Covid-19 outbreak: Mumbai races against time to create health care infra

Doctors in Mumbai are scrambling for new and experimental treatment protocol to ensure faster recovery of patients, with the city emerging as the epicentre of India’s Covid crisis.
This is a race against time to develop health care infrastructure, given the city is fast running out of dedicated Covid-19 isolation wards and intensive care units.
The city administration is pulling out all stops to create Covid-dedicated as well as intensive care beds. On the lines of Wuhan, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has begun work on a make-shift 1,000-bed mega hospital in the commercial hub of Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC).
The hospital will serve as an isolation facility for non-critical Covid-19 patients. Expected to be ready in a fortnight, the new makeshift facility can be scaled up to 5,000 beds, if needed. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will run the hospital that will have, among other things, oxygen facilities and pathological laboratories.

A task force comprising nine top doctors has been created to oversee the treatment of patients. From experimenting on biological drugs for skin ailments to rheumatoid arthritis on patients in government hospitals — they have now decided to try a new treatment protocol.
Speaking to Business Standard, Sanjay Oak, member of the task force, said steroids (acting as anti-inflammatory) and low-molecular-weight heparin or LMWH (used in prevention of blood clots) will be given to patients in stage 2b of the disease (or moderate cases). Stages of the disease are mild, moderate, and severe based on symptoms, respiratory rate, and radiological findings.

With no income and food, Dharavi gasps for air as Covid-19 cases increase

The roads are empty, the shops closed, and some areas are cordoned off. Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is locked down like the rest of Mumbai. However, the rising number of coronavirus (Covid-19) cases in thisteeming shantytown, where people live in huts and decrepit tenements, has put it front and centre of India’s fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

So far, Dharavi has reported five cases, including one death — that of a 56-year-old man. But there is fear that the numbers could inch up in a place where people grapple daily with overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. To add to their misery, the lockdown has left residents with no income and little food.

Rajesh Tope, Maharashtra’s health minister, told Business Standard that Dharavi was a grave concern for the government, given the density of its population and the poverty of its residents. “We are ensuring there is strict adherence to the rules of the lockdown in Dharavi. We do not allow crowds to collect, but it isn’t easy. There’s a space constraint, people are poor and without work right now. There are challenges,” he says.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) estimate that the average monthly income of a household in Dharavi is below Rs 5,000. Around 5-10 per cent of its population of 1.5 million, spread over 613 hectares and seven Mumbai wards, have headed back to their home towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar after the lockdown.

Sajeevan Jaiswal, a cloth merchant, is dipping into his meagre savings to somehow get by till the lockdown ends. His shop, near the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation office in Dharavi, is shut. Jaiswal fears for the safety of his family — his wife, two sons, and a daughter-in-law — who live above his shop in a small, 200 square feet space.

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“I don’t let them step out of the house,” he says. “If groceries have to be brought, I do it. We don’t have the luxury of using hand sanitizers and hand wash. We share a small bar of soap between us,” he says, speaking through a cheap mask, his only means of protection outside of home.

Jaiswal’s fears are echoed by Anil Shivram Kasare, a social worker and resident of Dharavi. The biggest challenge, he says, comes from the slum’s public toilets. “There are 1,500 public toilets in Dharavi. This is not enough for the people who reside here. But what can we do? We have to use them. The danger of catching the virus lurks everywhere in a slum,” he says.

Dharavi’s narrow bylanes, its lack of hygiene, and large families squeezed into small spaces — some of them near open gutters — make the area a veritable nightmare for any effort to step up cleanliness. To tackle the situation, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has set up a branch in each of the seven wards of Dharavi.

Every branch has around 150 sanitation workers who fan out across the length and breadth of the slum pocket, sweeping the roads and collecting garbage twice a day. Fumigation is done every two days. But the garbage piles up quickly, says Akhtar Khan, an advocate who helps run a free food delivery service for Dharavi’s poor. “These days, people have been frequently sweeping their homes, no matter how small, in an attempt to keep them clean. It’s a good habit. But let’s see how long they do it,” he says.

Whistleblower alleges siphoning of funds from MIAL; GVK gets MCA notice

International News
The GVK Group, which is in locked in a legal battle with the Adani Group on stake sale in its flagship Mumbai International Airport (MIAL), on Tuesday said it has received a notice from the corporate affairs ministry (MCA), seeking some details about the airport operator.
The group is resisting the Adanis' bid to buy out the 13.5 percent stake being held by its South African JV partner Bidvest in MIAL. The issue is with the Bombay High Court.
The Hyderabad-based infrastructure major, which has interest in power, coal mines and aviation among others, however, denied that other group companies have also received notices from the ministry.
"We confirm only MIAL has received a communication asking for certain details/information, which are being furnished," GVK said in a statement.
MIAL is a JV between GVK-led consortium of Bidvest and Airports Company of South Africa, and the state-run Airports Authority, in which GVK holds majority 50.5 percent and AAI 26 percent and the remaining 23.5 percent are with the two foreign partners.
While Bid Services Division Mauritius or Bidvest owns 13.5 percent, ACSA Global (Airports Company of South Africa) holds 10 percent in the nation's second busiest airport.

 The statement came after a section of the media reported that the GVK group was on the ministry radar following a whistle-blower alleging siphoning of funds, issuance of fake bills to inflate cost to get undue Customs and Excise duty benefits among others."We are not aware of any whistleblower complaint or any allegations that have appeared in a section of the media, which are baseless," the company said....READ MORE

Mumbai expects 20% salary hike, Bengaluru's IT staff expect least increment

Economy policy
Professionals in the financial capital are looking at higher pay hikes of 20 percent or more, while those in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru expect only about 10 percent increment this year, says a survey.
Professionals in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai are looking for higher pay hikes of above 20 percent, while their counterparts in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru expect only 0-10 percent hike, says a survey by jobs portal Shine.com conducted across professionals from across industries in Mumbai, Delhi- NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai.

It has found that in Mumbai almost 37 percent of those polled are expecting increment of above 20 percent, while in Pune and Chennai it is 36 and 38 percent, respectively. As many as 62 percent of employees in Mumbai are looking for over 20 percent appraisal in the education or training sector, around 56 percent in the auto sector are eyeing the same.

"It is interesting to note the variance in employee expectations across different metro cities and across sectors. While employee sentiments are high across most sectors, it is a given that not all organisations will be able to meet these expectations," said Zairus Master, CEO, Shine.com.
Further, 48 percent in the auto sector and 38 percent in the education/training sector are also looking for over 20 percent hike in Pune. In Bengaluru, professionals are expecting up to 10 percent hikes, while those in Delhi-NCR are on a lower side.


 Over 46 percent of e-commerce sector employees in Bengaluru are only expecting an average growth of 11-15 percent. A sector-wise analysis of appraisal expectations reveals that the highest appraisal sentiment is being carried by professionals in the banking, financial services and insurance and BPO/BPO/ITES sectors with over 35 percent expecting over 20 percent hikes.

Nykaa on its way to become the next billion-dollar Indian company

Company News

Nykaa, an omni-channel retailer of beauty products, could well be on its way to become the next billion-dollar Indian company. The Mumbai-based start-up has raised Rs 100 crore from private equity firm TPG Growth at a valuation of $724 million, company filings sourced from business intelligence platform Paper.vc, showed.

This means, in just six months, the company’s valuation has more than doubled. In September 2018, when Lighthouse Advisors invested Rs 113 crore to buy out early investor TVS Capital, Nykaa was valued at $330 million. Earlier, in 2018, the start-up had also raised Rs 160 crore through primary and secondary share sale.

TPG comes in as the first large foreign investor in the company. As a growth-stage investor, TPG has backed several businesses in India including Lenskart, BookMyShow, Janalakshmi Finance and Manipal Hospitals. The round marks a renewed interest by investors in niche e-commerce firms, especially when some players in the beauty category are struggling.

“TPG Growth’s Rs 100 crore investment gives Nykaa a spectacular jump in post-money valuation. The private equity firm’s investment gives Nykaa a Rs 5,027 crore ($724 million) valuation. The raise comes after a long hiatus in institutional investment in the cosmetic platform,” said Vivek Durai, founder of Paper.vc.

Durai said, the handsome jump in valuation can be attributed to Nykaa’s strong performance in the recent years. It more than doubled its revenue in FY17-18 to Rs 578 crore and narrowed losses 23 per cent at Rs 28.8 crore year-on-year, according to Paper.vc.


 Nykaa was started in 2012 by former investment banker Falguni Nayar. She was the managing director at Kotak Investment Banking...Read More

Mukesh Ambani's plans to take on Amazon and Walmart hit a legal firewall

Companies News:

There’s a wrinkle in plans made by Asia’s richest man to take on Amazon.com Inc and Walmart Inc on his home turf in India: his telecom and retail businesses can’t share data.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd., has outlined how he will marry the might of his group’s 9,900-plus retail stores and 280-million strong telecom user base to bolster his e-commerce venture. A senior Reliance executive says that any data sharing on customers between the two, could run into a legal wall.

“They are different companies so there are data privacy rules,” Ashwin Khasgiwala, Reliance Retail Ltd.’s chief financial officer said at a conference in Mumbai on Tuesday. “They’re different platforms,” he said while declining to elaborate on how the group plans to overcome it.
While its brick-and-mortar retail businesses are housed in Reliance Retail, the telecom operations are in a separate legal entity Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. Legal hurdles in sharing information can stymie a variety of lucrative uses of that data to sell more products to customers.

Ambani, who calls data the ‘new oil’ and has warned of ‘data colonization’ by overseas firms in India, can potentially find workarounds for the legal snarl. One option would be to merge the two Reliance units.


 Data sharing between “two legal entities is going to be very difficult,” said Abheek Singhi, head of Boston Consulting Group’s consumer practice in India. “My view would be at some point in time, at least from a legal entity perspective, it will come together.”Read More

IL&FS crisis: ED files PMLA case, conducts raids in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai

Companies News:

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted raids on at least six locations in Mumbai and Delhi-NCR region in connection with the multi-crore IL&FS payment default crisis, officials said.

They said the action by the central probe agency came after it registered a criminal complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the alleged payment default case and searches were being conducted at the residential locations of executives linked to the Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (ILFS) including its former chairman Ravi Parthasarathy and few others.
The raids are on in Mumbai and locations in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR) including Gurugram, they said.

Officials added that the investigators are looking at collecting additional evidences and documents apart from what they have obtained till now as part of the probe.

The debt crisis at the infrastructure lender came to light following a series of defaults by its group companies beginning September, 2018.

IL&FS has defaulted on payment of loans to SIDBI and along with its subsidiaries has a combined debt of over Rs 91,000 crore.

The ED's case is based on an FIR filed before the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi Police in December last year.


 Ashish Begwani, Director of Enso Infrastructures (P) Ltd, had filed the case against officials of IL&FS Rail Ltd for allegedly causing Rs 70 crore loss to his company by fraudulent means.

GoAir bird strike case: Pilots shut down wrong engine, says DGCA probe

Current Affairs:

While engine number 2 of the flight was affected due to bird strike, the pilots on GoAir's Delhi-Mumbai flight decided to shut down engine number 1, stated a report of Indian aviation watchdog DGCA on the incident that occurred on June 21, 2017.

Once the aircraft stopped climbing at an altitude of 3,330 feet, the pilots "realised their mistake", and consequently started engine 1 and brought back the plane to Delhi airport, stated the Directorate General of Civil Aviation report dated November 5, 2018.

"(The) incident was caused by incorrect identification of engine affected with high vibration followed by non-adherence to recommended procedures, lack of situational awareness, poor cockpit resource management and poor handling of aircraft during emergency subsequent to bird strike," it said.

The probe report has recommended that "suitable corrective action" should be taken for both the pilots "as deemed by the DGCA headquarters in view of the above findings".


The incident happened on an A320 aircraft, which had a total 156 passengers, at 5.58 am on June 21, 2017...Read More

French firm's Indian unit buys Prabhat's dairy business for Rs 1,700 crore

Companies News:

Global dairy major Lactalis will buy Mumbai-based Prabhat Dairy, a bulk producer of milk and dairy products, in its third acquisition in India.

Prabhat told the stock exchanges on Monday that Lactalis’s Indian subsidiary Tirumala Milk Products was acquiring its dairy business for Rs 1,700 crore, which is 1.17 times its FY18 sales of Rs 1,442 crore. The transaction is subject to mandatory approvals. The company did not specify a timeline for completion of the deal, but analysts expect it to be done in the next six months.

At Monday’s closing price of Rs 93.05 per share, Prabhat’s market capitalisation stands at Rs 909 crore.Kotak Mahindra Capital Company was the financial advisor to Prabhat on the deal. Veritas acted as the legal advisor.


 Besides the dairy business, the transaction also involves sale of 100 per cent shareholding in Sunfresh Agro Industries, a subsidiary of Prabhat, via a share purchase agreement, the company said...Read More