🏦 Don’t torch ties with India

Good morning. Fight the mid week slump and seize the day - you got this 💪 

Ruchirr Sharma & Shatakshi Sharmaa  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 🏦 Nikki Haley to US: Don’t torch ties with India to go soft on China

•  💻️ AI models on your laptop

• Bite-sized summaries

  • 🏡 RBI, Nabard scale up rural financial literacy with 2,421 centres

  • 🇮🇳🤝🇺🇸 India, US push forward on Trade Pact talks

• 🧑‍🍳 What else is cookin’?

MARKETS

🇮🇳 India

• Indian markets declined. Losses in oil, gas, pharma, and IT stocks followed weak earnings reports and renewed US tariff threats against India, pushing investor sentiment lower after recent gains and ahead of further RBI policy cues.

🌍️ International

• US markets ended lower, pressured by disappointing economic data and poor service sector growth. Investor concerns mounted over potential new tariffs on India and other trading partners, adding to uncertainty after a recent rebound and ongoing worries about the broader economic outlook.

POLICY

🏦 Nikki Haley to US: Don’t torch ties with India to go soft on China

As tensions rise over India’s oil purchases from Russia, former US ambassador Nikki Haley has stepped into the fray — with a warning for Washington.

In a strongly worded post on X, Haley said the US must not “burn its relationship with a strong ally like India” while giving a free pass to China, which remains the largest buyer of Russian and Iranian oil. Her remarks come just as Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of India, vowing to hike tariffs “very substantially” in the next 24 hours over its continued energy trade with Moscow.

Haley, who served as UN Ambassador during Trump’s first term, acknowledged that India buying Russian oil isn't ideal. But she pointed out the double standard: India faces tariff threats, while China gets a 90-day pause. “Don’t give China a pass,” she urged.

India, in response, mounted an unusually sharp counterattack, calling out the US and EU for “unjustified” targeting of its energy strategy. Indian officials argue that its oil imports are driven by price and national interest, not politics.

Meanwhile, Trump struck a friendlier tone with China, saying he’s “getting along very well” with Xi Jinping and might meet him by year-end — if a trade deal materialises.

The broader picture? US foreign policy is entering choppy waters, with allies and adversaries being judged by inconsistent standards. For India, which has walked a tightrope between Washington and Moscow, Haley’s comments are a rare voice of support — and a reminder that not all of DC sees red.

Read more: Economic Times

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 💻️ AI models on your laptop

In a throwback to its more open days, OpenAI has launched two open-weight language models — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — that are optimized for advanced reasoning and can run on a laptop or a single GPU.

Wait, what’s an open-weight model? It means the trained parameters (aka the brain of the model) are public. Developers can use them, tweak them, and deploy them without needing access to the original data. It’s not quite open-source, but it’s a big step toward transparency and customizability.

This is OpenAI’s first open release since GPT-2 back in 2019. The models are trained specifically on text-heavy data focused on science, math, and coding — making them especially sharp in those domains, including medical queries and competition math.

OpenAI claims performance on par with its smaller proprietary models (like o3-mini and o4-mini), and possibly competitive with Meta’s Llama or China’s DeepSeek models, though no direct benchmarks were shared.

Why it matters: Most open-source AI models this year came from Meta and startups, while OpenAI has mostly kept its tech locked down. With gpt-oss, it’s signaling a renewed interest in open development — or perhaps just responding to rising global competition.

Bonus: You don’t need a data center to use these. The smaller model, gpt-oss-20b, runs on consumer laptops, making high-performance AI more accessible than ever.

And with OpenAI eyeing a $40 billion raise, it seems the race to democratize AI is heating up — and this time, it fits in your backpack.

Read more: Economic Times

GENERAL OVERVIEW

🗞️ Bite-sized summaries

🏡 RBI, Nabard scale up rural financial literacy with 2,421 centres - To deepen financial inclusion in rural India, the RBI and Nabard have ramped up efforts to promote financial and digital literacy. Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary informed Parliament that 2,421 Centres for Financial Literacy (CFLs) have been set up across the country as of March 2025 — each covering three blocks on average. These initiatives aim to educate villagers on banking products, government schemes, mobile banking, and cyber security, while also supporting self-help groups (SHGs) with account access and credit linkages. The programmes rely on community-led, participatory models, fostering trust between rural communities and financial institutions.

🇮🇳🤝🇺🇸 India, US push forward on Trade Pact talks - India and the United States are making steady progress on a proposed bilateral trade agreement (BTA), with five rounds of negotiations completed since talks began in March 2025, Minister of State for Commerce Jitin Prasada told Parliament. The next round will be held in India from August 25. The agreement seeks to boost trade and investment while protecting domestic sectors like agriculture and small industries through sensitive lists and trade safeguards. India maintained a $41 billion trade surplus with the US in FY25, with bilateral trade touching $186 billion. Meanwhile, India has reserved the right to retaliate under WTO rules after the US refused consultations on its tariffs on steel and aluminium.

HEADLINES

🧑‍🍳 What else is cookin’?

What’s happening in India (and around the world 🌍️)

• Over 130 rescued as cloudburst triggers devastation in Uttarkashi; CM Dhami assures full support to affected people.

• Freakier Friday review: Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan struggle to rekindle the body-swap magic in shrill “Freakquel”.

• Indian generics wave next year set to sink obesity drug price.