Quick notes: Jerusalem pilgrimage | No more engines...

• Taypayer funding for Abrahamics: Tamil Nadu hikes Jerusalem pilgrimage number to 1,000  



• No more engines for Jaguars: Jaguar will be EV-only from 2025; Land Rover will be 60 percent BEV.
  



• Comparing with China on the role of govt in R&D: "In semiconductors, the upfront investment is so massive, that you want some assurance that there is a market for what you are going to build. Because the day you build your facility, it is not going to be state-of-the-art. It will be state-of-the-art only with incremental acquisition of knowledge and expertise. China aimed very low in semiconductors, but they got an assurance that there will be a buyer for that. Their government made sure Chinese consumption is pointed towards the production of SMIC. Indian government has never been willing to give such an assurance to someone who will invest $5 billion in putting up a fab".
  




• National Research Foundation: The NRF will distribute 100 billion rupees (US$1.37 billion) annually for its first five years. In 2018, India spent 0.69% of its GDP on research and development, compared with 0.84% a decade earlier. This compares with China’s 2018 spending of 2.1% and South Korea’s of 4.2%. India had just 255 researchers per million people in 2017. Israel had 8,342 per million, Sweden 7,597 and South Korea 7,498 in the same year.



• Not everything is translatable into dollars: We have seen clear evidence that big dams are not sustainable in the Himalayas.

Hindu society has been fighting for an uninterrupted and free Ganga for more than 100 years. Listen to what Sushma Swaraj said in the Parliament when her party was in opposition. pic.twitter.com/cWovMTScbb

— Upword (@upword_) February 12, 2021




• Don't party yet: We handled Galwan and its fallout well. But that is not the end of the story. India has now clearly emerged in Beijing’s eyes as the one immediate adversary who will not concede to China’s political will for economic and commercial reasons. That means new contours of conflict have been drawn for the future, which is why India must prepare, redouble efforts to build its border infrastructure and narrow the gap as fast as possible.
  



• Kundali comes to the west: New dating app for astrology lovers and skeptics alike  



• Big Tech Blinks: In Australia, Google and Facebook may soon pay lump sums for news