Quick grocery delivery platform Zepto on Friday announced the elevation of Devendra Meel to the Chief Business Officer (CBO), effective July 2024.

In this role, he will lead category management and foster brand partnerships, ensuring optimal assortment, pricing, availability, and growth of all core categories on the platform.

“I am deeply committed to this mission and will bring all my energy and dedication to it. Zepto’s meritocratic, fast-moving environment offers high-stakes challenges and the potential for 10X career growth,” Meel said in a statement.

Meel’s elevation to CBO underscores Zepto’s commitment to fostering internal talent and driving continuous innovation. Prior to Zepto, he, an IIM-Bangalore graduate, led special initiatives at Zomato and Jio, the company mentioned.

“Devendra has executed like an entrepreneur and treated Pass like his baby, working tirelessly 6-7 days a week with the Pass team to make the economics sustainable, and brought the whole company together to get Pass launched in record time,” said Aadit Palicha, Co-founder and CEO, Zepto.

Palicha further mentioned that he played a key role in scaling the company’s advertising business to hundreds of crores in revenue and, built out Zepto Pass end-to-end: from an idea to over 5 million subscribers. AGENCIES

The Palestinians ordered by the Israeli military to leave Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip are lacking essential services and experiencing hostilities, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

Over the last week, the communities in northern Gaza have endured increased fighting, the ICRC said on Thursday in a statement, adding that the evacuation orders affected thousands of families, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Israeli orders were often unclear, leading to confusion and fear among the residents, the statement noted.

“The grim reality in Gaza today is that nowhere is safe. The struggle to simply survive is robbing people of their dignity,” it added.

Israel’s military said on Wednesday that it dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza City, urging all residents to leave immediately amid an intensified Israeli military offensive on the city.

Earlier this week, the Israeli army required tens of thousands of Palestinians living in 19 blocs in Gaza City to immediately evacuate, according to a report published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

UN statistics estimated in early July that the number of people displaced within the Gaza Strip had risen to 1.9 million, or about nine out of 10 people in the enclave.

Israel launched a large-scale offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to retaliate against a Hamas rampage through the southern Israeli border on October 7, 2023, during which about 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 others were taken hostage.

The Gaza-based health authorities said on Thursday that the Palestinian death toll from ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza has risen to 38,345. AGENCIES

 Visiting Foreign Ministers of the Bay of Bengal countries jointly called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the final day of the 2nd BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers’ Retreat in New Delhi on Friday.

“PM had fruitful discussions with the group of Ministers on further strengthening the regional cooperation in diverse areas including connectivity, energy, trade, health, agriculture, science, security and people to people exchanges. He stressed on the role of BIMSTEC as an engine for economic and social growth,” a statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said after the meeting.

PM Modi also reaffirmed India’s commitment to a peaceful, prosperous, resilient and safe BIMSTEC region and highlighted its significance to India’s Neighbourhood First and Act East policies as well as in its SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) vision.

Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, or BIMSTEC, brings together seven countries of South and South East Asia for multifaceted cooperation

The first edition of the BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers’ Retreat was held in Bangkok in July 2023 as India continues to reiterate its commitment to promote connectivity and linkages in the shared Bay of Bengal region.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dr. Hasan Mahmud, Thailand Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa (current BIMSTEC chair), Bhutan Foreign Minister D.N. Dhungyel, Nepal Foreign Secretary Sewa Lamsal, State Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka Tharaka Balasuriya and Myanmar’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister U Than Swe attended the meeting to bolster regional cooperation.

During his meeting with the visiting foreign ministers, PM Modi also expressed India’s full support to Thailand for the upcoming BIMSTEC Summit to be held in September, later this year.

Last month, as he congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the BJP-led NDA’s third consecutive term, Thailand Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said that he is already looking forward to the Indian leader’s visit to the country in September this year for the BIMSTEC Summit.

“While Prime Minister Modi will be visiting Thailand in September this year to attend the BIMSTEC Summit; on my part, I look forward to paying an official visit to India at the earliest opportunity to realise the full potential of our relations,” said Thavisin.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval were also present during the PM’s meeting with the visiting foreign dignitaries. AGENCIES

 India will continue to be the world’s most populous country into the next century, even though its population will peak in the mid-2060s and begin a slow decline, according to a population expert.

India is “currently the largest country in the world in terms of population, and it is projected to stay so throughout the century,” Senior Population Affairs Officer Clare Menozzi said on Thursday at the release of the UN World Population Prospects 2024 Summary.

India’s population is “supposed to peak around the 2060s in size and then it starts to slightly decline,” she said. “So by the end of the century, India is projected to be around 1.5 billion, but still the largest country in the world by a large margin.”

According to the data accompanying the report, India’s population is projected to grow from 1.45 billion now to a peak of 1.7 billion in 2064 when the decline begins, and register 1.5 billion in 2100, a 12 per cent drop.

The report noted that India is among the countries where the working-age population – 20 to 64 years – will grow through 2054,” offering a window of opportunity known as the demographic dividend.”

To capitalise on this opportunity, countries must invest in education, health, and infrastructure, and implement reforms to create jobs and improve government efficiency, the report suggested.

Life expectancy for Indians is projected to grow from 72.24 years now to 83.3 years by 2100.

The total fertility rate for India, which is the number of children a woman has, will decline from the current 1.96 and start the next century at 1.69.

A total fertility rate of 2.2 is considered the replacement rate that will hold the population steady, and a dip below that signals a decline in population, although it could still be growing because of increasing life expectancy and because of the previous population growth that resulted in a large number of younger women who will be of child-bearing age.

In the next 30 years, Pakistan will become the world’s third-most populous country, according to the report’s projections, increasing its population from the current 251 million to 389 million in 2054, overtaking the United States and Indonesia.

That year, India is projected to have a population of 1.69 billion and China 1.21 billion.

For the world, the population will peak in the mid-2080s, growing over the next sixty years from 8.2 billion people now to around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, and then will slide to around 10.2 billion by the end of the century, according to Navid Hanif, the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development.

The report drew attention to the trend of an ageing population, where senior citizens will outnumber children.

By the late 2070s, the global population aged 65 and older is projected to reach 2.2 billion, exceeding the number of children under 18, and by the mid-2030s, those aged 80 and over will outnumber infants reaching 265 million, it said.

The trend towards a preponderance of an ageing population is already happening in several countries

The report proposed that countries consider the use of technology to improve productivity at all ages and expand lifelong learning and re-training to extend working lives for those who can and want to continue working.

About the future of the globe with a burgeoning population and the stress on the environment, Population Division’s Director John Wilmoth said that the impact will be from behaviour, rather than the numbers.

“What the world is like in 60 years, will depend on a lot of choices that will be made between now and then, policies that will be implemented or not, and technological advances and so forth,” he said.

“All of these things will change the world that we’re living in. Population trends will be one part of that, but not necessarily the largest or the determining part,” he said. “What really matters is our behaviours and the choices that we make.” AGENCIES

 The recent cyberattack in Indonesia that massively disrupted its national data system has urged the country to strengthen its cyber resilience and evaluate its digital technology policy.

Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs Hadi Tjahjanto said on Friday that the government would carry out digital security improvement and strengthen the system capabilities of its national data centre, reported Xinhua news agency.

“We are making the data centre with the ability to have multiple back-ups, layered back-ups with good security. We want it to be a system that cannot be hacked. This will continue to be done to support the government’s performance in serving the public,” Tjahjanto said in a press conference.

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics is currently preparing to execute what it calls as “tenant redeploy”, improving the digital security in governance by stricter standard operating procedures. “We’ll execute it from August to September 2024,” the ministry’s Director General of Informatics Applications, Ismail, said on Thursday.

The ransomware attack that targeted Indonesia’s national data centre and created a massive data crisis started on June 17 and went on for almost one week, with the hacker initially asking for a ransom of $8 million.

According to the Ministry of Communication and Informatics and the National Cyber and Encryption Agency, at least 282 institutions were disrupted by the attack, including the immigration services, which caused long queues at the airports due to system bottlenecks at the immigration checkpoints. The attack also disrupted educational institutions as the country was currently holding a student enrolment period ahead of the new academic year.

Reports said that following the incident, many citizens in Indonesia demanded the Communication and Informatics Minister to step down due to his failure in protecting the public’s data.

The financial industry in Indonesia, as the institution that is most vulnerable to hackers, continues to increase its cybersecurity capacity to anticipate the threat of cyberattacks, ranging from fulfilling cybersecurity standards to simulations in facing cyberattacks.

Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority, a government agency that regulates and supervises the financial services sector, launched on Tuesday cybersecurity guidelines that were specifically designed for all financial sector technology innovation organisers in the country.

The guidelines provide a cyber capacity-building programme that includes data protection, risk management, incident response, maturity assessment, training and awareness by prioritising the principles of collaboration and information exchange.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII) said it was preparing to form a task force that would focus on cybersecurity, particularly to prevent the negative impacts of increasingly massive technological innovation.

“We want to gather existing related stakeholders to provide inputs to the government in any case, especially for cases related to cybersecurity,” APJII Chairman Muhammad Arif said on Wednesday.

He also said that APJII, which currently has 1,087 members of Internet service providers across Indonesia, had begun to develop support for maintaining security in cyberspace.

Ridi Ferdiana, a software expert from the Faculty of Engineering of the Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia’s Yogyakarta province, said the recent ransomware attack should be a self-reflection for the government to improve the information system architecture, security procedures and computer security networks.

“There are several cybersecurity measures that can be taken to prevent the national data centre server from being exposed to cyberattacks again, including developing routine inspection procedures related to security gaps, implementing network security procedures for the public and the data centre, as well as conducting regular maintenance to review the security perimeter and suitability of procedures,” Ferdiana said.

The government, he said, should design high-availability cloud infrastructure based on disaster recovery plans to speed up the data recovery.

“We also advise that the national data centre implement encryption at the row field security or file level either in transit or at rest, so that even in the event of ransomware, the stolen data cannot be read,” he added. AGENCIES

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has called for the establishment of a national inquiry committee into Hamas’s October 7 attack, which will also probe the conduct of the government, military, and other security agencies.

The planned National Commission of Inquiry would be an independent body headed by a retired judge with wide-ranging investigative powers, Xinhua news agency reported.

At the graduation ceremony of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers’ course, Gallant said on Thursday that the commission “should be objective … it should check all of us—the government, the army, and the security agencies. It should check me as well as the Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu), Army Chief, Shin Bet Chief, the IDF, and the national bodies”.

Gallant is the most senior official to call for a national investigation into the attack, during which thousands of Hamas militants caught Israel by surprise, crossing from Gaza and killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others. AGENCIES

It’s an unprecedented state of excitement at the house of elderly Fatima in Kerala’s Kozhikode, whose son, Abdul Rahim, a death row convict in Saudi Arabia, is set to return home after securing a pardon.

It’s been an 18-year wait for the mother, whose prayers have been finally answered.

The return was made possible through a massive fund collection drive for Rs 34 crore which was given as blood money on the orders of a Saudi Arabian court. The court had ruled that in case the money was not given Rahim would be executed.

The money was handed over in April. The court yielded after the Saudi family accepted the money which enabled the legal proceedings for his release.

Rahim’s mother cannot hide her excitement, and on Friday she said she wants to see her son as soon as possible.

“Even though he calls me, that’s not enough, I just cannot wait any longer to see my son and wish he come at the earliest,” said Fatima.

Rahim’s nephew is also excited and said that the Saudi Arabian court has asked Rahim’s lawyer to be present on Sunday.

“The lawyer has told us, that on Sunday we will know when Rahim will be finally released. And once released, he will be put on a flight back home, for which the entire village is waiting,” said the nephew.

“After the orders of his release came, every minute now seems like hours,” added the nephew.

An auto driver here, Rahim was drawn to the Gulf to make more money. He reached Saudi Arabia in 2006 and got a job as a personal driver-cum-caretaker of a 15-year-old physically challenged boy, who also had a medical ailment where he breathed through an external device connected to his body.

The boy, according to Rahim, misbehaved with him one day while he was driving. As he was trying to quieten him, his hand accidentally touched the external medical device which got disconnected and the boy died.

A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced him for murder and the appeal court upheld this verdict in 2022. The decision was later confirmed by the country’s Supreme Court.

Then following numerous discussions with the Saudi family, they settled for blood money and the doors for Rahim’s freedom were finally opened. AGENCIES

The Malawian government announced it would host a virtual mining investment forum for Malawians living abroad on Saturday.

The event follows a successful 2024 Malawi Mining Investment Forum held in Lilongwe in April during the Agriculture, Tourism and Mining Week, said Malawian Minister of Mining Monica Chang’anamuno, reported Xinhua news agency.

On Thursday, the minister told local media that the upcoming virtual forum for Malawians living in the diaspora is part of the Malawian government’s ongoing efforts to promote sustainable development and growth of the mining sector.

The forum will include sessions designed for Malawians living abroad to explore unique investment opportunities in the growing mining sector of the sub-Saharan country.

Chang’anamuno said the forum is expected to attract over 200 Malawians in the diaspora, adding that they will have discussions to explore strategies and solutions for developing Malawi’s mining sector under the theme “Global Connections, Local Impact: Investing in Malawi’s Minerals.”

Malawi is rich in mineral resources, including rare earth elements, graphite, uranium, gold and gemstones. AGENCIES

Nearly 6,500 adolescent girls die in childbirth in South Asia every year, said UN agencies on Friday, calling for prioritisation of the health of girls and adolescents in South Asia.

Experts from the agencies discussed this at a two-day regional dialogue on adolescent pregnancy jointly organised by the SAARC, UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia (UNICEF ROSA), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Kathmandu, Nepal.

At the event, officials and civil society representatives from India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka reaffirmed their commitment to prioritise health for over 2.2 million adolescent girls that give birth yearly in South Asia; and to provide better opportunities to learn, set up their businesses, and earn a living.

The experts noted that most of these girls were child brides who have limited power over their reproductive health or lives.

The South Asia region “has a long way to go. I call upon everyone to resolutely address the root causes including child marriage, access to adolescent health education, and removing social stigma in managing the teenage population of SAARC region,” said Ambassador Golam Sarwar, the Secretary General of SAARC.

South Asia accounts for 290 million child brides — nearly half of the world’s burden. These girls are forced to drop out of school and face stigma, rejection, violence, unemployment as well as lifelong social challenges.

About 49 per cent of young girls in South Asia are not in education, employment, or training – the highest in the world, the experts noted.

With poorer health coverage adolescent mothers are also at increased risk of early deaths, and the babies born also face a significantly higher risk of death.

“It is high time that we reverse this trend,” said Saima Wazed, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia.

She stressed adolescents’ “unique physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and sexual development” needs to be given “special attention in national and international policies”.

She also called for “cross-sectoral collaboration and equitable access to a variety of services”, and an increase in “investments” to tackle adolescent pregnancy and promote their healthy socio-economic development.

“This supports the well-being of the youth of today – who are the human capital of tomorrow,” the Regional Director said. AGENCIES

 Nine infants have died since the beginning of an outbreak of whooping cough in November last year, according to figures released by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

In the first five months of 2024, 7,599 children and adults have been infected by the disease, which affects the lungs and breathing tubes and spreads easily, showed the figures released on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported.

“Young babies are at highest risk of severe complications and death from whooping cough,” the UKHSA said in its alert.

Over half of those infected are people aged 15 or older and suffer a mild illness, the agency said, adding that high numbers continue to be reported in babies under three months of age who are at greatest risk from the infection.

Medics have urged pregnant women and babies to get whooping cough vaccinations. The UKHSA said the latest uptake data for vaccinations offered to pregnant women to protect newborn infants against whooping cough has fallen below 60 per cent.

Timely vaccination in pregnancy and childhood is important to protect vulnerable young infants from serious disease, according to the UKHSA.

“Vaccination is the best defence against whooping cough, and it is vital that pregnant women and young infants receive their vaccines at the right time,” said Mary Ramsay, director of Immunisation at the UKHSA.

Andrew Preston, a professor from the Milner Center for Evolution and the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath, said: “We’ve now reached levels that we haven’t seen in the UK for well over ten years. This is a genuine outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough).”

“The levels of infant vaccination against pertussis have dropped over the last ten years and thousands of infants haven’t received the vaccinations that we know provide protection,” he said.

Preston said there has also been a striking reduction in maternal vaccination coverage in some parts of the country, down as low as 25 per cent to 30 per cent in some urban parts of Britain.

“I think that’s contributing to some of the more serious cases in those very young infants,” he added.

Preston said he was not sure how long the current outbreak will last. “It’s on an upward trajectory, and to be honest, I don’t think we know when that will plateau, but I think it is probably going to be at an enhanced incidence for most of this year.” AGENCIES