Good morning! Dr (Col) VK Gupta has become the first patient in India to be declared “currently free of cancer cells”. As per The Indian Express, he underwent CAR-T cell therapy, which genetically reprogrammes a patient’s immune system to fight cancer. The therapy was developed by ImmunoACT, a company incubated at IIT-Bombay, and Tata Memorial Hospital, and is targeted at B-cell cancers such as leukaemia and lymphoma. However, this is NOT a lifelong cure and requires more research. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

Soumya Gupta and Adarsh Singh also contributed to today’s edition.

The Market Signal 

Stocks & Economy: China fired Wu Qing, chief of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and replaced him with Yi Huiman. A PhD in economics, Wu was nicknamed the “broker butcher” for a crackdown on traders some years ago. 

US stocks surged on Wednesday with the S&P 500 closing just one point shy of a historic 5,000 mark. Taking cues, Asia opened largely upbeat, although Hong Kong and Singapore were subdued. 

Indian investors are awaiting the Reserve Bank of India’s policy statement after two days of deliberations. The finance minister indicated in the interim Budget that the government will borrow less in FY25, providing the banking system with more room to manoeuvre. That gives the central bank cushion to wait some more time before making changes to key rates. The GIFT Nifty indicates a flat opening.

BANKING

That’s How It Started Last Year

Investors in US banks felt a shiver up their spines when rating agency Moody’s called New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) debt junk, citing financial, risk-management, and governance challenges. 

An NYCB stock rout brought back memories from last year, when a clutch of regional banks went bust. What has them worried is that the New York lender had taken over one of them, Signature Bank, and taken losses on its real estate portfolio. Two recent high-level exits add to their worries.

And new blisters are appearing—credit card delinquencies are up 50% and consumer loan defaults are surging.

Giant strides: The big daddies of American banking, JPMorgan and Bank of America, are growing by adding brick-and-mortar branches. JPMorgan is now present in all contiguous states of the US of A. Local branches give them a feel of community banks.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Got Cash, Will Wreak Havoc

That’s much how things may play out in India’s upcoming elections. Professionals are offering deepfake-as-a-service to political parties for a mere ₹8 ($0.09) per video. That includes video/voice cloning and lip-syncing.

Political parties ostensibly want to use these services for personalised messages for workers on ground. Some are even asking for chatbots. However, service providers have reported incidents where they’ve been asked to morph videos of celebrities and opposition leaders. Such providers are watermarking their products for awareness. All this when the Indian government is in the process of regulating deepfakes.

In other news: Big tech is also going all-in on watermarking. OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta have agreed to use watermarking standards set by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

OpenAI and other generative AI startups are gradually losing investor interest due to insane valuations and doubts over their competitiveness with fat-pocketed Big Tech counterparts. 

POLITICS

Nanny State

We wondered whether the Uttarakhand Assembly was sustaining itself on Harsil Kush or Nanda Devi charas. Then it struck us that no one would dream this up if they were as baked as a potato.

Whatchu talkin’ about?: Uttarakhand passing its Uniform Civil Code (UCC) bill. As if the UCC itself wasn’t a contentious topic (crash course here), the state has proposed that residents in heterosexual live-in relationships notify a Registrar within a month of entering such partnerships. Otherwise it’s three months and six months jail time for failing to register and produce a certificate of the live-in relationship, respectively.

Other highlights: Criminalisation of practices allowed under personal laws, such as iddat, polygamy, and halala. There are also proposals for regulating the number of children, and consistent laws for succession, inheritance, and marriageable age.

The Signal

Uttarakhand’s UCC bill marks the first step in the final prong of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s three ideological commitments. With the abrogation of Article 370 and the construction of a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya complete, the party is now looking to enact the UCC in Assam, Gujarat, and other states it governs.

But the provision on live-in relationships violates the fundamental right to privacy, established in the landmark 2017 Puttaswamy ruling. And by equating live-in relationships with marriage, it (a) cold shoulders one’s choice to not have a state-recognised relationship in the first place, and (b) also overlooks the Delhi High Court observations on adult autonomy in the famous 2009 Naz Foundation ruling (pdf).

🎧 Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code is coming for live-in couples. Also in today’s edition: why young Indians are flocking to astrology apps. Tune in to The Signal Daily on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

ENVIRONMENT

Red Flags In Green Power

Can a power project be considered green if it destroys vast swathes of ecologically-fragile forests full of wildlife? Well, it’s green enough for the environment ministry, it appears.

The environment ministry allegedly relied on specious reasoning to approve three hydropower units planned by Adani Green Energy (AGEL), news portal Article 14 reported, relying on documents accessed using the Right to Information Act. 

Water battery: Costing ₹19,256 crore (~$2.3 billion), the “pump-storage” projects in the Maharashtra Western Ghats would destroy about 150 hectares of forests. Such projects  (pdf) have two reservoirs at different heights and use electricity produced by wind and solar units at non-peak hours to pump water up, which can then be flowed down to run turbines on demand.

In the nick of time: Interestingly, AGEL had signed the MoU with the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra government a day before it collapsed in a political coup.

ENTERTAINMENT

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em

Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery are giving up their individual live sports battles. Instead, they’re collectively launching a bundle of 14 channels to stream live sports in the US. The service will go live later this year and comprise 55% of US sports rights. Safe to say now that streaming = cable. 

Messy gets messier: Actress Gina Carano is suing Disney for discrimination after she was dropped from The Mandalorian for a series of antisemitic posts. Elon Musk is bankrolling her lawsuit. 

In April, Disney’s shareholders will vote for a new board of directors. Activist fund Blackwells Capital has asked the company to consider breaking up the giant into three companies focused on sports, entertainment, and resorts. 

Better-than-expected fourth quarter performance and positive guidance will, however, give the management a leg-up. Disney is also investing $1.5 billion in Epic Games, in what is its biggest bet in gaming yet.

FYI

Digging deep: EV maker Ola Electric, which is planning an IPO this year, may bid for rights to mine lithium blocks being auctioned by the Indian government, Reuters reports. 

Party pooped: The RBI has reportedly refused all requests for leniency from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Moneycontrol reports. This, after he personally met RBI officials and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman to plead his case for Paytm’s payments bank, which faces a regulatory freeze. 

Another executive departure: Zhang Nan, CEO of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has stepped down; no replacement has been announced yet.

Great fall vs. great leap: Ant Group, the fintech arm of Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, reported a 92% decline in year-on-year profit for the quarter ended September 2023. Ride-hailing company Uber posted its first full-year profit as a listed company.

Fear and loathing: Bomb blasts near offices of political leaders killed at least 26 people in Pakistan’s Balochistan yesterday, just as the country prepares to go to the polls. 

NOTA over Nikki: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing loss to the “none of these candidates” option in the Nevada GOP (grand old party) primary despite running unopposed.

Too much: MSD, maker of HPV vaccine Gardasil, has fired ad agency Schbang over a cervical cancer awareness campaign featuring Indian actress Poonam Pandey, who faked her death as part of the publicity stunt. MSD said it was not associated with the campaign. 

THE DAILY DIGIT

247

The number of passengers that made it to airlines’ ‘no-fly’ list in the past four years. Of them, 108 grabbed a spot for unruly behaviour in 2023 alone. (The Economic Times) 

FWIW

Lost: Ever wondered why moths flock towards lights? Well, scientists have found an answer. A new study published in the journal, Nature, argues that insects aren't really attracted to lights. They just use it to navigate. For the longest time, the glow emanating from the sky was the brightest (and only) light on the planet. Then humans invented artificial light, and its proliferation and intensity made navigation really confusing for these insects, rendering them ‘lost’. Human inventions messing up the lives of every other creature on the planet? Who’d have thought?

Mooning over: The moon is shrinking. Yup, you read that right. Over a few hundred million years, our closest natural satellite has shrunk by about 150 feet in circumference. And there’s still a problem: the shrinking of the moon is also increasing moon-quakes. Scientists have been measuring seismic activity on the lunar surface for 50 years now, thanks to the Apollo missions. The most powerful of these quakes are occurring near the Moon’s south pole, near the very same place where Chandrayaan-3 landed. The south pole is also the place where NASA hopes to land its Artemis mission, which will take humans back to the moon. Sounds like a perfect setting for a Hollywood sci-fi flick.  

Elixir of life: By that, we mean coffee. Think we’re exaggerating? Just ask the Swedes. They have a beloved routine called fika, where they set aside work and just hang out with friends/colleagues over coffee and pastries. This routine is an important part of Swedish culture and usually happens once or twice a day. Naturally, the allure of more caffeine and chitchat is hard to resist for the Americans, who are now adopting this practice. This, they believe, will go a long way in building office morale and camaraderie. But this is the US, so fikas are generally held once a month and are time-bound. We wonder how this would pan out in India though.