Archive: November 22, 2022

HDFC ERGO introduces interest free instalment options on health insurance premium for its Optima Secure customers

India, 2022:HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, a leading general insurance company of India, launches a pioneering feature of a premium payment option in installments for its Optima Secure Health Insurance Plan. With the introduction of this feature, the Company aims to make health insurance more affordable and convenient for customers, further driving insurance inclusion to a larger base of customers.

The primary new features of the Optima Secure plan include:

• Installment option for premium payment: Offers monthly, quarterly and half-yearly premium payment modes at no additional financial charges
• No room rent capping: Allows customers to select the hospital room of their choice
• Deductible buy-back: Empowers customers with an easy switch option that allows them to waive their opted deductible at renewal after the completion of five policy years

Speaking at the launch of new features, Parthanil Ghosh, President – Of retail Business, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, said, “At HDFC ERGO, it has always been our endeavour to come up with affordable and customer-centric insurance solutions to address the needs of all sections of our fellow citizens. The new features of the Optima Secure plan will allow the customer to decide on type of hospital room, change of deductible option and pay the premium in interest-free installments. We believe that the new installment feature of our Optima Secure plan will make health insurance affordable to a wider base of customers who wants to increase their Sum Insured or to purchase a multiple-year plan and thereby help in driving the larger agenda of insurance included in the country.”

Optima Secure health Insurance plan comes with four unique benefits- Secure, Plus, Protect and Unlimited Restore, which are builtin to offer guaranteed coverage for individuals and their family members against medical exigencies.

The four distinct features are:

• Secure Benefit – Doubles the insurance cover instantly and automatically on the purchase of the policy
• Plus benefit – Increases the base coverage automatically by 50% after 1 year and 100% after 2 years, even if there is a claim
• Unlimited Restore Benefit(add-on cover) – Restores the base coverage by up to 100% unlimited time if the policyholder runs out of coverage
• Protect benefit – Ensures zero deduction on listed non-medical expenses including consumables

The product also offers discounts on premium up to 50%, should customers choose to pay a small amount from their pocket in the event of a claim.

Lori Greiner and Mark Cuban of Shark Tank Season 14 have a message for their Desi fans

Shark Tank Season 14 – one of the most successful and celebrated business reality shows takes on its decade-long legacy with a brand-new season. Colors Infinity will present the latest episodes with a promise of entertainment and ingenuity of the kind that will leave you asking for more. Season 14 will showcase ingenious minds and their brilliant ideas contending to bring back enough investments to turn their dreams into reality. To decide the participants’ fate, the show will feature astute investors including Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John, and Kevin O’Leary.

Not only has the show gained massive popularity in the USA, but it also has a staunch fanbase in India. From people in the audience to the participants, the Sharks are left in absolute awe of the exceptional talent that India gets to the show.

Shark Lori Greiner shares a sweet message for the fans in India, “We love you all and we wish you the best of luck. Keep watching Shark Tank to learn and develop your knowledge about different kinds of products.” Shark Mark Cuban adds, “We really love our fans and followers out there in India. I would say to them that keep watching Shark Tank in India all the time, and if you get a minute go online and watch Shark Tank USA too.”

Tune into Colors Infinity every Saturday at 9 pm for your very own business masterclass with Shark Tank

Season 14!

AWS Launches Second Infrastructure Region in India

DELHI, INDIA—Nov. 22, 2022—Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the launch of its second AWS infrastructure Region in India—the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. Starting today, developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations, will have greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in India. Customers will have access to advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation including data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). For more information about AWS Global Infrastructure, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.

“The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region supports India’s digital transformation and is part of our long-term investment in the country since opening our first office in 2011. Customers and partners in India will now have additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with greater resilience, availability, and even lower latency,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at Amazon Data Services Inc. “We are proud to invest in the future of the Indian technology community and workforce, and we are committed to helping organizations across industries increase agility and drive innovation.”

“As a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $1 Trillion Digital Economy vision, the ‘India cloud’ is set for big expansion and innovation. Data centres are an important element of the digital ecosystem. The investments by AWS in expanding their data centres in India is a welcome development and would certainly help catalyze India’s digital economy,” said Shri Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. “The Government of India’s upcoming National Cloud and Data Centre Policy envisages a significant increase in India’s capacity from the current 565 MW to over 2565 MW in the near future. We look forward to greener and more sustainable data centres to power India’s expanding economy.”

“We welcome AWS’s commitment to invest approximately INR 36,300 crores in the AWS Region in Hyderabad, which strengthens Telangana’s position as a progressive data center hub in India,” said Shri K. T. Rama Rao, minister for Information Technology (IT), Industries and Commerce, Municipal Administration, and Urban Development at the Government of Telangana. “We recognize the power of cloud computing, which is why we have collaborated with AWS to improve e-governance, healthcare, and municipal operations to benefit the citizens of Telangana. We are pleased that the new AWS Region in Hyderabad will spur more innovation and growth for many enterprises, startups, and public sector organizations in India.”

With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, AWS now has 96 Availability Zones across 30 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins the existing AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, which opened in June 2016. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, and near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in India, while providing customers with even lower latency across the country.

AWS is planning to invest an estimated $4.4 billion (approx. INR 36,300 crores) in India by 2030 through the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. The investment is also estimated to support an average of more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually at external businesses during this time. These jobs will be part of the AWS supply chain in India, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and jobs within the country’s broader economy.
The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is also estimated to add approximately $7.6 billion (approx. INR 63,600 crores) to India’s gross domestic product by 2030.

Customers welcome the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region Hundreds of thousands of customers in India join millions of active customers using AWS in more than 190 countries around the world. Enterprises in India that choose AWS to speed time to market
and innovate include Angel One Limited, Ashok Leyland, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, Broadridge, Dr.Reddy’s Laboratories, Edelweiss, HDFC Bank, HDFC Life, RBL Bank, Tata Elxsi, and Titan. Indian public sector customers use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, innovate faster, and better serve the citizens of the region. These customers include 21K School, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Common Service Centers, CropIn, Digital India Corporation (MeitY), EnglishHelper, Government of Telangana, Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, NITI Aayog, PhysicsWallah, Prasar Bharati News Services, TraceX, University of Delhi, upGrad, and Whrrl. Indian startups, including Acko General Insurance, Chingari, epiFi, Fibe, INDMoney, Jupiter, Lendingkart, and Loco, are building their businesses on AWS to scale rapidly and expand around the world.

Acko is considered India’s first built-for-the-cloud general insurance company. “Since our inception in 2016, we have run our entire platform on AWS, which enables us to scale quickly to serve more than 50 million customers seeking seamless insurance experiences,” said Vishwanath Ramarao, chief technology and product officer at Acko. “We are obsessed with making insurance effortless. The launch of the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable us to run our applications across multiple highly available data centers in India to provide a seamless experience for customers while supporting our growth ambitions.”

Axis Bank, currently India’s third-largest private sector bank, offers an entire spectrum of financial services to customer segments covering large and mid-size corporations, small and medium enterprises, agriculture, and retail businesses. “With AWS as our primary cloud provider, we have successfully migrated more than 70 applications to the cloud, including digital offerings such as virtual debit card and credit card engagement platforms. We plan to migrate 70% of our on-premises workloads to the cloud in the next two years,” said Avinash Raghavendra, president and chief information officer at Axis Bank. “We welcome the launch of the second AWS Region in India, which will enable us to further expand the availability of our banking applications to customers, while ensuring that their data remains onshore.”

PhysicsWallah is an educational platform in India that provides affordable and comprehensive curricula to middle and high school students, and for national degree entrance exams. “We have collaborated with AWS since 2020 and use services such as Amazon CloudFront, AWS Elemental, and Amazon Redshift to seamlessly and securely deliver our live video classes to more than 6 million students across India,” said Prateek Maheshwari, co-founder at PhysicsWallah. “As user engagement across our app, website, and YouTube channel continues to grow across the country, a second AWS Region in India will enable us to continue to scale and provide even lower latency for students
accessing our platform.”

Tata Elxsi is a world-leading provider of design and technology services across several industries, including the automotive, broadcast, and healthcare sectors. Part of the Tata Group, Tata Elxsi has over 12,000 designers, engineers, and technologists working in more than 36 offices worldwide. “At Tata Elxsi, we support our customers in reimagining their products and services by applying design thinking and using innovative technologies. Previously, our on-premises infrastructure curtailed our capabilities to deliver high-performing differentiated consumer experiences and services continuously. We embarked on our digitization journey with AWS and migrated several business-
critical processes to the cloud, including our own industry-specific software products, platforms, and R&D projects,” said Nitin Pai, chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer at Tata Elxsi. “AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure and affordable services enable us to launch new and innovative solutions, scale based on our clients’ needs, and enable compliance across different jurisdictions.

The launch of the second AWS Region in India offers a welcome boost for us to foster greater business resilience.”

India-based AWS Partners also welcome the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support to customers. AWS SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ cloud environments. Examples of India-based AWS Partners include Biz2credit, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Darwinbox, Dataevolve Solutions, Deloitte, Gupshup, Hostin, Infosys, Manthan, Minfy Technologies, Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington, Tata Consultancy Services, Trigyn Technologies, Umbrella Infocare, and Wipro. For the full list of AWS Partners, visit aws.amazon.com/partners.

Built-in-the-cloud systems integrator Minfy is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner headquartered in India with offices in Southeast Asia, United States, and Australia. Since 2016, Minfy has helped more than 320 commercial and public sector customers innovate and digitally transform in the cloud. “Minfy works with many companies, state governments, and large public sector organizations in India, including National Skill Development Corporation, Dalmia Bharat, Exidelife, BookMyShow, MapmyIndia, and Tata Trusts, that build and run their service offerings at scale,” said Vikram Manchanda, CEO at Minfy.

“As many of our customers manage highly confidential citizen data, we need to meet strict data security and governance requirements when we migrate their workloads to the cloud. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will help us confidently meet these requirements while we deliver highly reliable and available solutions that help customers improve the quality of their service delivery for citizens with our deep tech capabilities in healthcare, life sciences, financial services, energy, and sustainability.”

Commitment to sustainability

As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target. Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and as of the end of 2021, reached 85% renewable energy across its business. In September, Amazon announced its first utility-scale renewable energy projects in India—420 megawatts (MW) of combined capacity across three solar farms located in the state of Rajasthan. Once fully operational, these solar projects will have the combined capacity to generate 1,076,000 megawatt
hours of renewable energy per year, enough to power more than 360,000 average-sized households in New Delhi annually (based on the average energy consumption per Indian household of 250 kilowatt hours from Statista). Amazon now has 57 renewable energy projects across Asia Pacific.

Quote from Puneet Chandok, President – Commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia, AISPL:

“We are pleased to announce the launch of a second AWS Region in India, which will enable hundreds of thousands of customers and AWS Partners to leverage AWS technologies with more flexibility, reduced latency, and increased resilience. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is part of our long-term commitment to India to invest in cloud infrastructure, provide training to upskill the nation with digital capabilities, create local jobs, and enable a more sustainable future. India has a rich history of innovation and we are pleased to put the power of AWS into the hands of more customers and AWS Partners, so they have the tools they need to build a better world, deliver citizen impact at scale, and re-invent technology experiences.”

Quote from Rahul Sharma, President – Public Sector, AWS India and South Asia, AISPL:

“AWS is committed to driving cloud adoption in the country to strengthen India’s position as a leader in the global digital economy. With a second AWS Region in India, our customers have greater choice and flexibility to build new features, store critical data within India, and scale their solutions. Our new AWS Region supports the government’s Digital India vision to drive innovation in e-governance, healthcare, agriculture, education, space-tech, utilities, and smart infrastructure, and enable the development and adoption of advanced technologies such as machine learning, high-performance computing, and quantum computing. The Indian government is already leading innovation and driving impact at scale, with transformational initiatives including Co-WIN, eSanjeevaniOPD, and DigiLocker, which run on AWS.”

Piaggio India Partnered With IDEA Foundation to Support Over a Thousand Children for This Year’s Daan Utsav

Pune, 22 Nov 2022: Piaggio Vehicles Pvt Ltd (PVPL), a 100 % subsidiary of the Italian Piaggio Group, celebrated Daan Utsav in association with Initiatives in Development and Education for All (IDEA) Foundation.

Daan Utsav is India’s biggest annual festival of giving. For this year’s Daan Utsav, PVPL joined hands with the IDEA Foundation which works towards the holistic development of underprivileged children, youth, and women. Through this association, PVPL employees performed various acts of kindness through volunteering, fulfilling wishes, or providing monetary help to over 1100 disadvantaged children.

One such initiative saw PVPL put up Wish Trees across IDEA’s Learning Centers Khanvasti, Ramnagar, Lamanvasti, Gopalvasti, Hadapsar, and Bhor, where students could share their desires of getting new storybooks, pencil boxes, or even birthday cakes and chocolates. PVPL employees came together to collect these gifts and fulfill these small yet impactful wishes.

Additionally, an exhibition was organized at Piaggio’s corporate office, where women under the IDEA’s livelihood project had set up stalls for handmade items such as diyas, aroma candles, herbal soaps, and wall hangings, among other knick-knacks. Apart from these initiatives, PVPL employees participated in this festival of giving by donating books, study materials, clothes, and toys to kids at the shelter homes.

Ms. Pooja Bansal, Chief Human Resource Officer, Piaggio Vehicles Pvt. Ltd., said, “Creating a strong business & building a better world are not conflicting goals as both are essential for long term success. Piaggio believes in giving back to society & has always been committed to uplifting and empowering communities. We are grateful that we were able to bring joy into some children’s lives in a small yet meaningful way during Daan Utsav. We are equally rejoiced to see our employees come in full force to make this initiative successful and bring out their spirit of kindness.”

79% of respondents believe Futuristic Technologies will drive growth for BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing sectors: ASSOCHAM & Primus Partner’s report reveals

22nd November 2022: India’s leading strategy firm with nation-building at its core, Primus Partners, in partnership withASSOCHAM, unveiled the report titled ‘Futuristic Technologies: Is India Ready?’ at the Futuristic Technologies Seminar organized by ASSOCHAM in Kolkata on Friday, in the presence of Shri Randhir Kumar, Secretary, Dept. of IT & Electronics, West Bengal, & Managing Director, WEBEL. The report stated the rising urgency for various stakeholders including state governments to adopt policies that support the inclusion of futuristic technologies as it would be key to creating a gigantic impact on multifarious sectors. As part of the report, Primus Partners and ASSOCHAM conducted a survey where 90% of respondents agree that futuristic technologies will be important for India in the coming times and 79% of respondents believe that the gigantic impact on BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing sectors will be led by their steadfastness in adopting these technologies and optimizing its usage for sectoral growth.

The report charts a comprehensive analysis and recommendations for integrating government policies and new-age digital technology such as Blockchain, AI/ML, Web 3.0, Cloud, and Metaverse to reimagine strategies for newer experiences and improved ways of conducting business. The day-to-day impact of adopting these new-age technologies will be an absolute game changer and have an overall positive effect on the mass as 97% of respondents surveyed across India believe that futuristic technologies will make life easier and save time and cost. Moreover, government initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission and Digital India program have immense potential for incorporating IoT goods and services. It further highlights foreseeable challenges such as understanding the technology, cyber-attacks, and internet speed in the country. However, India’s favorable demographics, growing economy, availability of talent, the 5G rollout, a large start-up ecosystem, and smartphone penetration will become powerful tools to combat them and find meaningful solutions for an elevated experience.

Expanding its horizon to other sectors, ASSOCHAM and Primus Partners’ report also highlighted the importance of strategically shifting towards futuristic technologies for the rapidly growing fintech industry given its revolutionary prowess to transform the growth of the country’s GDP. While India currently has more than 6636 fintech start-ups and 21 unicorns, collaborations with banks, insurance firms, and the retail sector will increase their influence and radically transform the Indian banking and financial industries. Moreover, operating through various business models, its impact has trickled down to the e-commerce industry as it continues to bloom further by offering customer-centric offers, ease of use, and availability of personal and commercial transactions globally. To expedite the friendliness of e-commerce platforms, an important step will be to adopt Big Data for incorporating analytics-driven decision-making mechanisms. The statistics highlight the immediate need for drafting a policy framework on the ethics of data for ease of implementation of such technologies in public and private organizations.

Sharing his insights on the report, Devroop Dhar, Managing Director, Primus Partners said, “With more than 450 active start-ups in the Web 3.0 domain, the sector is steadily growing in India. We will need to plan, implement, and employ next-generation technologies such as web computing, artificial intelligence, smart cities, blockchain, and the internet of things to yield the maximum benefit. These technologies will also become an important part of swift and efficient governance. The survey we conducted revealed that 93% of respondents believe in the increasing need for governments to adopt futuristic technologies for citizen service delivery. This process may then be enhanced for a choice-based proactive service delivery model based on family ID. The arrival of 5G will boost India’s adaptability to these technologies given its high bandwidth, low latency, and highly reliable communication system.”

Commenting on the role of consumers and governments driving growth through technological breakthroughs, Perminder Jeet Kaur, Senior Director – East and North East and National Coordinator for the National Task Force on Ayush &  Early Child Education, ASSOCHAM said “We, as consumers, have played a critical role in maximizing the impact of these technologies by adopting technology-led innovations and allowing tech enablers to collect more data for customized and improved experiences. India, today, is well positioned to consolidate its position as a global leader in the era post the fourth industrial revolution owing to one of the world’s youngest labour forces and a significant amount of technical aptitude. With the right combination of regulatory frameworks, India can lead this technological revolution.”

In the last ten years, technology has made incredible advances that are still changing our world. Today, it serves as the foundation for all potential future growth and enables the building of a more inclusive and sustainable society. With more than 50% of India’s population under the age of 27, arises an important task for collaboration between institutions and industries to frame policies that encourage upskilling and training the youth of the country to thrive in these dynamic industries.

Collaboration Between Luke Coutinho and Ashraf Motiwala Introducing a Line of Affirmation Accessories to India.

 Mumbai, November 22, 2022:In the journey of life, most of us are seeking perfection. We do this without realizing that even nature is not perfect. And we are products of it, after all. Each one of us has flaws. And only when we start to embrace those flaws and accept our imperfections, we start living our true authentic lives. Not being able to embrace our flaws only creates suffering. Accept you first. Because we are all imperfectly perfect.

This simple thought brought two friends and experts in their respective fields together for the creation of a unique movement, set out to direct your faith toward your vision, and transform your dreams into action.

“In my nine years of practice in integrative and lifestyle medicine, I have learned that while medicine and conventional protocols are necessary, they shouldn’t stop us from believing in what lies beyond medicine. This is where the power of hope, faith, belief, love, peace, and gratitude comes in. You may be on the best medicine or treatment, but if you do not have hope, your journey to healing becomes difficult. This is where I thought that an aesthetically designed jewelry line that carries these powerful words of affirmation can serve as a beautiful reminder. Faith and fear cannot coexist. I hope when you wear this piece of jewelry or pass it on to your loved ones, it adds value to your lives. No matter how hard times can get, never lose hope, faith, and belief in life and all it has in store for you,” said Luke Coutinho, integrative and lifestyle medicine practitioner – Luke Coutinho.

A graduate of the coveted GIA (Gemological Institute of America), Ashraf Motiwala, the fourth generation to carry forward the remarkable legacy of A.S. Motiwala, knew right away that this concept had the power to impact lives. The recipient of the Inspirational Leader award for his impressive achievements in the realm of jewellrybusinessmen and with his flagship brand A.S. Motiwala being voted the Best Diamond Jewellery of the Year Award for six consecutive years, he knew that his team had the creative dexterity, superior nuances, and advanced expertise to craft a line of jewellery that not only last a lifetime, but could leave a legacy. Known for his innovation and always bringing a fresh perspective, keeping in mind shifting consumer behavior, he felt it was important to craft a product that would be wearable daily and still have the personality to make a strong statement.

It is hence with a mélange of trustworthiness, values, craftsmanship, and creativity he pioneers India’s first affirmation accessories.

This curated collection of priceless pieces is instilled with a powerful message. Empowering words have been selected to guide, encourage, heal, and comfort you on your quest toward holistic living. Each word has been chosen wisely after a great deal of care to reflect what theyfirmly believe in. Love, Hope, Believe, Abundance, Gratitude, Peace, and Faith form an integral chapter in the betterment of your life.

During the journey of discovery, Ashraf chanced upon the universally recognized symbol – Ensō, which became the perfect introduction to the creation of India’s first Affirmation Accessory.

“My team and I searched for the perfect symbol to represent our new signature brand. The Ensō contains the perfect and imperfect; that is why it is always complete. This symbolism resonated for both of us as the circle signifies unity and completion. Perfect balance. But what makes the Ensō more intriguing is that it is not perfect at all. It is rough, messy, and at times not even complete,” said Ashraf Motiwala

Each piece features a pure golden encrusted Ensō created with precious gold and natural diamonds highlighted by enamel and colorful rubber straps. These straps have been imported from international companies that luxury Swiss watch brands source from. This ensures that these accessories can be worn daily while still looking their best.
With these Affirmation Accessories, their intention is to create something that would last with its wearers for a lifetime. It can also be passed down through generations allowing this legacy of positivity to continue forever. Join their movement toward holistic living, with this Affirmation Accessor.

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