* THE TIMES OF INDIA, CHENNAIFRIDAY, MARCH 17, 201722 TIMES BUSINESS

Chennai: Union Minister for com-merce and industry Nirmala Sit-haraman on Thursday said India’sengineering exports are likely toreach $60+ billion in fiscal 2016-17,on the back of revival of demandin the USA and for select productslike iron.

“Just between April-January,our engineering exports have tou-ched $50.87 billion, exceeding thetotal shipments of $49 billion in2015-16. Only for the month of Ja-nuary, we’ve seen aggregate ex-ports of $5.29 billion; that’s a 12%increase compared to the same pe-riod last year, said Sitharaman onthe sidelines of the sixth edition ofInternational Engineering Sour-cing Show (IESS) held in Chennaion Thursday.

There was enormous potentialfor India and Russia to enhance bi-lateral trade, which is presently at$6.62 billion, said the Minister, ad-ding that she’s had fruitful discus-sions with Denis Manturov, mini-

ster of industry and trade of theRussian Federation for leading a120 member delegation.

“We were particularly interes-ted in the North South TransportCorridor (INSTC) as it will cut ti-me and costs for transporting go-ods between both countries, saidthe Minister. The INSTC aims atincreasing trade by creating aland, air and ship route betweenIndia, Russia, Iran, Europe andCentral Asia — touching cities likeMumbai, Moscow, Tehran, Baku,Bandar Abbas, Astrakhan, Ban-dar Anzali, enroute.

The Minister said they were al-so looking at other measures, in-cluding the proposed FTA betweenIndia and the Eurasian EconomicUnion, which includes Russia.

“We need to finale the revised ver-sion of the Bilateral InvestmentTreaty. We’ve invited my counter-parts to be a partner country at theIndia International JewelleryShow 2017 this July in Mumbai andthe Advantage Healthcare Indiathis October,” said the Minister.

The department of commerceis keenly supporting technologyupgrades for engineering manu-facturers for boosting exports in li-ne with the objectives of EEPC.“We are looking at R&D Labs andidentified industrial clusters, sothat our products are world class,”said the Minister.

The International Enginee-ring Sourcing Show held in Chen-nai saw 400 exhibitors from Indiaand abroad.

Jan Sees 12% Y-o-Y Increase To $5.9 Bn In Exports

Engg exports may touch$60 billion on US demand

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Section 41-A of CrPC says a police officer requ-ires a ‘reasonable complaint’ and ‘credibleinformation’ to issue notice asking the su-

spect to appear before him for inquiry, said lawy-er V Raghavachari. “If he complies with noticeand continues to comply with the notice, he shallnot be arrested in respect of the offence,” he poin-ted out, adding that the officer concerned mustrecord reasons if he still wanted to arrest the su-spect. The magistrate, on his part, must read thereasons, apply his mind, and remand him in cus-tody only if his judicial mind is convinced, Rag-havachari said. Referring to Stayzilla controver-sy, Raghavachari said in normal course the ad-vertising agency or a similarly-placed complai-nant has to approach a civil court with a moneysuit for recovery of dues. It shall also pay about7% of the disputed amount as court fee. While amoney suit takes about two years for fruition, po-lice action is instantaneous, he said.

“Police convert a civil dispute into a criminaloffence or vice versa, depending on the circums-tance. By smartly introducing such words as ‘in-tention to cheat’ or ‘criminally intimidated’ poli-ce make a regulation civil dispute appear like acriminal offence, and remanding magistratesfall for it,” said Paul Kanagaraj. “Higher judicia-ry must deprecate this practice, as it also meansdirect revenue loss to the government,” he said.

Crafty lenders reducecops to ‘recoveryagents’, say HCs

Chennai: 12 startups are set tobe part of the inaugural cohortof YES FINTECH, YESBANK’s business acceleratorprogram. Selected from over753 applications across the glo-be, the final 12 were selectedfrom the top 35 startups whoshowcased their solutions tothe YES FINTECH Leadershipover a 2 day pitching session.

The Accelerator has been set upin collaboration with T Hub,Anthill, a platform for earlygrowth startups and LetsTalk-Payments, a global platform forfintech insights as the knowled-ge partner.

The 12 startups are SoCash(network of small merchants tomake cash accessible beyondATMs), Signzy (Digital KYC,biometric enabled digital cont-racts etc), Rupeeseed (robo ad-visory), Redcarpet, (alternativesocial and digital scoring for in-sta-credit), R1mo (foreign ex-change marketplace thats usesblockchain technology), Pay-key (easy payments through anintegrated in-app keyboard),

Numberz (integrating busi-ness workflows with bankingservices), Morph.Ai (bots forenterprises), FRS Labs (cybersecurity, fraud detection andidentity verification using bio-metrics and AI), Click & Pay(cashless, secure and flexiblepayments), Authme (using AIto replace passwords with uni-que pattern technology andbring UX and security toget-her) and Anytime Loan (alter-nate lending platform), a state-ment said. The selected star-tups cover domains like pay-ments, lending and alternativescoring models, insta-credit, cy-ber security, risk intelligence,capital markets and enterprisesoftware cutting across techno-logies like AI and machine lear-ning, big data & analytics,blockchain amongst others.

The cohort will go through a15 week program involving 3week onsite interactions atMumbai and Hyderabad and 12weeks offsite interactions.

Over the 15 weeks the start-ups will receive mentorshipfrom industry experts, integra-tion with YES Bank’s ecosys-tem, access to funding upto $1million and the bank’s network.

12 startups join YESBank’s accelerator

Ranjani Ayyar@timesgroup.com

Coimbatore: Sales of electrictwo-wheelers have hit a speedbump as poor quality of batte-ries and withdrawal of govern-ment subsidies for three yearsimpacted sentiments thro-wing the once promising in-dustry into a tailspin. The in-dustry, which clocked peak sa-les of around 1.2 lakh units in2010-11, has sold only about25,000 units in 2016, senior offi-cials the Society of Manufactu-rers of Electric Vehicles(SMEV) said.

“There were 68 manufactu-rers in 2008. But there are only14 now,” said Hemalatha Anna-malai, southern chapter chief

of SMEV. “Battery is the mainreason (for poor sales). We arenot able to get good quality bat-teries,” she said.

“Local manufacturing isnot up to the mark and the qua-lity of batteries is questionab-le,” she stated. Batteries usedin these vehicles are almost en-tirely imported from firmsthat do not understand Indianmarket conditions, she said.

“We have the capacity toproduce 30,000 vehicles a year.But we are operating at only20% capacity,” Hemalatha,who is also the founder andCEO of Ampere Vehicles, a lea-ding maker of electric vehi-cles, said. Only about 2 millionelectric two-wheelers have be- en sold in the country so far,

ilised for only about 30 kms.Though the advent of hig-

her quality lithium ion batteri-es, which can last up to five ye-ars and can be used to run vehi-cles for about 75,000 kms, hashelped in addressing the quali-ty issue, cost is a big impedi-ment, industry officials said.

A lithium ion battery usedfor these vehicles costs aboutRs 27,000.

These batteries are not af-fordable for average buyerseven with higher governmentsubsidy, Hemalatha stated.The government should alsoopen charging points at key lo-cations to enable users of elec-tric two-wheelers to rechargetheir batteries, she said.

she informed. In contrast, aro-und 42 million vehicles are soldin China per year, she said.

The market for these vehi-cles collapsed after the govern-ment withdrew subsidies inApril 2012, she stated. Subsidybenefits were restored only in2015, which has led to improve-ment in sales, she said. Theunion government provides asubsidy of Rs 7,500 for a lowspeed electric vehicle.

Lead acid batteries, whichcost between Rs 8,000 and Rs12,000, can last for about 2 ½ ye-ars. They can be used to run ve-hicles for up to 50 kms after be-ing charged for 6-8 hours. Butpoor quality batteries have ashorter lifespan and can be ut-

Electric two-wheeler sales skid on poor batteries,withdrawal of subsidies from government

Allirajan.M@timesgroup.com

Bengaluru: The Alibaba-backed digital payments andcommerce platform Paytmhas launched its operations inCanada, the company saidThursday, marking its first in-ternational foray. Paytm willoffer various utility paymentsfor residents and has partne-red with about 1,000 mer-chants initially in Canada, itsaid.

“Apart from utility bills,users will also be able to payfor their insurance and pro-perty taxes by using the newPaytm Canada app,” said Ha-rinder Takhar, chief executi-ve officer of Paytm Labs.

Takhar will be heading theCanada business. Havingstarted its Paytm Labs initia-tive in Canada in 2014 with twopeople focused on enginee-ring and data science for thecompany, the company has in-creased the team to 50 people.

John Tory, mayor of To-ronto, was present at the com-pany’s Noida headquarters atthe time of the announce-ment.

Paytm startspayment biz

in CanadaTIMES NEWS NETWORK

TWEEPLE CHASE

For many industries, Made in America will become Made (by robots) in America. Robots are cheaper than China. | Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb

Very grateful to the FBI & DOJ for bringing to justice the Russian officials & hackers who led the attack on Yahoo. | Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo

Excited to be an investor in @coherohealth to help 300M people worldwide living with asthma and COPD. @SamsungNEXT | Amit Garg, VC, Silicon Valley

I support the views of @_sachinbansal et al on the arrest of #stayzilla founder. This is unwarranted highhandedness which must stop | Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CMD, Biocon

Chennai: Digital marketing startupUMM studios has received funding fromC Kishore, MD, VIP Real Estate, who hasinvested in his personal capacity. The investment has also resulted in amerger of UMM with Kishore's digitalmarketing company Ideomind with eachpartner holding 50% stake. The merged company would be knownas Ideomind private limited.UMM, which was so long aservice-oriented company, offeringdigital marketing solutions would scaleup and have products on omnichannelretailing through the funding. “We have so far been bootstrapped andnow, we would want to scale up and themerged company would have 60%products and 40% services,” saidSanthosh Palavesh, founder, UMM. TNN

Digital marketingcompany UMMmerges withIdeomind

INSTC aims at increasing trade by cre-ating a land, air and ship route betweenIndia, Russia, Iran, Europe and CentralAsia, by cutting time and costs fortransporting goods

Coimbatore: The Society ofManufacturers of ElectricVehicles (SMEV) has urged theTN government to includeelectric two-wheelers under its‘Amma Two-wheeler Scheme’.The scheme envisagesproviding government subsidyof up to 50% of the cost of thetwo-wheeler to 1lakh women inthe state. TNN

SMEV for electric2-wheelers under‘Amma’ scheme

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