On Episode 837 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) as well as Ajay Vij, Senior Country Managing Director at Accenture.

SHOW NOTES

(00:00) Stories of the Day

(01:00) Indian markets gain on a fresh round of optimism of war end.

(03:26) Jet fuel and commercial LPG prices rise as the Government tries to fend off pressure on domestic consumers

(04:48) The government said it would not apply its strict tax evasion rules on foreign investments made before ​April 2017.

(06:56) How India’s DARPA-like fund, the ANRF, is gaining momentum

(19:30) AI Business Use Cases are Moving from Experimentation to Execution

WATCH the full Accenture episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuOBxbtvPMY

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NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.

Good morning, it's Thursday, the 2nd of April and this is Govindraj Ethiraj broadcasting and streaming weekdays, usually from Mumbai, India's financial capital, but in transit right now.

Our top stories and themes…

Indian markets gain on a fresh round of optimism of the war ending.

Jet fuel and commercial LPG prices rise as the government tries to fend off pressure on domestic consumers.

The government says it will not apply its strict tax evasion rules and foreign investments made before April 2017.

How India's DARPA-like fund, the ANRF, is gaining momentum.

And finally, how AI is going from experimentation to execution.

Markets, War, LPG and Jet Fuel

Well, here's the latest. The United States will be out of Iran pretty quickly and could return for spot hits if needed, President Donald Trump told Reuters on Wednesday, hours before he was scheduled to make a primetime address to the nation. He told Reuters he's absolutely considering an attempt to withdraw the US from NATO as well.

He has made opening of the Hormuz a pivotal point in the negotiations though, so we will have to wait and see how that goes. Meanwhile, Iran has said that the state of Hormuz will not be open to the enemies based on the absurd displays of the American president, and that was a statement by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, picked up by news agencies. It also says the situation in the state of Hormuz is decisively and dominantly under the control of the IRGC Navy.

Meanwhile, India's benchmarks were much higher on the first day of the fiscal year after a very bruising March, something none of us need reminder of, as a fresh round of hints from the United States indicated that the war could end soon. The Sensex and Nifty were up and the Sensex gained about 2017 points during the day, but eventually closed 1186 points to 73,134 and the Nifty 50 was up 348 points to 22,679. The broader market indices were also higher.

The Nifty mid-cap 100 was up 2.2 and the small cap was up 3.3%. Elsewhere, GST collections or goods and services tax collections seemed steady. Gross GST collections were up 8.8% to over 200,000 crore rupees in March, thanks to both domestic sales and imports. After adjusting refunds, net GST revenues were at about 178,000 crores, up 8.2% year-on-year.

Meanwhile, if it's not war, oil, or the lack of it, it's artificial intelligence, or at least that's the ostensible reason. U.S. headquartered IT firm Oracle on Tuesday laid off employees worldwide with a substantial number in India as well, with another round of job cuts expected within a month. Globally, the company has reportedly eliminated about 30,000 positions.

There are some reports that the India layoffs could be around 12,000, but Business Standard is reporting that according to their sources, it's about 2,500. So maybe the number could go up later, but even 2,500 is a large amount and this is a single-shot layoff. Employees began receiving termination notifications early Tuesday.

Meanwhile, jet fuel and commercial LPG prices shot up on Wednesday as they chased global price hikes. India is the world's second-largest LPG importer and is fighting to balance out domestic and industrial consumers as shortages abound. Reuters reported that domestic fuel retailers have raised prices of aviation turbine fuel by 8.6% to ₹104,900 per kilolitre and commercial LPG is up 10% to ₹2,078 per 19 kg cylinder in New Delhi.

The problem in increasing prices of commercial cooking gas cylinders is obviously that it tempts or leads to greater diversion from the subsidised home cooking cylinders, which are of course smaller. Now, this happens all the time despite various measures to counter it, but obviously at times like this, it does get exacerbated. India's total consumption of LPG is about 33 million tonnes.

Imports are at about 60% and 90% of those came from the Middle East, according to that sum up from Reuters. Meanwhile, the government has said it'll allow factories in special economic zones to sell goods domestically, and they typically can import at lower or without duties or duty-free. Reliance Industries has an entire refinery which sits in a special economic zone.

The measure was announced in the February budget to shield exporters from higher US tariffs, but the problem obviously has become bigger, if anything. A quick mention, the New Income Tax Act 2025, which replaces a 60-year-old framework, has kicked in on Wednesday. The intent, once again, is simplification, fewer sections, clearer language, and a move to a single tax year concept instead of the earlier previous year and assessment year.

A quick reminder, again, there are no changes in tax slabs under either the old or the new regime, and the new tax regime will continue as the default. A report in Business Standard says higher rebate under Section 87A effectively keeps tax liability at zero for incomes up to Rs 12 lakhs under the new regime. Standard deduction of Rs 75,000 remains for salary taxpayers, and new TDS forms replace Form 16 and 16A with Form 130 and 31.

So, while it means compliance becomes simpler on paper, tax outgo of course is unchanged, and on the other hand, PAN-related, or P-A-N, Permanent Account Number norms are becoming stricter, which could lead to cleaner data tracking. And some important news, Reuters reported the government saying it would not apply its strict tax evasion rules on foreign investments made before April 2017, easing concerns amongst global investors after a court order in a Tiger Global case raised fears of retrospective scrutiny. So, on Wednesday, the Income Tax Department said gains from investments made before April 2017 would not be subject to any scrutiny based on India's stricter anti-tax avoidance rules that are trying to curb aggressive tax planning and evasion.

So, the background to this is this. There was a landmark Supreme Court ruling in December which said that Tiger Global must pay taxes on its $1.6 billion sale of a stake in an Indian company in 2018. The judges said that Tiger Global used its Mauritius units as conduits and therefore were not eligible for an international treaty for pre-2017 investments.

Investors were of course worried and have expressed the concern that the ruling would allow the Income Tax Department to reopen any past transactions related to investments made before 2017, particularly those that came via Mauritius.

ANRF is Gaining Momentum

Chief Major Qualcomm Technologies in February committed Rs 90 crore over the next five years to support research programmes in India that would be jointly identified by them and the Anusantan National Research Foundation or ANRF. Under this strategic collaboration, Qualcomm plans to strengthen India's research infrastructure to enhance the nation's research capabilities in science, engineering, and next-gen technologies.

Now, these programmes would be identified jointly through the ANRF's established evaluation and governance framework in priority technology areas. Which brings us to the ANRF which was set up to promote R&D and foster a culture of research and innovation throughout India's universities, research institutions, colleges, and R&D laboratories. So, ANRF acts like an apex body to provide high level strategic direction of scientific research in the country as per the recommendations of the national education policy.

So, it brings people together like industry, academia, research institutions, and government departments. Another piece of background, the ANRF was notified in Feb 2024 and the idea of a National Research Foundation or NRF in India had its genesis in the national education policy of 2020. So, how does it all come together? I reached out to Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, CEO of the Anusantan National Research Foundation, who incidentally worked with organisations like Microsoft, GE, and IBM in senior research functions before moving to government.

I began by asking him to walk us through ANRF's vision, direction, and where things were currently.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: So, NRF is a fairly new entity and so we have been in existence for about two years now and I've been in my role for about a year now. So, we are in a rapidly growing phase. We have two parts, one is set of grant programmes we do similar to National Science Foundation, DARPA and like and then we have a capital programme which is only focused on private sector.

It's a patient capital programme not focused on grants but that's only for private sector, that's only for TRL 4 plus, right? So, it's meant for translation and scale up using private sector, you know, the early stage of technology de-risking, fundamental support for research and then acceleration of some of those areas sector-wise, you know, we are doing through academia and labs and the like.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right, and what's the early response been like and which areas?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: See, we do two parts. One is we do broad-based funding like National Science Foundation where we give literally thousands of grants, fellowships and so on. So, that is like the bread and butter for our community.

Even there, we are asking our researchers to step up in terms of ambition, step up in terms of pushing the frontiers, doing interdisciplinary work, collaborate, this and that, right? So, that's one class and then we have what we call mission mode or MAHAR, this is transformation for advancement of high-impact areas. So, that is in various sectors like electric mobility, 2D materials, met tech, AI, meeting science and engineering, critical raw materials, drones and then we have now put out a couple of new formats.

One is called translational centres, innovation centres, research and innovation centres and now we are going to launch a massive societal innovation programme called leapfrog demonstrators for societal innovation. But we are just getting started. We can do many more of these.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Sure. I know there are many, many projects that are passing through you but what are the kind of projects that have stood out to you as interesting or exciting for that matter?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: See, as you correctly pointed out, we are in the early stages, right? So, we have just put out a few programmes which are past the selection. So, they are at early stages of execution, right?

So, we have an electric mobility programme or an electric vehicle programme where we have set up seven hubs and spokes and they are getting going in terms of their work. That's one thing worth noticing. We are doing a pair programme where we are trying to, you know, enhance the set of institutions that do research where hub institution like ISE, IIT Bombay, et cetera, they sort of mentor a set of spoke institutions which are emerging research institutions and their capability.

That is not specific sector-wise but it is really to build and broaden the distribution of excellence in our country. And then, of course, the other programmes like we are setting up a research fab within 2D materials, those are all going through selection phases. AI for science and engineering, we have gone through phase one, we have gone through phase two.

So, in the next two, three months, you will see a lot more selections done. MedTech will get selected. You will see many projects undergoing.

So, those will be tens of very focused projects funded at critical scale. And all of these will have the opportunity to accelerate from TRL2 to TRL6 and then onwards to RDI and scale up, right? So, that would be the nature of saying, you know, you will see a lot more excitement in the coming months.

Govindraj Ethiraj: You know, your own background, you worked with Microsoft, IBM, you have been a CTO at Microsoft, you focused on energy. If you were to look at both these strains, one is experience and the other is what we are facing currently globally, which is an energy crisis. How do you see the role of institutions like ANRF blending the institutional role with the expertise of someone like you and the market needs?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: The topics that you mentioned like sustainability, energy transition, climate change, all of these are, you know, high interest areas for us, where we would like to launch new programmes. In fact, we are in early stages of working out a programme with the MNRE, which is the Ministry of New and Renewables programme, which is in early stages. We would love to partner with the Ministry of sort of petroleum and other areas for, you know, the energy sector there.

We would also welcome partnerships with the PSUs and other energy companies to work with us and co-fund programmes that we can define jointly together and co-funded together. And we can do these very quickly. So, this energy transition, many of these areas are still in the TBD zone, but we are quite keen on doing more.

And also, as I mentioned, societal innovation is a programme we're going to launch very soon. And that programme also admits of various aspects of energy, climate resilience, and radical energy efficiency and so on, as part of its design. And we could use that as a vehicle also.

So, these are various ways of doing things.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And when you say societal innovation, I mean, why that particular description for the kind of projects that will come under it?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: See, the Honourable Prime Minister, as part of our Governing Board, he's the chairman of, chairperson of our Governing Board. First Governing Board meeting, he has asked us, pick societal problems of India and go solve them at scale, not on a lab scale. And then, as part of that, develop technologies and research and innovation that you can take to the world.

So, that was a challenge put in front of us by the Honourable Prime Minister. So, rather than going after individual areas of societal innovation, we are doing a broad-based programme and saying, we're welcoming proposals, saying that pick a problem that you like, let's say air pollution or water pollution or other pollution, et cetera. Right.

And say, rather than just talking about it, say, what can you do about it? What can you do about it? Not at lab scale, what can you do about it at a critical scale?

That's why we're calling it a leapfrog demonstrator. So, leapfrog, both in a technology capability, as well as across the TRL spectrum. So, it's sort of like a translation kind of programme and demonstrator at scale, at a critical scale.

So, when you want to reimagine agriculture or when you want to do these radical energy efficiency. So, we are allowing a variety of topics. And as part of this, we are also aggregating CSR, we are aggregating partnerships at line ministry.

So, we're doing all of government, all of society type partnerships to expand these programmes. And this allows me also to optimise my programme officer bandwidth so that rather than doing lots of tiny programmes, we can do one massive programme, which has different areas.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Great. And that brings me to the other question. So, as a nodal body, if that's the right term, you could be flooded with applications from all kinds.

I mean, B2B, B2C, you know. So, how are you managing this structurally? And for those who are listening, watching, who want to engage with you or ANRF, how would they do it?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: See, I've written a long LinkedIn article on different parts of ANRF and I would encourage people who are interested to take a look at that. See, ANRF has two distinct parts, right? If you're a private sector entity and you'd like to get funding, right?

So, we have a patient capital scheme there called RDI, which is a scale-up vehicle or a translation and scale-up vehicle for research development and innovation intensive sectors. There also, you can partner with other entities, which could be, you know, foreign entities and so on, but it has to be Indian management controlled entities. And we do it in a two-peer manner within that funding.

That's a significant source of funding, which is 1 lakh crore, which will get multiplied into, you know, probably close to 4 lakh crore or 5 lakh crore. This is like non-trivial amount of funding going into the deep tech sector, broadly speaking, right? The research-driven deep tech sector.

And then the other part is the grant portion, where we are looking at it as academic-led and academic-driven. So there, you could, again, partner with academia. If you're an academic, you're a lab, you're a section eight companies, or even you're an NGO, you're, you know, one of these sorts of entities.

You know, different programmes have different eligibilities, but broadly speaking, academia labs, in this case, can all compete for all our programmes. You can partner with them. That's why we'd like to see a lot more industry academic collaboration.

And then, you know, then we have also defined IP policies very consistently. IP belongs to the grantees. They can then make arrangements separately with their counterparts.

Or we, in some programmes, we also have open IP policies where for our AI programme and our upcoming drones programme, we're going to do open IP. So this will allow faster translation. So this also enables collaboration between academia, startups, and so on.

So while the money may not go to a company, the money is going to academia, but together you can achieve more and, you know, you can translate it quickly. But then we require more engagement of industry. See, because our goal is to use all these mechanisms to drive industry academic collaboration, drive collaboration, even within parts of academia into disciplinary collaboration, and then up the TRL spectrum of our capabilities and get the ecosystem going in the right direction.

And then we have a scale vehicle using non-DI. That's the theory of the case. We'll be doing other things using our innovation fund and so on.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And I mean, you've pointed out that this actually stems or has its roots in the national education policy. So the genesis of this whole effort is education.

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: Yeah, actually, that's quite interesting, right? So the idea of NRF or National Research Foundation was motored in chapter 17 of the national education policy. And then it was created as an act of parliament, which was passed in 2023.

And then we were notified on February 2024. And I joined in 2025. Right.

So it's been sort of in the operationalisation phase at this point. So we're just getting started. So we have a special mandate and responsibility for our university ecosystems.

And also we think of university ecosystem as where the skill development, the capacity development is happening. But at the same time, you know, we'd like to broaden out our very narrow slivers of excellence that are there in our country in terms of research innovation, and then broaden them out. That's one of our goals.

And at the same time, use that to drive industry academic collaboration to have a better ecosystem. So this is pretty much what has happened in the US and the National Science Foundation funds broad based things. You know, that's why they have so many Nobel prizes and the environments are very different.

At the same time, that gives a base for entrepreneurship. And, you know, the Googles and other things came out of Stanford. And similarly, you have the ecosystems in Boston and Silicon Valley and so on driven by the university ecosystem.

Right. So I we think of, you know, the intersection between academia and industry as something which is a long term project, which we need to really invest in a consistent manner. And that's why we needed a statutory body, which is chaired by the Honourable Prime Minister that gives the gravitas and the ability to collaborate across all stakeholders.

And we are set up as an apex organisation across all of the stakeholders. So I don't report any line ministry. We have a reporting to a couple of boards and executive council chaired by the Principal Scientific Advisor and the governing board chaired by the Honourable Prime Minister with the Ministers of Education and Science and Technology as Vice President.

I report to all of the executives. But and as you can see, I come from the private sector. So we are running a professionally triple front organisation.

And also, we are trying to behave differently. Right.

Govindraj Ethiraj: So as a last question, Shiv, so you've spent all your life, as you said, in the private sector. So what made you move to government?

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: Actually, I spent first part of my career was in academia. I used to be a professor in the US. So I know a lot about the US system, both in academia as well as the funding entities and so on.

So obviously, I saw a big gap in India that needs to be fixed. And I knew something about that. Similarly, I worked a lot in the industry research ecosystem in India.

And also the government was looking for somebody who had a background in both and so turned out to be a good fit. I look at it as a nation building activity. There's something we can make a huge impact on.

Ultimately, it's all about impact, I feel. It's not about other things.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Shiv, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman: Thank you.

AI Business Use Cases

Investments in AI infrastructure are rising and countries world over are scrambling to get ahead in the race. Business leaders are of course more focused on how AI can increase productivity, growth, and create value.

I recently caught up with Ajay Vij, Senior Country Managing Director at Accenture on the sidelines of the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum, and I asked him how he was seeing the shift from experimentation to execution.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Ajay Vij: Every CEO gets it that this is the future, no doubt about it. We are also seeing trending of more spend on technology. I think we're slowly moving from the experimenting, as I said, to now starting to embed it in the process.

So they all get it. What the client is looking for is expertise, right? When we talk to a client, I think we need to show that we are ready for it.

And that, of course, it sits on the big demographic foundation of talent, right? So how much we can invest in the talent, how skilled they are, how current they are with the technology. And again, using the story from yesterday, it's no longer about playing chess.

So you're not estimating five years from now what's going to happen. So I'd be ready. It's like playing squash, right?

The ball goes on the right, you go pick it up, and then you come back to the centre to be able to, you know, then pick up on it and say, okay, now what's the next coming? I think the client is looking for that agility. The client is, of course, looking for our investments in it, right?

How intensive or extensive is our library around various tools that are getting created here? How exposed are our people? And I think what industry knowledge do we bring to the table?

That's more important, right? The differentiator will really not be the technology or the tools. Many of us will have it.

The differentiator will be your industry knowledge that your people bring to the table. And that's what the client is looking for.

Govindraj Ethiraj: And give us an illustration of that. And like, for example, a sector that you are working on, maybe you're leading and where you see that really coming into.

Ajay Vij: So everywhere. So at a very simplistic day to day level, let's say in retail campaigns, right? Using data to be able to draw out analytics and doing a focused campaign.

And we've really seen results that are in high double digits, not small, of increased sales in that case. Just this morning, the team was leading me through where we are using AI for a client in truly manufacturing a proprietary sauce and how in the process, the machine was stopping X number of times in a day because it's you're dealing with liquids, you know, things, ingredients go here and there. And a 70% impact on lesser stoppage is there.

Great, right? The other one very recently at the jury at the AI summit, I was on the jury for AI by her. Great example of a handheld device doing initial data collection for loan disbursement, right?

You go there, what used to take weeks gets done in hours. The guy comes back, plugs in and boom, boom, boom. The loans move faster.

It reaches the right place.

Govindraj Ethiraj: This case, AI is accelerating the synthesis of data as opposed to earlier.

Ajay Vij: It is one, it is making it faster.

It is making it more accurate, less chance of any kind of distorted data. And you know, the background or the basics here are of course, access and inclusion. AI is giving you both of those or technology is giving both of those.

Your ability to take a handheld device and go and collect that data anywhere and come back and upload it or the infrastructure that is present over there and then taking it to the last mile. That's most important.