January 21, 2021
While finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman navigates the obstacle course between fiscal deficit and economic stimulus, her announcements for India’s healthcare sector will be closely watched.
In the grips of that pandemic that has infected more than 10 million Indians, the central government is expected to increase its spending on healthcare to ramp up infrastructure. “Health and investment in health is going to be critical, not only to keep our lives safer but also to make our health-related expenditure more predictable, for people will not be spending for health out of their pocket,” Sitharaman had said in November, during a conference hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry, a non-governmental trade advocacy group.
January 19, 2021
On Jan. 6, Kavin Bharti Mittal, the founder of the eight-year-old Indian instant messenger Hike, tweeted that the app was starting the new year “with a bang” by bettering its social media platform and adding gaming to the gamut. Buried in that news was the fact that the company was retiring StickerChat, formerly Hike Messenger, which the flagship product of Mittal’s company for years.
Four days later, Mittal announced, “India won’t have its own messenger.”
This is quite surprising, given that Mittal spent several years promoting Hike Messenger as he believed that India will have two leading messaging app. “One is simple messaging, WhatsApp would be that company, the second is much more rich form of messaging. We believe Hike is going to be the other one,” the then 26-year-old entrepreneur had told Quartz in 2014.