughters of dictators looking to launder "15,000,000.00 (fifteen million) US Dollars", and wondering if you'll help. But they're intercepted by spam filters, or else easily identified and deleted. (Human vanities don't evolve much: tooth-whitening products are still a popular topic.) There was a time, in the 1990s, when serious commentators predicted that spam might kill email altogether. But these days, barring the occasional ingenious twist – what if your friend really did have his wallet stolen at the airport, and needs cash? – you'd be forgiven for concluding that the era of spam was over. Yet the alarming realisation you come to after meeting Finn Brunton, a New York University academic and author of the new book Spam: A Shadow History Of The Internet, is that it's only just beginning.
Partly, this is down to the law of unintended consequences: the campaign against spam has worked so well that it's no longer an option for ordinary, slightly dodgy marketers; instead, it's the domain of organised crime. But it's also because the basic logic of spam – that you can foist your message on millions of people, whether they like it or not, at essentially no cost, and that as long as a tiny proportion of them respond, you'll make a profit – has seeped into the rest of the web. Early in his research, Brunton discovered that defining spam was far harder than he had imagined. Where is the line, exactly, between an unsolicited email or a spam blog comment and "clickbait", those seductive Huffington Post-esque headlines that suck up your attention but don't deliver what they promise? Or branded tweets from Pepsi or Samsung that you never asked to see? Or any form of online advertising? Or, for that matter, the people the writer Merlin Mann calls "personality spammers", endlessly polluting your Facebook feed with their frenzied need for self-expression?
Spending years immersed in spam has given Brunton, who is 32, a degree of sympathy for spammers. "In the early days, being a spammer didn't involve having a lot of technical capacity; it just meant being able to absorb a lot of hatred," he says. "I wanted to understand what it felt like to be that kind of a loathed figure." His work abounds in genuinely detestable figures, such as Davis Hawke, the up-and-coming neo-Nazi leader who pivoted to full-time spamming after it emerged that his father was Jewish, undermining his prospects as an Aryan supremacist. (He is now on the run from authorities, possibly in Thailand or Belize.) But it's hard not to feel for the more hapless characters in Brunton's narrative: overzealous marketers who didn't grasp how much rage they'd be unleashing among anti-spam activists until they suddenly started receiving stacks of pay-on-delivery pizzas, or automated nuisance phone calls 40 times a night. And it's hard not to admire the ingenuity that led to Pitcairn Island, a windswept rock in the South Pacific, becoming the world's largest per capita source of spam, not because its 60 or so residents are all spammers, but because their computers have been remotely commandeered by a "botnet" system, which lets criminals elsewhere use the islanders' computing power to send millions of messages for free.
You could argue that a society is defined by what it deems unacceptable; likewise, Brunton argues, the decisions we've taken about what should count as spam, and what to do about the offenders, make the internet what it is. Ultimately, life online is a struggle to control people's attention. And while the battle against the promoters of bogus Viagra may be nearly over, it's much less clear who's winning the war.
Spam today accounts for somewhere between 70% and 90% of all email sent, depending on which estimate you trust, and email spam is far from the only variety. Yet it took years for the inventors of the internet to realise that it might be a problem. Early on, in 1971, an anti-war activist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a message to all users of his network, the Compatible Time Sharing System, with a headline in caps – "THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY" – but all he got was a slap on the wrist. ("But this is important!" he protested, when his boss told him off.) It was 35 years ago, in 1978, that the first real spam arrived: a dull invitation to a demonstration of new hardware manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation. And it was probably later still, some time in the 1980s, that the word "spam" was first used to describe such messages, a reference not so much to the canned meat as to the Monty Python sketch in which the conversation gradually becomes clogged with repetitive junk.
As the internet exploded, so did spam, and the challenges it posed weren't merely technical: they prompted a surprisingly deep philosophical dispute about what the net, and the nascent worldwide web, should be. Some of its founding fathers were hippies, dreaming of a new society based on trust, in which policing and government wouldn't be needed; spam threatened that. The growing ranks of home users, meanwhile, resented paying steep monthly phone bills to download what turned out to be newsgroups full of unwanted ads. And they responded with aggression.
Spammers got the aforementioned pizzas and phone calls, floods of retaliatory emails and "black faxes", all-black documents designed to waste the recipients' ink. But such shaming tactics worked only as long as spammers could feel shame. The watershed moment is widely agreed to have occurred in 1994, when two married immigration lawyers from Arizona deluged the Usenet discussion system with a message about green cards, then refused to slink away when confronted. The incident made national headlines, and one of the lawyers gave defiant interviews to newspapers. The geeks were welcome to their romantic ideas about the net, she said, but what mattered was the law, which couldn't touch the spammers.
Plenty of anti-spam laws did follow, in America and elsewhere, but they always struggled to combat the monumental forces of human vanity and avarice. Spam needs only a minuscule proportion of recipients to be duped in order to be profitable – even before anti-spam laws, 0.2% was considered an excellent response rate – and that proportion can be relied upon. In 2003, a security flaw at Davis Hawke's company, Amazing Internet Products, exposed the details of people who'd paid $50 a bottle for a herbal "male enhancement" product called Pinacle [sic], which promised to add "three full inches in length". According to Wired magazine, they included the president of a Californian aeroplane parts firm and the manager of a $6bn investment fund.
Such lapses aside, spammers have always benefited from the fact that people who fall for cons generally don't want to publicise their gullibility (or their insecurity about their genitals). The exceptions have arisen when the sums involved have been too large to brush off. In 2000, Brunton reports, a US businessman named James Adler tried to sue Nigeria's government and central bank after he paid out more than $5m as part of a mail-based 419 scam (the classic "Dear sir, I am a Nigerian prince" advance-fee fraud) in the expectation that he'd someday receive a 40% cut of a far larger sum. It takes a special blend of cynicism and naivete to fall for a 419: on the one hand, the trick feeds off racist assumptions about Africans being corrupt; on the other, it relies on the victim's confidence that the offer being made is wholly honest – and that, when the funds finally arrive, nobody at the bank will raise an eyebrow. "Which is crazy," Brunton points out. "Banks and law enforcement agencies monitor and investigate unusually large transfers all the time."
Not surprisingly, Adler's case didn't get very far. Three years later, a Czech retiree walked into the Nigerian embassy in Prague to demand assistance in recovering $600,000 that he'd spent on a 419 email fraud, much of it borrowed. When informed that no help would be forthcoming, he pulled a gun on the consul and shot him dead.
The reason this kind of spam is much less of a nuisance these days isn't primarily laws, though. It's the huge advances that have been made in spam filters, which use complex algorithms to learn to sift the bad emails from the good. The systems now in use don't need to rely on identifying especially spammy phrases, such as "Nigerian prince" or "male enhancement". Instead, by comparing vast corpuses of legitimate email and spam, they're able to determine which combinations of seemingly innocuous words mark a message as suspicious. To use one of Brunton's examples: any of the words "madam", "guarantee", "sexy" and "republic" might appear in legitimate email, but an effective filter will learn that they almost never all arise together except in spam. ("Litspam", those incongruous snippets of old novels one occasionally encounters in spam emails, is an effort to beat this system.) Oddly enough, one person who deserves credit for the relatively unclogged state of your inbox is Kenneth Lay, the late and disgraced chief executive of Enron. Academics who developed spam filters had trouble finding sufficiently large quantities of non-spam email to study, until US authorities published the 619,000 internal emails they'd seized in the course of investigations.
And yet the decisive blow that filters struck to old-school email spam may only have helped it mushroom elsewhere. Much modern spam isn't designed for consumption by humans at all; instead, it's "robot-readable", created by one non-human entity for the attention of another – specifically, the "spiders" that crawl the web compiling data for Google – in the hope of pushing a junk page higher up the list of search results. Meanwhile, the rise of social networking has seen the growth of numerous new types of spam, including the creation of vast armies of fake Twitter followers. If you've ever been suddenly retweeted by scores of obviously fictional accounts, it's because a spammer somewhere is building a stable of fake personas, engaging in plausibly human-seeming online activity, so that he or she can charge someone else money for ostensibly boosting their followership. (And if you're ever tempted to buy Twitter followers yourself – there are numerous such services online: £14 or so will buy you 20,000 – you can assume that they're not real people.)
Not that classic spam no longer exists; it has just slipped beyond the reach of law, into the purely criminal world of phishing attacks and online banking fraud. In 2011, researchers analysing the money trail behind one email, advertising Viagra-style drugs, found that the web domain involved was registered in Russia, hosted in Brazil and managed in China, taking payments through a Turkish server to an Azerbaijani bank, with the product eventually dispatched from Chennai in India.
Define spam in the abstract way that Brunton prefers, though – as "[using] information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention" – and it becomes easier to see that, in a sense, it's everywhere online today. One interesting example: Demand Media, the "content farm" that operates sites such as eHow and Livestrong, pays humans (poorly) to write articles selected on the basis of what web users are searching for. Hence such eHow masterpieces as How To Wear A Sweater Vest and How To Sign Up For A Yahoo Email Account and How To Catch A Horse. Is that spam? The web, Brunton points out, has been colonised by clickbait – "vast algal blooms of linked content with catchy titles, top-10 lists about trending topics, wild claims, and needlessly contrarian stances, all delivered with only a few hundred words per article." Are their publishers spammers? And, if so, why not also "the canny [newspaper] editor who knows that sex, serial killers and how-to stories sell"?
There can't be definitive answers. The point is simply that human attention is a resource, and that it's possible for others to consume yours at little cost to themselves, which means it's a resource that's easily abused. Of course, society couldn't function if people weren't allowed to impinge on your attention to some degree. But how to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions, and how to fight the unacceptable ones? Such questions matter, because they end up determining how we spend our attention online, and thus – in an increasingly connected world – how we spend our lives. For prompting us to reflect on such things, perhaps the penis-enlargement salespeople of the world deserve our grudging thanks.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

You Searched For "Chennai power bills" and got 10 results

This made-in-IIT solar plant is illuminating thousands of rural homes in India

Anushree Singh

It's master vs disciple: Dhoni takes on Pant in today's second IPL match as CSK clashes with DC

IANS

BJP Seeks Financial Package For Seemandhra In Return For Telangana Support

Times Of India

Rishabh Pant to donate match fee towards rescue operations in Uttarakhand

PTI

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