From the Foreign Press

The Financial Times interviews seven 24-year-olds-all ‘midnight’s grandchildren’, the children born to India’s post...

Financial Times

The Financial Times interviews seven 24-year-olds—all ‘midnight’s grandchildren’, the children born to India’s post-Independence generation. They are, in fact, children of liberalisation, born when India flirted with reform in the mid 1980s. Among those featured in the write-up are Nomita Daru, an ambitious professional working in India’s booming financial services sector; and Ranno Banwasi, a woman from the low-ranking Musahar caste who simply “wants to be like other people”. The article says that these 24-year-olds from different religious, caste and geographic backgrounds highlight the “danger of a backlash against liberalisation that could prompt a return of the politics of envy and the socialist remedies that consigned India to decades of disappointing growth.”

The Guardian

A travel piece takes readers to the vineyards of Nasik in Maharashtra, “famed for its religious festivals, temples, industrial development—and more recently, as the centre of India’s embryonic wine industry.” The writer then spends a couple of days at a Sula resort, run by one of India’s premier wine brands, and comes back impressed. “All of Nasik’s producers agree that improving vineyard tourism—as well as the wines—on every estate is the key to the region becoming a must-stop on the tourist trail, and wine’s newest new world”.

Los Angles Times

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The bank for street children in New Delhi gets featured again, this time in the Los Angeles Times. This charming, bare-bones bank run for and by street children is where these kids stash their meagre earnings and learn about saving and planning. “Their lives are far removed from the country’s growing image as an economic juggernaut powered by software engineers and ornamented with Bollywood babes.”

Forbes

A report on Renault’s new $1.1 billion plant in Chennai says the car manufacturer will produce Renault’s Logan cars and Nissan’s Micras, which both target the mid-to-high end market. It quotes an equities analyst to say, “India is a would-be car market that is about to burst.”

The New York Times

A report on the recent petrol fuel hike says India and Malaysia became the latest Asian countries to “risk the wrath of voters by raising the price of subsidised fuel, a highly unpopular measure that could further weaken the governments of both countries made fragile by recent electoral setbacks.”