Women in 2026 assembly elections; Building AI tool for healthcare
West Bengal, historically among the better-performing states on women’s representation, elected 37 women this year.
Hello,
In the first case of its kind, cybercriminals recently used an AI model to create a zero-day vulnerability that could be used to exploit networks widely, Google said on Monday.
The development comes amid security concerns over AI models that can be used to launch widespread attacks, especially on banking infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a union representing India’s IT employees Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), has reportedly written to Union Labour and Employment Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, asking the government to issue an advisory on work-from-home. The request came after PM Narendra Modi appealed to citizens to adopt remote working as a fuel-saving measure due to global geopolitical tensions.
ICYMI: An increase in LPG price has pushed restaurants to become leaner.
Molière, the playwright, actor, and poet, is widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. He is to French literature what Shakespeare is to English. Now, more than three hundred years after his death, he has been revived using AI, The Guardian reported. Scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used AI to write a play in his style.
In today’s newsletter, we will talk about
- Women in 2026 assembly elections
- Building AI tool for healthcare
Here’s your trivia for today: What was the name of the first orbiter of NASA's space shuttle programme?
Social impact
Women in 2026 assembly elections
After decades of women’s political mobilisation and the strong case for the Women’s Reservation Bill, few women actually made it to power in the recently concluded assembly elections in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Puducherry and West Bengal.
Power play:
- Across these five states, 1019 women contested for 824 assembly seats and only 78 won.
- Tamil Nadu sent 23 women to the Assembly, including 13 from C. Joseph Vijay’s two-year-old Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), out of the 443 women who contested the elections.
- West Bengal, historically among the better-performing states on women’s representation, elected 37 women this year. With 385 women candidates, it had the second-highest number of women contesting the elections.
<Funding alert>
Startup: Sindhuja Microcredit
Amount: $5M
Round: pre-Series D
Startup: Wingreens
Amount: Rs 120 Cr
Round: Series D
Healthtech
Building CIBIL-like score for healthcare
When you apply for a home loan, a three-digit number decides your future: CIBIL score. Based on years of repayments and borrowing behaviour, the score gives banks a single honest picture of your financial health. Now imagine the same thing, but for your health.
That's the idea Kiran Kalakuntla had when he founded ekincare in 2014 along with Srikanth Samudrala and Dr. Noel Coutinho . Not the flashy version of digital health, no telemedicine app, no on-demand doctor consultations. Just a quiet obsession with one question: what would it take to build a truly continuous, intelligent picture of a person's health over time?
Key takeaways:
- India's employer-sponsored health ecosystem is enormous: over 500 million workers, most of them covered by some form of company-mandated annual health check.
- Hyderabad-based eKincare embeds itself as the health benefits layer between employers and their workforce. It manages everything from annual health checks and OPD reimbursements to chronic disease programmes and mental wellness.
- eKincare has built what it calls a Health Score, which is a continuous, dynamic metric drawing from lab reports, step counts, family history, dietary habits, and every health interaction a person has through the platform.
News & updates
- Legal battle: Online fast-fashion platform Shein accused Temu of copyright infringement "on an industrial scale", while Temu countered that Shein is using litigation to stifle competition, as a trial opened at London's High Court on Monday.
- AI bet: OpenAI said it is setting up a new company with more than $4 billion in initial capital to help organisations build and deploy AI systems. It also acquired an AI consulting firm, Tomoro, to quickly scale up the unit.
What was the name of the first orbiter of NASA's space shuttle programme?
Answer: Columbia
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