分类： bharat

India’s car market just had its worst month in 18 years. 1 million jobs are at risk

New Delhi (CNN Business)Just two years ago, India’s huge car market was booming and global players were rushing to invest. Now it’s been slammed into reverse.

Sales of passenger vehicles plunged 31% in July, according to figures released by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) on Tuesday. It’s the ninth straight month of declines and the sharpest one-month drop in more than 18 years, SIAM Director General Vishnu Mathur told CNN Business.
“This is a very deep sort of a slump that is impacting every segment of the industry,” Mathur said.

India had been a bright spot for carmakers until recently, with annual sales of passenger vehicles rising by about 33% over the past five years.
Big global players like Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia have invested billions to expand their footprint in the country, and new players like Chinese state-run carmaker SAIC have also tried to grab a slice of business.
Before the slump hit, India was predicted to overtake Germany and Japan to become the world’s third largest car market by 2020 — behind only China and the United States.
But the country’s biggest carmakers are now struggling. New safety and emission regulations have driven up prices, troubles among India’s consumer finance providers have hit lending and a broader economic slowdown has made consumers reluctant to spend.
Maruti Suzuki, which accounts for roughly half the passenger cars sold in India, reported a 36.7% drop in vehicle sales in July. Sales at Tata Motors (TTM), which owns Britain’s biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, plunged 31%.

Mahindra & Mahindra (MAHMF), the leading Indian manufacturer of electric vehicles, suffered a 17% slump. It said last week that it would have “no production days” at several plants for up to 14 days this quarter to manage falling sales.
Global rivals are also suffering. South Korea’s Hyundai (HYMTF), the No.2 player in India, saw its sales fall 10% in July compared to the same month last year, while Japanese giant Toyota (TM) fell 24%.

Thousands of jobs lost

The slump has prompted companies to slash over 330,000 jobs through the closing of car dealerships and cutbacks at component manufacturers, Mathur said, citing data from industry associations that govern those two sectors.
The Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India warned in a statement last month that its “crisis-like situation” could result in a million people being laid off.
Carmakers in India have directly axed at least 15,000 temporary workers, according to Mathur.
“The industry has stopped all fresh recruitments,” he added.

That’s bad news for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who won re-election by a landslide in May but is currently presiding over India’s slowest economic growth in five years and its highest unemployment rate in several decades.
Auto industry representatives are calling on the government to help bail out the sector as it has done in the past, Mathur said. They’re asking for tax cuts and other steps to get the market moving again.
India is one of several big car markets to face a major slump, as the global car industry struggles with trade tensions, an economic slowdown, new technologies and regulatory changes. The world’s biggest car market, China, shrank for the first time in more than two decades in 2018.
Germany, home to some of the world’s top carmakers like Volkswagen (VLKAF), BMW (BMWYY) and Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler (DDAIF), is still grappling with the effects of a diesel emissions scandal and the prospect of a messy Brexit.

Man booked for divorcing wife through triple talaq in UP

A case was registered against Shamim Ahmad who married Nazia Parveen seven years ago and was demanding dowry from his in-laws.

A man in Muzaffarnagar was booked under the newly-enacted law for allegedly giving triple talaq to his wife, police said on Monday.

Acting on a directive of the Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Women, a case was registered against Shamim Ahmad, SHO Anil Kapervan said.

Ahmad, a resident of Chowk locality, had married Nazia Parveen seven years ago and was demanding dowry from his in-laws, he said.

Nazia Parveen, who works in a school here, alleged that police had initially refused to register a case in the matter, following which she approached the commission.

Ahmad’s sister was also booked for allegedly putting pressure on the accused for divorcing his wife, police added.

The Victorian sex scandal that shook India

In April 1892, a small eight-page pamphlet in English circulated in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, the largest and wealthiest princely state within the British Indian Empire.

The pamphlet would ruin the lives of the couple it described: a Muslim nobleman named Mehdi Hasan, and his Indian-born British wife, Ellen Gertrude Donnelly.

The 19th Century in India was not a time of love across racial lines: the rulers did not have sex with, let alone marry, the ruled. It was even less common for an Indian man to have a relationship with a white woman.

But the pair were part of the elite circles in Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizams (royalty). Ellen’s British connections and Mehdi’s role in the Nizam’s government made them a late 19th Century power couple. They were even invited to London to meet Queen Victoria.

As Mehdi rose through Hyderabad’s administrative ranks however, his success sparked jealousy among locals as well as other north Indians living in Hyderabad.

He became Chief Justice of Hyderabad’s high court and then the Home Secretary of the state. All this granted him a lavish salary and stoked the envy of his peers. At the same time, Ellen came out of purdah, and began moving in Hyderabad’s affluent social circles. This upset some, but Mehdi and Ellen increasingly enjoyed their rising status.

Yet the disarmingly small pamphlet presented a much different history of the couple – and led to a dramatic fall from grace.

The pamphlet’s anonymous author(s), jealous of Mehdi’s success and unable to find fault with his performance, primarily targeted Ellen.

The pamphlet made three specific accusations.

First, it claimed that Ellen had been a common prostitute before she married Mehdi, and that the author, along with some other men, had “kept” her for their exclusive sexual pleasure.

Second, it alleged that Mehdi and Ellen had never married.

And finally, it said that Mehdi had “sold” sexual favours with Ellen to members of Hyderabad’s administrative elite to curry favour.

Against the advice of his friends, Mehdi filed a lawsuit against the pamphlet’s printer, SM Mitra, in the Residency Court, where a British judge would preside.

Both the prosecution and defence hired well-known British lawyers to make their cases. The two sides bribed witnesses, and accused each other of having witnesses who perjured themselves either in pre-trial depositions, on the stand, or both.

Shockingly, the judge acquitted Mitra of the charge that he had printed the pamphlet. He left untouched the accusations of cohabitation, prostitution, incest, deceit, perjury, bribery, and more that had come out during the trial.

The pamphlet scandal was an international sensation. The Nizam’s government, the British Indian government, the British government in London, and papers across the globe followed the followed the case during its nine-month run.

Within days of the verdict, Mehdi and Ellen boarded a train to move back to Lucknow, a city in northern India where they had both grown up.

Mehdi repeatedly tried to be reinstated in the local government in Lucknow, where he had once served as a local collector, to receive his pension, or just to be granted some money, but to no avail.

Mehdi – who had once professed his love for Queen Victoria through tear-filled eyes, and called the nascent Indian National Congress party “dangerous” – was abandoned by the colonial Indian government just as the Nizam’s government had abandoned him.

In the end, he was dismissed from his role as Home Secretary in the Nizam’s government, and humiliatingly, denied any pension or compensation from either.

When he died at the young age of 52, he left no protective financial net for Ellen.

As she aged, her condition worsened. In the last years of her life, in shaky blue ink on cream paper, she beseeched Hyderabad’s prime minister and Nizam for some form of compensation.

Hyderabad officialdom, having emerged from a time of scandals and corruption, viewed Ellen’s request with sympathy and allowed her a small compassionate allowance. Yet, shortly after receiving modest help, she succumbed to the plague and died.

The story of the couple provides a window into cultural hybridity during the high noon of the British Indian Empire. It wouldn’t be too long before Indian nationalist forces began to seriously challenge socio-political structures.

Mehdi and Ellen’s story challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the India of that period.

While the couple clung to each other in a sea of sensation and storm, ultimately their story so violated the norms of the time that they were ruined.

The pamphlet scandal is an end-point in colonial India’s history in which Hyderabad and the princely states were still “oriental despots,” just before many became nationalist supporters.

The Indian National Congress, begun in 1885, was gaining momentum by the time of Mehdi and Ellen’s trial in 1892.

And, shortly after Ellen’s death, Mahatma Gandhi returned to India and solidified Congress’ role in India’s freedom movement. A tectonic shift was underway in which the princes of India, their domains and their scandals were about to recede from the headlines as the nationalist took centre stage.

And in this shift, the pamphlet case has been lost.