IB Economists

  The Delhi government has announced an incentive on the purchase of electric vehicles, upto Rs. 30,000 on two wheelers and Rs. 150,000 on four wheelers. The incentive will come in the form of a subsidy which will allow producers to produce at lower costs and therefore are likely to reduce prices for consumers. This will funded by the pollution cess and road tax on fuels. India has very few electric vehicles due to high tariffs on importing electric vehicles and also lack of domestic production. Although Two wheelers have become famous in the country due to previous central government initiatives such as FAME, these initiatives have not been  very effective.  E- Vehicles are beneficial for the environment since they reduce the greenhouse emissions and are also considered to be on average low cost. One of the reasons for a lot of companies to not produce in India was the high cost and less availability of spare parts. This assistance gives the producer an incentive to...

The Ministry of Railways has announced that it would be moving towards the privatization of 109 railway routes. The Indian railways are the world's fourth-largest network. The government plans an Rs. 30,000 Crore investment from the private sector.  According to the ministry, the objective of this is to modernize the railway, reduce traveling time, create jobs, and enhance safety along with better experience. The department also stated that the private trains would be equivalent or faster than the already existing trains on the same route.  The private sector will also be responsible for the maintenance and operating of these costs and will have to pay haulage and energy charges to the Indian Railways, and the driver and guard will be from the Indian Railways. The Indian Railways has been a burden on the government due to its losses. The affordable prices of the railways, limit the revenue generated by the government, and privatizing the railway could help ease th...

The confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) said in a statement that nearly 20% of Indian traders could run out of business in the upcoming months, According to CAIT nearly $72 Billion has been lost in revenue in the period between 25th March to 30th April. Out of the 70 million traders who have suffered, 15 million traders will have to close down permanently. The traders are mainly made up of small and medium sized retailers. CAIT claims that there is no synchronization between the central and state governments and the home ministry have not helped the situation on the ground. They are looking for intervention from the government in order to minimize the impact. Earlier, Nobel Prize winner - Abhijit Banerjee suggested that India needs a big stimulus package in order to recover from this economic crisis. The Indian government has failed to introduce any stimulus package in order to help the economy. A lack of any help from the government can lead to a rise in unemployment and push ma...

Facebook invested $5.7 Billion for a 9.9% stake in Reliance subsidiary Jio, this will help Jio Mart users to make payments through Whatsapp, which is the most widely used messaging app in India. Jio Mart helps local grocery stores to connect with consumers nearby with the help of e-commerce. Jio Mart is seen as a competition to ‘Local Stores by Amazon’ which also allows local grocery stores to connect with consumers in their locality. The service was launched six months ago on a trial basis. However, Local Stores, the stores themselves are responsible for delivering the goods, while in Jio Mart goods use its own delivery system to deliver the goods, this includes employees of Jio Mart to pick up goods from the store and deliver it to the consumer. During the coronavirus pandemic the need to deliver essential goods such as groceries at the doorstep is paramount and consumers may also be willing to pay extra for this service. Facebook and Amazon are among the largest corpora...