TMS Ep58: Privatisation, Google smartwatch, RBI rates, encryption

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said that his government will be less involved in the “business of business”. He was actually re-asserting the government’s old stand. While presenting the Budget early this year, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the government’s new disinvestment policy. It has promised to keep a bare minimum presence in specified strategic sectors and privatise the rest.

As the Centre is moving ahead with its privatisation plan, let us see what the world’s leading search engine company is up to. In the making for years now, Google’s smartwatch is likely to be released sometime next year, if reports are to be believed. And there seems to be an Indian tinge to it, as the watch has been codenamed ‘Rohan’. How different will this health gadget be from those being offered by Apple, which is dominating the smartwatch segment since 2015. 
 
Google smartwatch is possibly the next most exciting wearable to hit the market. But the emergence of the new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, has again made the global markets uncertain.
Whether the new Covid-19 wave will be inflationary or deflationary in nature will depend on country-specific infection rates and policy responses. So, what will India’s Reserve Bank do?  
 
The RBI is likely to maintain its status quo on the repo rate at four per cent today. But the status quo on encrypted digital messages is something the government is not comfortable with.
We have heard about the Indian government’s faceoff with WhatsApp over the new IT Rules. The government wants platform to identify the first originator of any piece of information that jeopardises India’s security, sovereignty or contains sexually explicit material. But this would mean breaking the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp platform which forms the fulcrum of its user privacy.
But do we really understand what is end-to-end encryption? Let’s understand the technical concept more in this podcast.   < br />

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