Short-term sugar high: rupee drop boosts Indian IT, but storm clouds gather

by Hansraj Agrawal | Aug 1, 2025 | Science

Currency-driven relief is tempered by growing macroeconomic uncertainty

The recent depreciation of the Indian rupee against the US dollar is expected to offer a short-term margin cushion for Indian IT services firms, even as macroeconomic headwinds from the US cloud the longer-term outlook.

With the rupee breaching ₹87/USD and most IT exporters like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech billing in dollars while incurring costs in rupees, analysts estimate that every 1 per cent rupee fall can boost EBIT margins by 20–25 basis points.

With 50-60 per cent of revenues for Indian IT companies derived from the US, and a significant portion of expenses, primarily employee costs, incurred in Indian currency, the current depreciation is likely to support earnings in the near term.

Alongside, the NIFTY IT Index has dropped 20 per cent year-to-date, while the broader BSE Sensex has declined by less than 1 per cent over the same period.

High Rate

“Depreciating INR vs USD is always a positive scenario for Indian IT. For the quarterly or annual revenues, we consider the average quarterly or annual rate. Only if the USD/INR rate stays elevated from current levels on a sustainable basis in the next few quarters can we see a weaker INR-led better top-line growth from current street estimates. If we consider approximately 1 per cent depreciation in INR v/s USD in FY26 from our current estimated average rate of 85.9, then the INR-led top-line will grow by 1 per cent,” Dhanshree Jadhav, Lead Analyst – Technology Choice Institution Equities, explained.

Though the employee billing costs will increase by 30-40bps, the remaining 60-70bps top-line growth will benefit the margins. On the contrary, if there is around 1 per cent appreciation in INR v/s USD in FY26, there will be a similar negative impact on margins.

On an overall basis, she said, a weaker USD/INR rate on a sustainable basis augurs well for Indian IT companies, which bill clients in INR. However, with the rising delivery costs, passing on the currency benefits to clients might result in a slightly lower benefit than 60-70bps.

Siddharth Tyagi, Research Analyst, INVasset PMS, observed that this currency-driven relief is tempered by growing macroeconomic uncertainty due to the US’s evolving trade stance.

Stronger push

The administration recently signalled a stronger push toward domestic job creation and import substitution, including potential increases in tariffs and tightening outsourcing-related norms. These measures may affect the demand environment for offshore IT services, particularly in discretionary spending segments.

“While the recent depreciation of the rupee provides a tactical advantage to Indian IT exporters, the strategic risks associated with rising US protectionism could limit the extent of relief. The sustainability of margin gains will ultimately depend on how global clients respond to regulatory and macroeconomic shifts in the months ahead,” Tyagi added.

Similarly, Navy Vijay Ramavat, MD, Indira Groups, expressed bearishness on the IT sector. She said the industry’s future is highly uncertain.

The traditional model of charging US clients lower rates while paying Indian wages faces mounting pressures. Automation, rapid technological shifts, rising domestic costs, and fierce global competition are fundamentally changing the business landscape.

The advantages that powered Indian IT’s growth for decades are eroding, and the sector must adapt to survive. While currency movements may give a temporary boost, the long-term outlook remains unclear, and the industry faces significant structural challenges, she concluded.

Published on August 1, 2025

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Data from NISAR can help start-ups and enterprises solve various challenges, say NASA representatives

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 31, 2025 | Science

Mark Simons (left), Professor of Geophysics, Caltech and Gerald W Bawden, programme manager, natural hazards research, Earth Science Division, NASA

Now that NISAR is successfully in orbit, it’s not just the research community but also enterprises and start-ups that stand to gain by the huge wealth of data that the first-of-its-kind dual band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite will send back.

Speaking to businessline a day after the launch, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) representatives, part of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, said that NISAR is producing about 42 terabits of raw data per day and if leveraged right, this can give rise to a new community of start-ups and businesses.

Commercial enterprises can use the output as a kind of reconnaissance tools and then reprocess things at a higher resolution to solve specific issues and problems, they said.

“If you take a look at all the data that NASA has collected in the solar system, from Mercury to Pluto… NISAR is going to be collecting three times that volume in the first year,” Gerald W Bawden, programme manager, natural hazards research, Earth Science Division, NASA, said.

“We are imaging almost the whole world at five by six metre resolution twice every 12 days. So this is an incredible opportunity for the commercial sector to come in and find opportunities in this wealth of data,” he added.

NISAR is the first satellite to have dual frequency bands, one made by NASA and the other Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The satellite can detect the movement of land and ice surfaces down to the centimetre. The data NISAR collects also can help assess how forests, wetlands, agricultural areas, and permafrost change over time.

Now that NISAR is launched, it is going to go through a 90-day commissioning phase, Bawden explained.

“So over the next 90 days, NISAR is going to continue flying up to a higher elevation to get to what we call a reference science orbit, and that is 747 kilometres.” After checking that it’s working well, the teams will then start taking some test data, and 90 days from now, NISAR will go into operational mode.

Commercial benefits

In terms of commercial benefits, the NASA representatives expect agriculture, coastal development, disaster response and water resources study to be among key use cases.

In a boost for academia and start-ups, the data delivered by NISAR will be all open and free.

“One of the extraordinary things with NISAR and in all missions that NASA is involved with is that all data is free and open to everybody on the globe,” Mark Simons, Professor of Geophysics, Caltech and a part of NISAR mission team, said.

“It provides an opportunity to ambitious people to think about opportunities for value-added products,” he added.

Bawden added that there’s a lot of opportunities for start-ups in agriculture, infrastructure stability and safety.

Speaking about the uniqueness of the first joint NASA-ISRO partnership, the scientists said that when two agencies work together, each builds a part of the technology, but this is the first mission where both built parts that have to work well together.

“With both agencies having a rich history in synthetic aperture, it was a natural marriage,” Bawden said.

Future collaborations

Has the mission given rise to more opportunities for the two space agencies to come together?

Bawden notes that there are areas which NASA and ISRO are working on with human spaceflight being one.

“But right now my team is focused on getting the SAR up and going, and we’re not looking that far down the road as of yet,” he added.

“It’s easy to focus on hardware. But what this mission has done is introduced a large number of scientists to each other who did not know each other before, which is a true investment in the long-term future,” Simons said.

Published on July 31, 2025

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NISAR: An all-seeing eye on Earth

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 28, 2025 | Science

The assembling of NISAR satellite at ISRO, Ahmedabad

From the ‘clean rooms’ and high-security halls of ISRO, in Bengaluru, comes a satellite unlike any built before. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission not only marks the most ambitious collaboration between India and the US in space, but also sets a new gold standard for Earth observation.

What makes NISAR a trailblazer? Its core is a unique marriage of two radar systems, each with its own “superpower”.

Dual-frequency innovation is the heart of NISAR. L-band radar (provided by NASA), with a wavelength of 24 cm, effortlessly penetrates dense forests, sees the skeleton of landscapes, and monitors changes in vegetation and topography — even through thick cloud cover. S-band radar (engineered by ISRO), at 10 cm wavelength, excels at recording subtle changes in soil, wetland, and ice, even in challenging equatorial and polar environments.

This dual-frequency setup is a first not just for India, but also globally, for any free-flying space observatory, enabling simultaneous imaging from both bands to reveal what single-frequency satellites cannot.

Bold engineering

ISRO’s imprint on NISAR is unmistakable. Indian engineers took on the formidable challenge of designing, fabricating, and testing the S-band SAR unit and the satellite’s core bus.

NISAR

Their achievements include the S-band SAR payload, which is responsible for capturing the high-resolution images that are critical in tracking natural disasters, including floods, landslides, and coastline changes.

The ‘chassis’ supporting the payloads, also built by ISRO, integrates sophisticated power, control, and thermal systems to keep NISAR’s sensitive electronics safe in the harsh conditions of space.

Launching from Sriharikota, using ISRO’s trusted geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV), NISAR is a testament to India’s prowess in heavy satellite deployment.

Indian teams at the UR Rao Satellite Centre, in Bengaluru, conducted precision integration, testing the massive radar payload and reflector at ISRO’s state-of-the-art antenna facilities, simulating harsh space conditions and verifying interoperability.

Central to NISAR’s uniqueness is its SweepSAR digital beam forming architecture

Unlike traditional radars that scan side by side, SweepSAR’s ‘scan-on-receive’ technique covers an astonishing swath — over 240 km wide — while maintaining fine resolution.

The 12-m deployable mesh reflector, among the world’s largest, unfolds in orbit to catch the faint returning radar echoes with surgical precision, even as the reflector rotates and the spacecraft whizzes overhead. Each of the hundreds of feed elements in the antenna can be directed and processed independently, making NISAR an agile and dynamic observer, not a passive scanner.

Giant leap

NISAR is the result of a decade of technical exchanges between ISRO and NASA, involving hardware, know-how, and joint mission operations.

NISAR assembly and antenna testing at ISRO, Bengaluru

Mapping the entire globe every 12 days, NISAR will measure everything from tree heights and crop yields to glacier cracks and earthquake-triggered landslides, providing daily insights into a warming, shifting Earth. Real-time, freely available data will help planners predict floods, monitor water resources, and react to disasters, potentially saving lives in India and across the globe. All data is accessible to researchers worldwide within days, and even faster in emergencies.

The project embodies a commitment to global science and transparency.

A feather in ISRO’s cap, NISAR has deep roots in Indian soil. From the assembly lines in Bengaluru to outreach events in Gujarat Science City, Indian scientists and engineers are at the core of this international effort. The satellite will not just survey distant regions but also provide critical data for India’s monsoon management, forest conservation, and river basin planning — delivering local as well as global impact.

As NISAR prepares for launch, ISRO’s contribution — and India’s growing technological might — have never been more visible or celebrated.

This is not just a mission. It is a symbol of collaboration, innovation, and the power of vision to make the invisible visible.

(The writer is a former associate project director of NISAR at ISRO)

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Published on July 28, 2025

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Fungus shield for pineapple

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 28, 2025 | Science

Transgenic pineapple plants

Indian researchers have identified a gene in pineapple that promises to lead to a powerful, homegrown line of defence against devastating fungal attacks.

The pineapple (Ananas comosus) is the most economically significant fruit of the Bromeliaceae family, valued for its nutritional benefits, alongside a delicious juicy flavour.

One of the biggest threats to pineapple farming is a disease called Fusariosis, caused by the aggressive fungus Fusarium moniliforme. It warps the plant’s stem, blackens the leaves and rots the fruit from the inside out. Traditional breeding techniques have struggled to keep up with the fast-evolving onslaught of such fungal foes.

Researchers at Bose Institute, Kolkata, have identified the gene behind the somatic embryogenesis receptor kinase (SERK), which can activate host defences against plant diseases.

Focusing on the AcSERK3 gene, part of the pineapple’s genetic code known for helping plants reproduce and survive stress, Prof Gaurab Gangopadhyay and his PhD student Dr Soumili Pal enhanced — or ‘overexpressed’ — the gene in pineapple plants. This charged up the plant’s natural defences to fight the Fusarium fungus far more effectively.

“The AcSERK3-overexpressed pineapple lines were more resilient to Fusarium infection than susceptible wild pineapple variety, due to increased stress-associated metabolites and scavenging enzyme activity. In controlled tests, these transgenic plants stood tall and green, while regular pineapples wilted under fungal siege,” says a press release.

A new multi-fungal tolerant pineapple variety could be developed through a long-term field study, enabling growers to plant varieties that can withstand multiple fungal threats.

Point-of-care sepsis diagnosis

Portable endotoxin detection device

A group of scientists from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, have developed a highly sensitive, low-cost point-of-care device with an electrochemical biosensor for early diagnosis of sepsis. The portable device has eight distinct sensor architectures; it is used for detecting endotoxins rapidly and accurately, says a press release.

It detects endotoxin in blood serum using a standard addition method, providing results within 10 minutes.

Sepsis is a serious medical condition caused by an infection and can lead to multiple organ failure, shock and even death. Early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for timely therapeutic intervention and improving patient outcomes. Early diagnosis is possible with the precise and sensitive detection of specific biomarkers. Endotoxin, a toxic component of the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria, acts as a key biomarker, signalling the presence of an infection that could lead to sepsis.

In all the sensors, appropriately modified nanomaterials such as gold atomic clusters or nanoparticles, cupric oxide, or copper nano-clusters, molybdenum disulphide, reduced graphene oxide, or carbon nanotubes were used to enhance sensitivity.

The team has demonstrated a highly sensitive electrochemical sensor chip for the detection of lipopolysaccharide, which is compatible with a portable analyser for on-site detection.

The sensor is fabricated using functionalised carbon nanotubes and copper (I) oxide nanoparticles.

Two of these electrochemical platforms demonstrated versatility by enabling the sensitive detection of gram-negative bacteria, specifically E coli, in water samples. This highlights their potential for efficient water quality monitoring.

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Published on July 28, 2025

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Frozen timestamps

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 28, 2025 | Science

A century and a half ago, when trains were plying but electricity was still not widely available, intrepid entrepreneurs cut huge chunks of ice from the frozen Great Lakes and transported them to California and Texas to cool drinks in summer.

Decades later, scientists developed a method of collecting ‘ice cores’, cylindrical chunks of ice, from different depths below the surface to study what lay trapped in them and, in turn, decipher the conditions that prevailed during that period. Air bubbles trapped in ice are really books of history.

Now researchers of the British Antarctic Survey are on a project to study ice cores 3 km below the Antarctica plateau to determine the state in which the continent existed 1.5 million years ago. This takes research further back in history, building upon an earlier research that looked at the continent’s climate record 800,000 years ago.

The drilling site, Little Dome C, is about 40 km from the French-operated Concordia Station.

Dr Liz Thomas, Head of the Ice Cores team at the British Antarctic Survey, seeks to unlock the answer to why, a million years ago, the gap between two glacial cycles expanded from 41,000 years to 100,000 years.

With the data collected from the cores, scientists will reconstruct how the environment was back then — temperatures, wind patterns, extent of sea ice, and so o.

“This unprecedented ice core dataset will provide vital insights into the link between atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate during a previously uncharted period in Earth’s history, offering valuable context for predicting future climate change,” Dr Thomas says in a statement.

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AUTOMATED ANSWERS: Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research, Zoho

Published on July 28, 2025

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PARAM-1 learns local ways

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 28, 2025 | Science

In the rapidly expanding world of large language models (LLMs), English continues to dominate, throwing other languages in the shadow. This imbalance is particularly stark in India, where more than 20 official languages and hundreds of dialects are spoken daily. PARAM-1, a newly released bilingual foundation model, rises out of India’s own linguistic and cultural landscape.

The model is detailed in a paper published on arXiv (July 2025) by the BharatGen team, which includes Kundeshwar Pundalik, Piyush Sawarkar, Nihar Sahoo, and Abhishek Shinde. The authors describe PARAM-1 as a 2.9-billion parameter foundation model trained from the ground up to reflect Indian realities.

Beyond translation

The name PARAM has a legacy in Indian high-performance computing, but the new model signals a different ambition. PARAM-1 is not a simple upgrade of past systems; it is designed to create artificial intelligence that understands India as more than just another market.

Unlike most global models that treat Indian languages as peripheral, PARAM-1 dedicates 25 per cent of its training data to Hindi. This includes government translations, literary works, educational material and community-generated content. The rest of the dataset consists of English sources carefully curated for their factual depth and range.

A tokeniser is the first step in how a language model processes text. It breaks sentences into smaller units, or tokens, which the model can interpret.

Standard tokenisers, built for English, perform poorly on Indian scripts, splitting words into too many fragments. PARAM-1 addresses this with a script-aware tokeniser that recognises Hindi and other Indic scripts, creating fewer and more meaningful tokens. This improves both accuracy and efficiency.

Although PARAM-1 currently supports only English and Hindi, its tokeniser has been designed for broader Indian linguistic diversity. It can handle scripts such as Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali, laying the groundwork for future multilingual expansion.

Design, not retrofit

PARAM-1 is the result of a training strategy that prioritised inclusion from the start. It was trained in three phases, beginning with general language learning, followed by a focus on factual consistency, and, finally, long-context understanding. This structure allowed the model to gradually develop fluency, retain factual information more effectively, and improve performance on tasks that require reading and reasoning over longer texts.

The model was tested not just on widely used English-language benchmarks such as MMLU and ARC Challenge, but also Indian-specific datasets. These included MILU, which draws on Indian competitive examinations, and SANSKRITI, a benchmark that covers cultural knowledge ranging from festivals to geography. The results were encouraging. PARAM-1 performed competitively on global benchmarks and outperformed several open models on Indian tasks, especially in Hindi.

More languages

Although PARAM-1 is presented as a model designed for India, its bilingual focus means that other Indian languages are still excluded. This raises questions over the model’s inclusivity, especially in a country where linguistic identity often intersects with regional politics and access to services.

The team behind PARAM-1 appears to be aware of this limitation. The tokeniser was specifically engineered to handle the morphological patterns found in Indian languages beyond Hindi. While this does not compensate for the lack of direct training in those languages, it does provide a foundation for expanding the model’s linguistic reach in future iterations.

Equitable AI

PARAM-1 is not a frontier-scale model, nor does it claim to be the most powerful LLM available. Its significance lies in a different direction. It shows what can happen when the design of an AI model reflects the needs and complexities of the people who are meant to use it.

The development of PARAM-1 offers a blueprint for equitable AI design. It highlights the importance of investing early in diverse data, language-aware infrastructure, and public benchmarks that reflect regional and cultural realities. The model also invites broader participation from government agencies, universities, and private firms, especially if it is to grow into a truly multilingual and domain-specialised platform.

The authors of the model offer a clear message in their conclusion: Fairness in AI cannot be treated as an afterthought. It must be addressed in the earliest stages of design. PARAM-1 currently supports just two languages, but leaves the door open for many more. It serves as a reminder that if artificial intelligence is to serve all of humanity, it must begin by learning to listen to more of it.

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Published on July 28, 2025

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