All posts tagged: Indias

WhatsApp gets new chief as Meta taps India’s CRED founder Kunal Shah, and invests 0M in startup

WhatsApp gets new chief as Meta taps India’s CRED founder Kunal Shah, and invests $900M in startup

Published by skeptic

Meta is betting on India for WhatsApp’s next chapter, naming entrepreneur Kunal Shah to lead the messaging app and succeed Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after nearly seven years at the helm to take on a new product-building role at the company. The move comes alongside a Meta-led $900 million financing for Indian fintech giant CRED, structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. The deal will make Meta a minority investor in the CRED, which said Shah will step down as chief executive while retaining his personal shareholding. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users accounting for a significant share of the app’s global base of over three billion people. The country has also emerged as a key battleground for Meta’s ambitions in business messaging and digital payments, areas seen as critical to WhatsApp’s next phase of growth. Cathcart, who has led WhatsApp since 2019, oversaw a period of rapid expansion that helped the service become one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, including with more …

India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement camps out until education minister resigns | Politics News

India’s ‘Cockroach’ movement camps out until education minister resigns | Politics News

Published by Sam Flores

New Delhi, India — Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z political movement born out of a joke and despair, have camped in the Indian capital to demand the resignation of the education minister, defying police orders. The June summer heat is sweltering in New Delhi, where dozens of protesters slept overnight on roads and pavements, with more people joining on the second day amid a heavy police presence. Abhijeet Dipke – the viral movement’s leader, who recently graduated from Boston University in the United States – returned to India earlier this month to escalate the protests from online to the streets, addressing the simmering anger among Indian youth. Nearly half of India’s 1.4 billion population is under 25. Frequent leaks of exam papers and discrepancies in exam scores have caused widespread outrage among young people already stressed by the pressures of studying and seeking jobs. Dipke’s Cockroach Janta Party (Cockroach People’s Party, or CJP) has been channeling that anger and frustration, demanding that the federal education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resign. Until recently, it …

As ILO convention turns 30, India’s home-based workers demand equal rights | Labour Rights News

As ILO convention turns 30, India’s home-based workers demand equal rights | Labour Rights News

Published by Sam Flores

New Delhi, India – On a searing hot afternoon in a dense working class neighbourhood of the Indian capital, Shehnaz Bano sits on the dilapidated floor of her one-room home, deftly stitching pieces for a new leather jacket. To make each piece – a sleeve, a front or back panel or a shoulder yoke – the 38-year-old mother of two teenage sons spends hours, but is paid a mere 100 rupees (about $1) for each piece. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list “Imagine if I was a regular employee and I did the same work for the same hours, but on a factory floor. I would have been paid more, right?” Bano asked. “Just because I work from home, I don’t get equal pay or rights.” That is because Bano, like nearly 260 million others across the world, is a home-based worker (HBW) – people employed to produce goods or services in or near their homes. The HBWs are part of what is referred to as the global informal economy. Such a form …

India’s revolution in women’s cricket | Athletics

India’s revolution in women’s cricket | Athletics

Published by Sam Flores

In cricket-obsessed India, a women’s World Cup win and a glitzy new league are transforming the lives of female players. India may be a cricket powerhouse on the world stage, but for decades, the women’s game was neglected at home. That all changed with the creation of the Women’s Premier League in 2023. The WPL has provided an unprecedented injection of funding, enabling hundreds of young girls to pursue the sport. 101 East explores the multimillion-dollar transformation of women’s cricket in India through the lives of a star World Cup player, the youngest female cricketer to secure a WPL contract, and a girl being scouted for the upcoming season. Published On 20 Jun 202620 Jun 2026 Click here to share on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Source link

Telegram loses bid to overturn India’s temporary blocking of the app

Telegram loses bid to overturn India’s temporary blocking of the app

Published by Sam Flores

NEW DELHI, June 19 : Telegram on Friday lost its bid to overturn an Indian government order temporarily banning the messaging app, with a New Delhi court ruling that the government’s actions, aimed at preserving the integrity of a key med school exam, were legal and reasonable. The ban of the app from June 16 to June 22 has stirred an intense debate in the world’s most populous nation. Free speech rights activists say it has set a worrying precedent that cements government powers to curb the use of any messaging platform whenever it sees fit. The government put the block in place after the results of the country’s exam for students hoping to get into medical schools were scrapped last month amid allegations that the question paper had been leaked. The government is “empowered … to issue directions for blocking the public access to Telegram,” Delhi High Court Justice Tejas Karia said in his ruling. Telegram, which has more than 150 million users in India and counts the country as its biggest market, did …

India’s Wipro opens AI center for Anthropic’s Claude in Bengaluru

India’s Wipro opens AI center for Anthropic’s Claude in Bengaluru

Published by Sam Flores

June 16 : India’s Wipro said on Tuesday it has set up a Center of Excellence (CoE) for applied AI focused on Anthropic’s Claude models at its Bengaluru hub. Wipro’s move comes as AI-led automation pressures revenue of traditional Indian IT services firms, which lost billions of dollars in market value in February, partly following Anthropic’s launch of an AI agent tool. Here are some details: • The CoE is expected to bolster the IT services firm’s ability to scale enterprise AI adoption using Claude models. • It is aimed at helping Wipro develop AI-based platforms and industry tools, and expand the use of AI across its finance, human resources and sales teams. • Wipro said it will train 10,000 employees to use Anthropic’s Claude over the next 18 months. • Analysts at Jefferies said Wipro expects compression in services revenue to weigh on growth in the coming quarters, while AI could help widen its addressable market through application rebuilds and workflow redesign. • Investors are increasingly concerned that AI tools could disrupt the labour-intensive …

India’s GenZ Leader Slapped at Protest

India’s GenZ Leader Slapped at Protest

Published by Sam Flores

MUMBAI, June 15 – The founder and leader ⁠of ⁠India’s Cockroach Janta Party ⁠was slapped repeatedly by unknown men during a crowded ​protest in the northern city of Jaipur on Monday, which he said ‌was an attempt to scare ‌him and his group. • Abhijeet Dipke, 30, who has lived in ⁠the United ⁠States for the past two years, was being carried along ​on the shoulders of supporters when he was suddenly slapped repeatedly on the shoulders and face by two men, television and social media footage showed. ​The men were not identified. • “These are all tactics to scare us, threaten ⁠us ⁠and distract us from ⁠the main ​issue at hand. But we will continue to speak out,” Dipke said ​in a video posted ⁠on the group’s social media accounts. • Dipke was slapped by at least two men several times before he was carried away. • The rapid rise of Dipke and his Cockroach Janta Party, which says it represents “the ⁠lazy, the unemployed, and the chronically correct”, is driven by the concerns …

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale

Published by skeptic

India’s AI model output has been slow compared to the U.S., Europe, and China. Only a few startups are releasing models, and most of them are large language models or voice models. To encourage more development, the government launched the India AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to subsidized GPU compute in exchange for releasing their models publicly. One of the 12 startups selected for the program, Avataar AI, has launched a new video model called Varya that is built to understand local context — such as identifying different festivals, food, and clothing. The Peak XV-backed startup, which focuses on creating video tools for e-commerce, didn’t build Varya from scratch. It started with Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model released by Alibaba, and used a technique called distillation — essentially compressing the model’s capabilities into a leaner, faster version optimized for Avataar’s specific use cases. The result is a model that runs in four steps rather than Wan 2.2’s 50, producing video …

‘What if all cockroaches came together?’ The youth movement threatening to shake up India’s politics | India

‘What if all cockroaches came together?’ The youth movement threatening to shake up India’s politics | India

Published by Sam Flores

The call out to the youth of India was simple: “Get ready to swarm the streets of Delhi with peaceful and loving dissent.” They came in their thousands. The weekend marked the first public protest of the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), a movement that began as an online joke, but which has swiftly grown into one of the most unexpected challenges to the indomitable power of the country’s rightwing Narendra Modi government – driven by millions of discontented and disillusioned young people. “The youth of this country will no longer fear, they will fight,” said CJP’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, who had flown in that morning from the US to lead the lively protest. “For the government, we may be mere insects, but we are alive and capable of fighting for our rights.” Abhijeet Dipke addresses supporters during the protest in Delhi. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images Among the gen Zs and millennials who gathered amid a heavy police presence, many expressed hope that a youth-led mobilisation, similar to movements that brought down governments in the neighbouring …