TMS Ep111: SEBI U-turn, plant-based meat, crude oil prices, Github

After four years of cajoling, Sebi has finally given in. Its efforts to introduce a good and established global corporate practice of keeping the offices of chairmen and managing directors at companies separate in India didn’t yield results. In the market regulator’s own words, it was a ‘tall order’. So, what does Sebi’s about turn mean? And what lessons does it hold for the market regulator? 

While some Indian companies may be resisting new ideas, people of the country seem open to experimenting when it comes to food. Stalls of spicy soya chaap are increasingly dotting the city markets across the country now. The last couple of years have seen the emergence of several plant-based meat brands in India. While the concept has been around in the West for a while, celebrities like Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma are helping in its mainstreaming in India. A slow but steady change in consumer awareness has opened up opportunities in this space. 

After food, let us move on to oil. Crude oil prices surged over 10% in the last one month to touch an eight-year high of $96 a barrel earlier this week amid tension between Russia and Ukraine. The BSE Sensex closed 105 points down at 57,892 yesterday, and the Nifty50 ended 17 points lower at 17,305, as investors monitored the Russia-Ukraine situation. Business Standard’s Puneet Wadhwa caught up with London-based Paul Hickin, a director at S&P Global Platts, to understand how he expects crude oil prices to play out in the days to come.

Stock markets in India are likely to remain cautious on Friday, and take cues from their global peers. Let us now move on to the world of software. A controversy brought Github into the limelight in India recently when a bunch of youths misused this platform to host an app, on which they allegedly organised fake auction of over 100 women of a particular faith. While police acted swiftly and nabbed all the key accused, Github, on its part, suspended the account used to create the app and slammed the crime. There is much more to Github than this controversy. Take a peek into the creative world of this huge open-source platform and more in this episode of the podcast.