The Silent Cost Of Corrosion Corrosion doesn’t talk back. It doesn’t make the front pages the way a bridge collapse or a monsoon flood or a factory fire does. But it eats through steel, quietly, year after year. In the end, that slow erosion adds up to a staggering number. Corrosion costs India ₹14 lakh crore annually, or 4.3 per cent of its GDP. Bridges, highways, railroads, ports, power infrastructure, buildings and industrial assets all age prematurely. This is from a Nomura report shared with the Economic Times. Where the damage hurts most The damage is not evenly distributed. The…
Author: Ankita Moharana
Two Opposite Trends, Simultaneously in Conflict Car buyers all over the world are doing two contradictory things at once. Spending rules are getting tighter. At the same time, they’re falling harder than ever for electric cars. A new report from McKinsey captures these two trends colliding in real time. The study is based on a survey of more than 20,000 mobility users in China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. And that means the automakers caught in the middle don’t get to solve for just one trend. They need to get both. The Nuance of the Affordability…
Nearly 95% cloud cover and widespread rain have defied textbook forecasts a monsoon trough, local lows and a favourable Indian Ocean Dipole are, for now, outmuscling the Pacific Industry Odisha Bureau, Jul 26: Forecasters had a straightforward expectation this year: a strong El Niño would thin the clouds, sink dry air over the subcontinent and leave the southwest monsoon short. What arrived instead was cloud cover across nearly 95 per cent of India’s skies and rain across regions the models had largely written off. The gap between prediction and observation raises an uncomfortable question has El Niño weakened, or is…
Industry Odisha Bureau, Jul 26: In 2019, India had fewer than ten private space companies. By 2023 it had more than 140. Nothing about the country’s engineering talent changed in those four years. What changed was a rule. Until June 2020, ISRO held an effective monopoly over launch activity, and building a private rocket in India was, in practical terms, not permissible. The consequence was visible in the numbers. Between 2010 and 2022, payloads and rocket bodies in low Earth orbit more than doubled, and the global space economy swelled from roughly $270 billion to about $400 billion by 2019…
Industry Odisha Bureau, Jul 26: Every monsoon, India’s hospitals brace for the same surge: overcrowded wards, strained diagnostic labs, and millions of infections that drain public resources and idle workers across the country’s wettest months. India carries roughly one-third of the world’s dengue burden, yet until now its defenses consisted of what doctors have relied on for decades emptying breeding grounds, distributing nets, and urging households to cover water containers and clean out coolers. There has never been a specific treatment for the disease. That calculus is changing. The approval of Qdenga, India’s first dengue vaccine, marks a departure from…
Ambassador Abhay Thakur signals New Delhi’s strategic pivot at Mandalay mining forum; two delegations in seven months reflect urgency to secure critical minerals. India is pursuing a deliberate strategy to source rare earth minerals from Myanmar, moving beyond diplomatic overtures to direct engagement with mining operations and rebel-controlled territories—a stark indication of how critical New Delhi views breaking free from Chinese control of the sector. The push came into sharp focus this week when India’s Ambassador to Myanmar, Abhay Thakur, addressed the opening of a mining forum in Mandalay, announcing that cooperation between New Delhi and Naypyidaw has “picked up…
The headline figures glitter—$11.5 billion, 53,500 jobs, India’s largest metallurgical investment. But in Rayagada and Sundargarh, where bulldozers haven’t arrived and no contracts have been signed, locals will spend the next eighteen months watching officials map out their land, negotiate their displacement, and decide what tomorrow looks like for communities built on mineral-rich earth. This is the part of megaproject economics that rarely makes the press release: the grinding, unglamorous work before construction begins. Adani Enterprises and Abu Dhabi’s International Resources Holding announced their 50-50 partnership last month to build an integrated aluminium corridor spanning the full value chain—from bauxite…