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- Bit by Bit 2nd Feb || Budget 2023 highlights & more
Bit by Bit 2nd Feb || Budget 2023 highlights & more
Good morning Readers!
Here are:
"5 amazing stories in 5 minutes to make you future ready"
Happy reading!
MARKET UPDATE
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FII Net Cashflow : + ₹1785 crores
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(Market Data as of 11:00 PM on 01/02/2022)
BFSI
Key Points
In the new tax system, the Personal Income Tax Rebate Limit will rise from the present Rs. 5 lakh to Rs. 7 lakh
The highest surcharge rate decreased from 37% to 25% under the new tax system
Centre will hire 38,000 teachers for Eklavya Model Residential Schools
₹5.94 lakh crore allocated for the defence sector, which is a 13 per cent increase compared with the previous year
Decrease in allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) by 21.66 per cent
The Story
The middle class is feeling better thanks to the 2023 budget (no income tax on income of up to Rs 7 lakh per annum; earlier, the cap was Rs 5 lakh). Additionally, it is focused on promoting inclusive development, improving infrastructure, and utilizing young power. It also narrows its emphasis on technology and the environment. Therefore, it is not surprising that Sitharaman uses the words tax (122 times), income (60 times), green (25), digital (22 times), development (38) and growth throughout her speech (15).
Immediately after the country celebrated 75 years of independence, Sitharaman joked that this was the "first budget of Amrit Kaal," a term that PM Modi had coined to lay out a new plan for India for the following 25 years. "We envision the 'Amrit Kaal' as a knowledge-based, technology-driven economy with sound public finances and a thriving financial sector. This "jan-bhaagidari" (public engagement) must be accomplished by "sabka saath, sabka prayaas" (everyone's support, every person's effort)," Sitharaman stated.
FMCG
The start of the Pradhan Mantri-Promotion of Alternate Nutrients for Agriculture Management Yojana (PM-PRANAM) to encourage states to promote alternative fertilisers was announced by the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday. The action would support encouraging states to use fewer fertilizers.
She stated that the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojna 4.0 will also be launched, along with the establishment of 30 worldwide Skill India centers to train thousands of young people. In order to provide the nation's youth with employable skills, the government began the third phase of Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana in 2021. This program makes over 300 skill courses available to them.
According to her, state governments will be urged to establish Unity Mall for the promotion and sale of GI (Geographical Indications) products and "one district one product" items. In order to boost tourism in the nation, the minister further stated that the government would choose 50 locations through a "challenge mode."
The government is also allocating enough money to scrap obsolete, polluting government vehicles. The policy for vehicle scrapping will go into force on April 1. According to the government, the strategy will support the circular economy and speed up the phase-out of unsafe and harmful automobiles.
Manufacturing
Key Facts :
Custom duties on certain components for mobile phones and televisions removed
Significant cost reduction for electronic manufacturers would follow
Would not have significant impact on final customer prices
The Story :
The reduction in basic customs duties on certain parts and components like camera lenses will have no significant impact on the final product price, but will have a 0.16-0.19% cost impact on the mobile phone’s bill of material, India Cellular and Electronics Association said in reaction to the union budget 2023 announcements.
Sections of the industry welcomed the move to remove customs duties on certain parts and components for mobile phones and televisions, stating that it will deepen the value chain in India, and make manufacturing more competitive.
The government removed the 2.75% basic customs duty on import of camera lens, along with removal of duties on inputs to parts of connectors in the union budget 2023. The government notified the continuation of custom exemption notifications which were facing a sunset on March 31, 2023 for another one year. Additionally, BCD on parts of open cell assembly for tv panels have been slashed from 5.5% previously to 2.75%.
TECH
OpenAI, the creator of the popular chatbot ChatGTP, has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
ChatGPT is a free program that generates text in response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism.
The AI classifier, a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI. It uses a variety of providers to address issues such as automated misinformation campaigns and academic dishonesty, the company said.
“We recognize that identifying AI-written text has been an important point of discussion among educators, and equally important is recognizing the limits and impacts of AI-generated text classifiers in the classroom.”
Anything Interesting
The Story
Scientists have synthesized versatile, synthetic 'cyborg' cells in the lab. These cells have many characteristics of living cells but lack the ability to divide and grow.
Artificial cells need to be carefully controlled and cells dividing normally is a major issue that needed to be tackled. The cyborg cells are programmable, do not divide, preserve essential cellular activities, and gain nonnative abilities," says biomedical engineer Cheemeng Tan from the University of California, Davis.
Cell engineering is traditionally based on two key approaches: genetically modifying existing cells to give them new functions (highly flexible but cells can reproduce) and building synthetic cells from ground up (which cannot reproduce but have limited biological functions).
The cyborg cells utilize a new strategy. Bacterial cells were taken as a foundation and elements from artificial polymers were added. The polymer was exposed to UV light when it entered the cells creating a cross-linking hydrogel matrix which mimics a natural extracellular matrix.
These cells can maintain a lot of biological cellular functions and are more resistant to external stressors.
Tests conducted using tissue samples demonstrated that the newly developed cells were able to invade cancer cells, highlighting their potential for health treatments further down the line – they could one day be used to deliver drugs to very specific parts of the body.
