Tupperware Appoints Ankur Damani as Commercial Director to Drive Growth and Accelerate Omnichannel Expansion

New Delhi, India June 02: Tupperware is pleased to announce the appointment of Ankur Damani as Commercial Director, effective 26 May 2026. In this strategic leadership role, Ankur will lead the company’s India business with a focus on accelerating growth and profitability, strengthening market execution, expanding product and distribution capabilities, and driving Tupperware’s Omnichannel growth strategy across the market.

Ankur joins Tupperware with over 20 years of experience across leading international and Indian consumer brands, bringing deep expertise in business transformation, omnichannel growth, distributor network development, retail expansion, and consumer-centric business strategies. Prior to joining Tupperware, he served as Country Head – India & Sri Lanka at Triumph International, where he was instrumental in business transformation, driving growth, strengthening market presence, and leading strategic initiatives across the region.

Before joining Triumph, Ankur was Country Head at Le Creuset, the globally renowned French premium cookware brand, where he played a key role in expanding the brand’s presence across retail, e-commerce, hospitality, and corporate channels.

As Tupperware continues to evolve its business model to meet changing consumer preferences and omnichannel buying behaviour, Ankur will play a pivotal role in expansion of the company’s multi-channel presence and accelerating its omnichannel expansion.

We are delighted to welcome Ankur Damani to Tupperware. His leadership, strong commercial experience & proven success across a range of industries, deep understanding of Indian consumer and market dynamics make him the perfect choice to lead our commercial transformation journey. As we continue to strengthen our partner ecosystem while expanding our omnichannel footprint, Ankur’s expertise will be instrumental in driving sustainable growth and future-ready capabilities for our organization.” shared Noopur Jain, Regional HR Director, APAC at Tupperware.

On his appointment, Ankur Damani said: It is an honour to join Tupperware — a brand with an enduring legacy built on innovation, trust, and empowerment. The opportunity to contribute towards strengthening the brand’s commercial capabilities while accelerating its growth ambitions is incredibly exciting. I look forward to working closely with the teams and partners to unlock new opportunities, deepen consumer engagement, and drive long-term value creation.”

From Bhadohi Carpets to Global Carts: Uttar Pradesh Emerges as India’s Next Big E-commerce Export Engine

Commenting on the growing opportunity, Shri Dinesh Goyal, National President, Indian Industries Association, said: “Uttar Pradesh today has the scale, manufacturing strength, artisan ecosystem, infrastructure growth, and policy support required to emerge as a leading national hub for e–commerce exports. Digital commerce is helping democratise exports by connecting small businesses and local manufacturers directly with global consumers.”

Appreciating the efforts of the Government of Uttar Pradesh, he further stated: “The proactive policies of the Government of Uttar Pradesh, industry-friendly governance, improved infrastructure, investor-focused reforms, and a safe business environment have significantly strengthened industrial confidence and positioned Uttar Pradesh among the most preferred destinations for industries, manufacturing, and exports.”

Highlighting the broader export opportunity, Shri Goyal added: “The Uttar Pradesh Export Promotion Policy 2025–2030, combined with ODOP, logistics improvements, and digital enablement initiatives, can unlock transformational export opportunities for thousands of MSMEs, startups, women entrepreneurs, and artisans across the state.”

How Meghalaya Rewrote Its Health Story in Eight Years: A Glance at What the NFHS-6 Numbers Reveal About a State That Decided Not to Wait

The Mountains Are Moving

How Meghalaya Rewrote Its Health Story in Eight Years

A glance at what the NFHS-6 numbers reveal about a state that decided not to wait.

There is a particular kind of progress that does not announce itself loudly. It does not arrive as a ribbon-cutting or a single triumphant statistic. It accumulates quietly, one institutional birth at a time, one fully immunised child at a time, one young woman who finishes school instead of marrying at seventeen, until one day a national survey holds up a mirror and the change is undeniable. That is the story the sixth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023-24) talks about Meghalaya. And it is a story worth telling honestly, because the honest version is more impressive than the inflated one.

Consider where the state began. For decades Meghalaya carried the twin burdens common to India’s hilly, sparsely connected frontier states: a high maternal mortality rate, fertility well above the national average, and child nutrition indicators that consistently trailed the rest of the country. The terrain itself was an adversary, villages folded into valleys that a single monsoon could cut off, health centres a half-day’s walk from the families who needed them. Against that backdrop, the NFHS-6 results are not just good news. They are evidence of a deliberate, sustained turning of the wheel.

The numbers that matter

Start with fertility, the indicator that has long defined Meghalaya’s demographic challenge. The Total Fertility Rate fell from 2.9 children per woman in 2019-21 (NFHS 5) to 2.2 in 2023-24 (NFHS 6), a 24.1 per cent decline that is the steepest fertility reduction of any state in India. Teenage pregnancy dropped by more than a third, from 7.2 to 4.6 births per thousand adolescent girls. Child marriage rate reduced by 18.3%. These are not abstract demographic curves; they are thousands of girls whose futures widened.

The gains in maternal and newborn care are just as striking. Data from NFHS 5 and NFHS 6 clearly demonstrates the change. Institutional births rose from 58.1 to 65.6 per cent, and crucially, more of those deliveries are happening in public facilities, the share climbing from 49.1 to 55.7 per cent, a sign that families increasingly trust the government system rather than being forced toward costly private care. Deliveries attended by a skilled health worker climbed to 70.9 per cent. On the pace of improvement in both institutional delivery and skilled attendance, Meghalaya ranks among the top two or three states in the country. Full immunisation of young children leapt from 64 to 75.3 per cent, again, one of India’s fastest gains. The proportion of expectant mothers taking iron-folic-acid supplements for the recommended hundred days rose by nearly half.

And then there is the figure that should give every reader pause: spousal violence against ever-married women fell from 15 per cent to 5.9 per cent, a 60 per cent reduction in eight years. A society does not move a number like that by accident.

None of this means the work is finished. Meghalaya’s child stunting that has seen a 20.9% improvement between the period 2019-21 to 2023-24, still stands at 36.8 per cent, its unmet need for family planning, the worrying dip in children receiving an adequate diet, and very high tobacco use among men all remain stubborn challenges. Thus, the honest reading of NFHS-6 is that Meghalaya is one of India’s fastest-improving states even though its absolute levels still sit in the lower band nationally. It is a story of rapid catch-up, not yet of arrival, and that is precisely why the trajectory matters more than any single rank.

Why the curve bent

Progress at this scale is rarely the product of a single scheme. What distinguishes Meghalaya’s approach is that the state government chose to treat health not as a department’s problem but as a whole-of-government project, and, just as importantly, as a partnership with the communities themselves.

The foundation was laid with the Meghalaya Health Systems Strengthening Project, a multi-year effort to rebuild the bones of the public health system: better-equipped facilities, stronger referral chains, and a relentless focus on data. Out of it grew the MOTHER programme – Measurable Outcomes in Transforming the Health sector through a holistic approach with a focus on women’s Empowerment, which used a mobile application to register and track at-risk pregnancies in real time, so that a mother in a remote village became visible to the system rather than invisible to it. Layered on top was the Rescue Mission, an explicitly multisectoral effort that pulled the Departments of Health, Social Welfare, and Community & Rural Development into the same room to attack the social causes of poor maternal outcomes, not just the clinical ones.

Some of the most effective innovations came from the ground up. SHG-run transit homes, modest community-managed lodgings near health facilities, solved one of the most intractable problems of mountain geography: how does a pregnant woman from a road-less village reach a hospital before labour, not during it? By giving her somewhere to stay in the days before delivery, these homes converted intention into safe, institutional childbirth. The same self-help-group networks, federated through the State Rural Livelihoods Mission, became the carriers of nutrition awareness, agri-nutrition gardens, and behaviour change, a model credited with a sharp fall in severe acute malnutrition cases in the areas it reached.

On the demand side, the Megha Health Insurance Scheme, now in its fifth phase and offering cashless cover of up to ₹5.3 lakh per family, integrated with the national Ayushman Bharat–PM-JAY, removed the financial terror that once kept families away from hospitals altogether. The newer CM Care+ scheme extends a safety net for the catastrophic, high-cost treatments that fall beyond even that ceiling. When a family knows that a complicated delivery or a sick newborn will not bankrupt them, the decision to seek institutional care becomes far easier.

Most recently, the government has trained its sights on the one battle it has not yet won: child nutrition. The Mission 1000 Days programme, built around the now-well-established science that the window from conception to a child’s second birthday largely determines lifelong health, channels nutritional support, mother-and-child kits, frontline-worker training, and community interventions into that critical period. Its companion “003” agenda, zero maternal deaths, zero unimmunised children, and healthy growth for every child in the first 1,000 days, has drawn praise from UNICEF for its community-partnership design. It is the logical next chapter: having moved the needle on access to care, Meghalaya is now going after outcomes.

A model worth watching

What ties these efforts together is a philosophy the state’s leadership has articulated plainly that lasting development comes from long-term human-development systems rather than isolated welfare announcements. It is an unfashionably patient idea in an age of quick wins, and the NFHS-6 data suggest it works. Build the institutions, trust the community workers, use the technology to make the invisible visible, remove the financial barriers, and then hold the course across electoral cycles.

Meghalaya has not solved every problem; no honest account would claim otherwise, and the stunting and family-planning gaps are real summons to keep going. But it has demonstrated something that more prosperous states often struggle to achieve; that a frontier region with difficult terrain and tight resources can post some of the country’s fastest improvements in the indicators that decide whether mothers survive childbirth and whether children grow up healthy. Eight years ago, that would have read as aspiration. NFHS-6 has turned it into evidence.

The mountains, it turns out, can be moved. Meghalaya is showing how, one mother, one child, one village at a time.

Data source: National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5: 2019-21 and NFHS-6: 2023-24), International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai. Programme details drawn from Government of Meghalaya health and rural-development initiatives as reported in 2025–2026.

Launch of Flixora – democratising movie streaming and distribution

Flixora, the new platform designed to democratise movie streaming and distribution launches on Monday 1^st June 2026.

Flixora is designed to help filmmakers, studios and content owners distribute and monetise their movies globally and instantly. Creators do not need to have millions of followers before seeing an income, as they do on other platforms. Small filmmakers can get payment and recognition for their work, instead of the industry being monopolised by big studios and those with a name already.

The platform will enable creators to upload, manage, market and sell their content directly to audiences, without relying on traditional gatekeepers or complex distribution networks.

Flixora focuses on simplifying movie distribution for independent filmmakers and emerging creators who often struggle with limited access to global streaming platforms, high distribution costs, low visibility and restricted monetisation opportunities. By providing a direct-to-audience streaming infrastructure, Flixora allows creators to retain control over their content, pricing, audience reach and revenue generation.

The platform also helps filmmakers, production companies and distributors looking for a more accessible and scalable way to reach international viewers.

At the same time, it offers audiences access to a broader and more diverse catalogue of films, including independent cinema, regional productions, and underrepresented stories that may not appear on mainstream streaming services.

How it works for the creators

For movie makers, the process is remarkably straightforward. For a nominal fee of $100* per month you can start adding your movies to Flixora. The fee covers as many films as you want to upload.

All movies are reviewed by the team and, upon approval, are uploaded for end users to stream. The review process ensures quality standards are maintained. If a filmmaker fails to get approval for their movies the $100 is refunded.

The quality of the films streaming on Flixora is paramount, meaning that creators can rest assured they are not getting drowned out by substandard content that also deters viewers. Movies must be original and can only be submitted by the creator.

There is scope for a wide variety of content, as long as the films are over 30 minutes long. Fiction can include any genre and any format, and factual films can include documentary style or practical tips-based material. Music is expected to be a significant section of content. The chief limitation is no pornographic content or anything illegal.

Producers are also offered the choice of countries where they wish viewers to have access to their movie streams, and the site will even provide projected earnings. Those earnings all go directly to the filmmaker, with no cut taken by Flixora, up to a limit of $1 million.

How it works for the viewer

Flixora offers unique design and user experience. Users can search by genre or subject and the search facility includes voice command. You can even search by release date. Just ask “show me all the movies launched on 1^st June”, for example, and a list will appear.

Because there is a minimum length of 30 minutes and all films are reviewed by Flixora to ensure they are high quality, there is not an overwhelm of choice or substandard content that you have to plough through to get to what you enjoy watching.

For viewers the price point is, once again, a winning feature. In the free model, you can pay as you watch with a single movie costing just $1 per session. Alternatively, you can select a premium user status for just $5a month, with unlimited access.

Uniquely, premium users can invite friends to watch movies with them wherever they are, and they can watch together in real time, with friends paying just $1 each. The premium user can stop and start the movie in real time and fellow watchers will stop and start with them. So, they can all go and top up their drinks and grab popcorn at the same time, or stop to discuss what they are watching.

The aim for both producers and viewers is to democratise movie making and viewing, making it accessible to anyone and everyone.

From 1^st June there will be approximately 30 movies, all of them originals, available to stream and Flixora’s projections show that those numbers will grow fast.

Martins Osuofia, Founder of Flixora said: “Flixora isn’t trying to replicate the traditional streaming model and compete on that level. We’re creating a brand new structure for global film distribution, one built around accessibility, creator ownership and direct audience reach.”

Andrew Stevens, writer and producer of ‘The incredible true story of 100 dates in Dallas’ said: “Flixora’s model reduces barriers to entry in the entertainment industry by giving creators such as myself the tools needed to distribute content professionally through a digital-first platform. I am very excited at the prospective opportunities to connect directly with global audiences and to earn directly from day one.”