The programme was inaugurated P. Hemalatha, Secretary, Spices Board. Saswati Bose, General Manager, APEDA, B. N. Jha, Director (Marketing), Spices Board; Dharmendra Das, Director (Development), Spices Board and Joji Mathew, Director (Retd), Spices Board and Lead Auditor, NPOP addressed the participants.

The technical sessions featured insightful presentations on organic certification, updated NPOP standards, market trends, and practical challenges. Saswati Bose elaborated on the 8th edition’s provisions for sustainable spice production. The Spices Board, in collaboration with APEDA, conducted a one-day sensitisation programme on the 8th edition of the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP) on spices at Kochi. The event aimed to raise awareness on updated NPOP standards for sustainable spice production besides promoting the export of organic spices and spice products.Thejas Thayyil, Business Head, Biowin Agro Research, spoke on the scope and global demand for organic spices. Hemalatha said, “Sustainable agriculture aims to ensure safe and nutritious food at affordable cost, farmer profitability, and environmental conservation. In this context, the 8th edition of NPOP provides essential guidelines for organic spice production in harmony with nature. I hope this programme deepens stakeholders’ understanding and commitment to sustainable practices.”

IT analysts have been grilling the top CXOs of top-tier companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro to get a visibility on the terrain in the backdrop of tariffs. K Krithivasan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of TCS, said that the Consumer Business Group saw heightened caution and delays in discretionary projects, especially in the US.Jayesh Sanghrajka, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Infosys, tariffs and trade barriers were likely to lead to a subdued spend and delayed decision-making.

The impact

Based on client conversations, large transformation projects are being paused or delayed. Clients with budgets are waiting for certainty about the situation before moving forward.There is some impact across the board, but there are some sectors more impacted than others. “For instance, our consumer business, you’re seeing more impact like retail, CPG, airlines, travel hospitality, we see more impact. Similarly, there is an impact in the auto sub segment within manufacturing. But if you take BFSI, by and large the segment is doing okay. There is some softness in insurance,” he said.“Retail sector has been impacted by economic uncertainty resulting in lower consumer spending in core markets. Due to recent tariff announcements, client budgets are expected to be tightened and there is increased caution. Decision cycles are getting stretched for discretionary spend and large deals,” he said.Pallia said that after the pause for 90 days on the tariffs, there was a little bit of stability over the last two few weeks. 

Uncertain economic environment 

In the recent earnings call, he said that it was driven by the significant drop in consumer sentiment in February, which had preceded changes in global trade and tariffs, creating a domino effect on retail CPG and TTH (travel, transportation, and hospitality) industries.“The impact of tariffs on IT service providers will be a function of their portfolio of offerings and end markets,” Prashant Shukla, vice president, Everest Group, said. “Weakness in auto, especially in Europe continues. We are helping clients in aerospace resolve bottleneck in the supply chain,” he said. “For instance, in terms of topline and deal pipelines,  part of portfolio which is discretionary in nature with exposure to directly impacted industries like manufacturing will suffer much more than, say, an essential, non-discretionary service with industry which is not directly impacted by tariffs, like banking. In short to medium term, cost-optimisation services will see more takers,” he said.Published on April 28, 2025 “We are seeing this impact not just in the US, but also in Europe. Similarly, these impacts are being seen across sectors, directly or indirectly. But some sectors have been impacted more, like consumer, manufacturing. Within manufacturing, specifically automotive and industrial, are impacted,” he said, responding to a query.Even as reciprocal tariffs by US President Donald Trump trigger an economic chaos across the world, IT analysts and investors are trying to weight how these tariffs could impact the bottomlines and margins of IT companies.He said the clients in all the industries were taking a lot more cautious approach. “And they’re also doing scenario planning, because they would like to see when this whole thing is settled down, before they start making more business decisions,” he said.

It can be reasonably assumed that the implementation of food security schemes as well as crucial direct benefit transfers (Jan Dhan Yojana and PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, among others, including those introduced by the States) have made a big difference. The impact of these schemes has been captured through the new methodology used in Household Consumer Expenditure Surveys (HCESs) of 2022-23 and 2023-24. The World Bank draws an important line between extreme poverty and a ‘low and middle income country’ poverty level of .65 a day (PPP terms). Using the latter measure, India’s poverty is seen to have fallen sharply from 61.8 per cent to 28.1 per cent over a decade, lifting 378 million people out of poverty. The two sets of figures corresponding to their respective poverty lines are revealing. They tell us that foodgrain distribution to 80 crore people has perhaps played a big role in reducing extreme poverty; yet, a quarter of the population struggles to make ends meet even as their bare survival needs are provided for. The numerous DBT schemes could be meeting consumption needs in ways that are not entirely understood. Therefore, ‘freebies’ need to be understood in a more granular way with a view to rationalising them, as each could be distinct in its impact. The brief, which derives its conclusions from the HCESs of 2011-12 and 2022-23, also observes a decline in consumption-based inequality, but adds a caveat that this may not be borne out by income-based inequality assessments. It acknowledges that changes in methodology in HCES 2022-23 over its decade-ago version “present challenges for making comparisons”. The HCES data suggests that the urban-rural gap narrowed from 84 per cent in 2011-12 to 71 per cent in 2022-23 and further to 70 per cent in 2023-24. The brief, meanwhile, makes a sobering observation that the median earnings of the top 10 per cent were 13 times higher than the bottom 10 per cent in 2023-24. Owing to methodological issues, it is hard to say whether this marks an improvement over time. The World Bank’s recently released poverty and equity brief on India confirms what many researchers and lay observers have said from time to time — that ‘extreme poverty’ in India, measured in terms of those living on less than .15 a day in 2017 PPP terms, is turning into a footnote. It has fallen from 16.2 per cent in 2011-12 to 2.3 per cent in 2022-23. As a result 171 million people have emerged from a state of dire want.

Some of the brief’s observations are puzzling. For instance, the view that “recent data indicates a shift of male workers from rural to urban areas for the first time since 2018-19” does not sit well with Periodic Labour Force Survey data on rising workforce in agriculture in recent years — or for that matter, arguably with a December 2024 study by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister that points to a decline in rural to urban migration over a decade. The data noise with respect to India’s socio-economic profile needs serious attention.