Schools Financial News

Vedanta Aluminium, has said that it has dedicated 130 ‘Nand Ghars’ at Jharsuguda, Odisha. The ‘Nand Ghars’ are a network of ‘modernised anganwadis’ supported by Vedanta and function as hubs of women and child development in a bid to accelerate development of local communities. It said that these ‘Nand Ghars’ will transform the lives of over 7,000 children in 127 villages in Jharsuguda. The inaugural event was attended by Dipali Das, MLA, and Sunil Gupta, COO, Vedanta Aluminium. Appreciating Vedanta’s developmental efforts in the district, Dipali Das said, “I would like to thank Vedanta and Anil Agarwal Foundation for modernising our anganwadis with all essential amenities for the holistic development of children and their mothers.”

Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) to implement an IP-based CCTV surveillance system in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. “IOCL has always been a forward-thinking and innovative company, always a pioneer in the implementation of new and advanced tech into their environment. We are just very proud to be associated with this project,”Arun Gupta, Managing Director of Transline Technologies said.

Krutrim AI, the artificial intelligence firm founded by Ola Electric’s Bhavish Aggarwal, has raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion from venture capital fund Matrix Partners India and other investors. Krutrim AI is the first Indian unicorn of 2024 along with being the first Indian AI firm to join the billion dollar club.

Earthful, on Friday announced that it has raised Rs 3.3 crore in a funding round led by Green Ivy Venture. The round also saw participation from angel investors, including Tracxn cofounder Abhishek Goyal, Jayant Paleti of Darwinbox and Magicpin cofounder Brij Bhushan. The startup will use the fresh capital to invest in research and development, build omnichannel presence and expand its team.

Susan Lucia Annunzio is a leadership coach, author and president and CEO of the Center for High Performance. She also is an associate adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This will no doubt sound familiar to most people.

The Design Village (TDV) has signed an MOU with  Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), School of Design Italy to strengthen their academic ties and foster collaboration in the field of design education. This agreement will pave the way for a rich exchange of knowledge and resources between the two institutions aiming to provide students with a global perspective and enhance their skills and competencies, as per the press release. 

As against the money-metric approach used earlier, the Niti Aayog prefers to use poverty estimates based on the UNDP suggested multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI). Unlike the former that was based on consumption expenditure, the MPI uses a number of indicators on different aspects of well-being. The national MPI is based on data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), of which the most recent one available is for 2019-21 (and there are previous surveys for 2005-06 and 2015-16).

Mississippi, its latest capacity expansion amid growing demand for cloud services as more firms adopt new artificial intelligence technologies. Businesses are doubling down on AI development and majority of that traffic is expected to be managed on the cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft's Azure — the top three vendors globally.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is visiting South Korea on Friday and meeting leaders of chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, two sources with knowledge of the matter said. Altman is expected to discuss potential partnerships for making chips, the sources said, declining to be identified.

World Trade Organization’s (WTO) 13th ministerial conference to refrain from extending a moratorium on imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions would impact the semiconductor design ecosystem in India, industry bodies told ET. The moratorium expires in February-March this year. WTO members had agreed against imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions since 1998 and the moratorium has been periodically extended at successive ministerial conferences, which is the highest decision-making body of the 164-member organisation.

Information Technology Rules to ensure fair compensation for use of their content in the process of training generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in the country amid increasing AI copyright disputes across the world. Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) has sent a letter and made representations to the ministries of electronics and information technology and information and broadcasting, seeking protection from likely copyright violations by AI models.

Scientists stated that they are nearer to comprehending the best method for making the human body responsive to an organ donation from another breed, in an attempt to resolve the undergoing organ shortage, as per a CNN report. Over 100,000 people in the US are on the waiting list for transplants with an average of 17 dying each day at the time of waiting. Doctors have gone through many decades conducting experiments with substitutes and several at present see some potential in the replacement of human organs which are failing with intrinsically adjusted pig organs.

By David Lawder

₹204.30 crore, while National Insurance Company Ltd made a profit of ₹44.82 crore for the first half of the current fiscal from a loss of ₹1,768.46 crore in the year-ago period. Oriental Insurance Company Ltd slashed its first-half loss to ₹42.17 crore from a net loss of ₹3,586.93 crore during the first half of FY23. However, the New India Assurance Company Ltd reported a loss of ₹199.99 crore for the second quarter of FY24 from a profit of ₹260.23 crore posted during Q2FY23.

bankruptcy court in India to initiate insolvency proceedings against Byju’s, exacerbating the challenges for a company which is desperately scouting for funds to keep operations running amid a slowdown in the edtech sector and regulatory scrutiny. The lenders have been in negotiation with the company over prepayment of a $1.2 billion term loan taken by its US subsidiary, Byju's Alpha, even as the two sides also continued to fight a legal battle in US courts.

AI4Bharat, the research lab at IIT Madras, on Thursday announced the release of its first large language model Airavata trained on Hindi datasets. Airavata (Sanskrit word for ‘elephant’) was created using SarvamAI’s foundational Hindi model OpenHathi with diverse, instruction-tuning Hindi datasets to make it better suited for assistive tasks, the research wing said in a blogpost.

Odisha will observe a holiday on Saturday, January 27th, on the occasion of the launch of a temple redevelopment project in Sambalpur, PTI reported, citing officials. According to officials, the decision was taken to give people enough time to join the inauguration of the Samaleswari Temple Area Management and Local Economy Initiatives (SAMALEI) project. Meanwhile, all government offices will also remain closed on that day, as it's the fourth Saturday of the month. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is set to inaugurate the hugely anticipated Rs 200 crore project, spread over an area of around 40 acres. Moreover, the initiative also includes works related to the beautification and peripheral development of the temple, a heritage corridor, and modern amenities, the officials added.

The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder." Yet in the course of our research, we also learned that the opposite lesson is just as important: The best bosses don’t strive to build entirely frictionless organizations. Instead, they know when and how to help their charges to slow down. In effect, they know what every race-car driver knows: If you want to win, tapping the brakes at the right times is as important as pushing the pedal to the metal.

Tech Mahindra reported a 60.6% year-on-year fall in its net profit for the quarter ended December at Rs 510 crore. The country's fifth largest software services firm cited its business rationalisation measures as well as continuing macroeconomic headwinds impacting its clients across business segments for missing profit estimates.

Ranjan Pai, chairman of Manipal Education and Medical Group, is set to emerge as the largest shareholder in Byju’s-owned Aakash Institute, with a 40% stake, people aware of the matter said. The Aakash board has approved the conversion into equity of the $300 million Pai invested during 2023, they added. This values the company — one of the remaining valuable assets for Byju Raveendran’s troubled edtech group — at around $700 million and renders it debt-free.

regulatory sandbox for the “functional security and validation” of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and work towards developing an “indigenous security ecosystem” for the cybersecurity of such devices. Additionally, it is also likely to push for the development of “indigenous tools for protecting and securing mobile apps”. For IoT devices, the IT ministry will also work with working groups to continuously update policies regarding the security of such devices.