One important thing: Bengaluru airport is set to become India's first airport with a Multi-Modal Transport Hub (MMTH), that will integrate bus & Metro stations, private cars and taxi parking, baggage sorting area and retail area.

• Once functional, Bengaluru will join the likes of London’s Heathrow and Switzerland’s Zurich.

In today’s newsletter:

• GoMechanic finds a buyer
• Partial relief for Google in CCI battle
• NPCI clarifies on UPI transaction charges

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Sequoia-backed GoMechanic has finally found a buyer after two long months of media speculation over who’s going to buy the beleaguered startup. 

And to everyone’s surprise, it is not among the usual suspects or ones being speculated in recent months.

GoMechanic has been acquired by Servizzy, a consortium led by little known Lifelong Group for an undisclosed amount.

• The board and shareholders with support from Stride Ventures initiated a speedy and widely publicised sale process to ensure the continuity of business, the consortium said in a statement

• Lifelong Group did not reveal the other members of the consortium

Since GoMechanic’s founders admitted to reporting financial errors in January, the company and its investors have been hunting for a buyer. We previously reported how used car retail platforms Spinny and Cars24 were in the race to buy the company.

New Delhi-headquartered Lifelong Group is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and has been in the business since 1985. 

• The group serves many large players including Hero, and General Motors.

GoMechanic, which started as a car repair platform that essentially formalised road-side garages, made forays into spare parts business in 2020 and thus the Sequoia-backed platform’s network will help Lifelong Group to expand its client base.

• GoMechanic is said to have 800 active workshops and claimed to have serviced 30,000 vehicles in January, Lifelong Group said.

“Acquisition of the GoMechanic business, aligns with our strategic vision of synergising the Lifelong Group’s proven expertise in the automotive industry,” a spokesperson for Lifelong Group said.

After a string of setbacks, Google has received partial relief in its fight against the Competition Commission of India (CCI)'s recent Android antitrust order. 

The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has today set aside four of the 10 remedial measures ordered by the CCI in its October 2022 ruling against Google's Android business.

• The tribunal however upheld CCI's Rs 1,338 crore penalty on Google, saying that the competition watchdog's order does not suffer from any ‘confirmation bias’,  as the company had alleged.

For Google, CCI's directives were of more consequence than the penalty amount since it directly impacted the tech giant's business model. India is Google's biggest market in terms of users and is also a key market for the company's future growth strategy. 

Among the key reliefs include:

• Google will not need to allow hosting of third-party app stores on Play Store 

• No need to allow users from removing pre-installed apps such as Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube. 

• Google can continue placing curbs on distributing apps through sideloading

• The company need not share its proprietary Play Services APIs with rivals, original equipment makers (OEMs) and developers. 

NCLAT stated that Google asking OEMs to pre-install the entire suite of 11 Google applications amounts to imposition of unfair conditions. 

• Google also does reduce the incentive of the OEMs to develop their own version of Android (Android forks) by imposing conditions through its Anti Fragmentation Agreement (AFA) that bars OEMs from developing and distributing Android forks, it held.

In January, Google had announced sweeping changes to its Android business in India, including allowing device makers to license individual apps to pre-install on their devices and giving users the option to choose their default search engine.

• The company had said it is also updating its Android compatibility requirements that will enable device makers to build forked variants of Android.

Google has 30 days to pay the penalty and implement the order. It can also challenge the order in the Supreme Court.

• The company said it is currently reviewing the order and evaluating their legal options.

First off, relax! You are not gonna pay for UPI transactions just yet!

This is exactly what the National Payments Council of India also said in its statement today after many took it to social media with false information or misinformation on UPI being chargeable.

Let us decode this for you.

The Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPI wallets) like AmazonPay and PhonePe have been permitted to be part of the interoperable UPI ecosystem. So, the interchange charges are now applicable for the PPI merchant transactions.

• The NPCI has set an interchange fee at 1.1 percent for merchant transactions initiated through PPI wallets on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network with effect from April 1.

"One thing is very clear that a customer never pays in any of these transactions. Only the merchant as a user of the payment system will pay a nominal fee for the payment system,” said Dilip Asbe, CEO of NPCI.

While monetising UPI is a long debate, during the News18’s Rising India Summit today, Asbe sort of indicated that more investment is needed in the payment system to unlock its potential of processing a whopping 300 crore (3 billion) transactions a day by 2030 from 30 crores transactions as of today. 

“Growing to 10X or 3 billion translations per day is the true potential of India and to reach there we need money and we need investments both on the customer and merchant side,” Asbe said. 

There are multiple dialogues happening between fintechs, government and the stakeholders on how to unlock UPI’s potential and find a way to run the system with investments both on the consumer and merchant side, he said.

Imagine you are about to get married, and desire a spectacular wedding set on a spaceship with a backdrop of stars and galaxies. Or perhaps you are a car brand, eager to showcase your latest model atop Mount Everest. 

All of this can be made possible virtually, using just a few simple user commands.

Hyderabad-based Gamitronics is building a generative AI-based tool called Brahamand that helps people create virtual 3D worlds through text commands. 

While it will initially be part of Gamitronics's metaverse platform PartyNite, the company has bigger ambitions for this tool, including tapping the country’s overall creative industry.

Go deeper

On March 29, 1974, Mariner 10 became the first space probe to reach Mercury. During its mission, it completed three flybys between 1974 and 1975 before running out of attitude control gas. 

Mariner 10's findings showed Mercury to be a heavily cratered planet with a significantly higher mass than previously estimated. (Picture credit: NASA)

• Crypto clients with deposits at the failed Signature Bank have until April 5 to close their accounts and move their money, according to the FDIC.

• Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz told investors he was surprised by the regulatory focus on crypto rather than AI, which he believes will cause a "deep fake" identity crisis.

It is impossible to resist courtroom dramas, especially one that involves murder and mystery. More so, if it involves Perry Mason, a criminal lawyer and protagonist in the detective series written by Erle Standley Gardner. 

The plot is simple. Mason’s clients, many of them damsels in distress, are falsely accused of murder. The popular criminal attorney saves the day, and his clients by finding the real murderer, culminating in the final scene.

The series currently ranks third in the top selling books series having sold 300 million copies. 

Between 1933 and 1973, Gardner wrote 82 novels featuring Mason, which were adapted into a TV Series, Radio Show and movie series.

Read the books