It will be second after the space agency’s existing Satish Dhawan Space Centre, founded in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota in 1971, with two launch pads.
The spaceport will be dedicated to launching smaller launch vehicles and will be ready in about two years, ISRO chairman S Somanath said on the sidelines of the event in Tamil Nadu.
Spread over 2,350 acres, the Kulasekharapatnam spaceport will help save fuel for small rocket launches as the port can launch rockets directly south over the Indian Ocean without requiring crossing landmasses.
“This facility will play an instrumental role in accommodating the increasing launch frequency of both ISRO and the growing private space industry in the coming years.
Bhatt, director general of the Indian Space Association.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and majority owner of Paytm Payments Bank, has stepped down from the board of the troubled unit days after the Indian regulator signalled continuity at the financial firm Paytm.
Paytm Payments Bank said Monday it was reconstituting the board of directors at the Paytm Payments Bank, an associate of Paytm, with the appointment of four executives — ex-Central Bank of India Chairman Srinivasan Sridhar, retired IAS officer Shri Debendranath Sarangi, former executive director of Bank of Baroda Shri Ashok Kumar Garg, and Retd.
The appointment follows the Indian central bank penalizing Paytm Payments Bank, in which Sharma owns a 51% stake, with severe business restrictions.
(Paytm owned a 49% stake in Paytm Payments Bank.)
TechCrunch reported early this month that the Indian central bank has weighed ordering a board shakeup at Paytm Payments Bank and removing some of the company officials, including Paytm founder Sharma.
India has updated official rules in the space sector to attract global investors and companies, after opening it up to private players four years ago.
The new foreign direct investment (FDI) policy raises limits on foreign investment, potentially spurring renewed interest in the South Asian space community.
Private and public actors in India have been taking measures to increase participation in the country’s space sector.
India has around 190 space tech startups, offering solutions including launch vehicles, space situational awareness and hyperspectral imagery.
Investments in Indian space startups reached over $124 million last year, per government data.
However, awareness of the monetary and environmental benefits associated with carbon credits is low.
It was early, as no methodologies were available at the time to create carbon credits from agriculture.
However, the 34-year-old entrepreneur decided to start his venture once the methodologies started appearing in developed markets, including the U.S. and Europe.
Unlike nature-based credits, carbon credits from renewable energy projects are easy to measure and record and do not involve co-benefits to nature.
That said, the rigorous oversight helps bring high-quality carbon credits that can be sold globally.
An Indian state government has fixed security issues impacting its website that exposed the sensitive documents and personal information of millions of residents.
The bugs existed on the Rajasthan government website related to Jan Aadhaar, a state program to provide a single identifier to families and individuals in the state to access welfare schemes.
One of the bugs allowed anyone to access personal documents and information with knowledge of a registrant’s phone number.
The state’s Jan Aadhaar portal, which launched in 2019, says it has more than 78 million individual registrants and 20 million families.
The portal aims to offer “One Number, One Card, One Identity” to residents in the northern state of Rajasthan for accessing state government welfare schemes.
Krutrim, an AI startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round that values it at $1 billion.
It’s also the first Indian AI startup to become a unicorn, it said.
Matrix Partners India — which has also backed Aggarwal’s other two startups, ride-hailing firm Ola and EV startup Ola Electric — led the $50 million “first round” in Krutrim, it said Friday.
The startup plans to launch a conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages, the startup said.
The startup plans to make a beta version of its eponymous chatbot available to consumers next month and follow it with rolling out APIs to developers and enterprises.
Sony called off the merger between its India unit and Zee Entertainment on Monday, ending a two-year acquisition deliberation that would have created a $10 billion media powerhouse in the South Asian market.
Sony said in a statement that it has sent a termination letter to Zee after the Indian firm failed to meet the conditions, despite a 30-day extension.
Sony also sought for Zee to improve its finances, something that has only grown worse in recent quarters.
The deal would have created a $10 billion media powerhouse in India, where billionaire Mukesh Ambani is increasingly flexing his wealth and reach.
Zee and Sony have been important fixtures in the Indian TV industry for the last 25 years.
The iPhone 15 and its many iterations comprised more than half of Apple’s Q4 smartphone shipments of nearly 2.8 million units in India, Canalys said in its quarterly report.
Apple started selling the iPhone 15 series in India in the first batch of its availability in September.
Nonetheless, Apple is becoming a familiar brand in the Indian smartphone market and is rapidly growing its local presence.
However, the country saw a minimal 2% yearly drop, with 148.6 million smartphone units shipped in 2023.
“Canalys expects the Indian smartphone market to grow by mid-single digits in 2024, driven by affordable 5G and the pandemic period replacement cycle.
Google has pulled many crypto exchanges, including Binance and Kraken, from its Play Store in India, the latest blow to already dwindling India’s crypto exchange already dwindling India’s crypto exchange.
Apple pulled the apps earlier this week pulled the apps earlier this week and on Thursday evening ISPs in India began blocking the URLs of the crypto exchange websites.
This only impacts users who attempt to access the Indian iOS app store or the Binance website from India,” Binance said earlier Friday.
On Tuesday, CoinDCX announced that it would provide rewards to customers who transfer their crypto assets from global exchanges to its India-based platform.
Coinbase, another popular global crypto exchange, stopped onboarding new customers in India last year.
Naturally, global crypto VC funds flooded into India, hoping to replicate the home runs that Accel, Sequoia and Lightspeed had hit a decade prior.
Bullish reports predicted India housed over 100 million crypto participants, despite far fewer participating in any investment instrument in reality.
Despite having an earlier blanket ban overturned in court, regulators persisted in likening crypto to Ponzi schemes and pressured banks from engaging with any crypto startups.
The pending removal across Google Play, internet providers and beyond caps a journey mired with shutdowns, pivots and relocations abroad for Indian crypto startups.
Some entrepreneurs are still fighting for the Indian crypto dream, requesting New Delhi reconsider the punishing 30% crypto tax.
