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Pakistan players (PTI Photo)

NEW DELHI: Veteran off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin has stirred debate at the ICC T20 World Cup 2026 after urging Pakistan to make a bold selection call ahead of their must-win Super 8 clash against England in Pallekele on Tuesday. Taking to social media, Ashwin advised Pakistan to promote Fakhar Zaman to the middle order if they are serious about staying alive in the tournament.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!“If Pakistan are serious about this World Cup campaign, they need to think about giving Fakhar Zaman a go in the middle order,” Ashwin wrote on X. He emphasised Fakhar’s ability to counter England’s spin threat, particularly leg-spinner Adil Rashid and left-arm spinner Liam Dawson.

“He can sweep and use his feet against Rashid and Dawson to inflict some serious damage through the middle overs. This was Nepal’s success formulae against Rashid and there are some key learning’s that the other teams can try to imbibe. Access the square boundaries to earn balls in the step hit zone,” Ashwin added.Ashwin pointed to Nepal’s success against Rashid, even sharing a wagon wheel graphic to illustrate how accessing square boundaries and using footwork disrupted England’s control in the middle overs.The suggestion comes as spin is expected to dominate at the Pallekele International Cricket Stadium, where slowing surfaces have already influenced results. England’s spinners, supported by pacer Jofra Archer, played a decisive role in their commanding win over Sri Lanka, while their batting has found unlikely heroes.Despite inconsistent performances from senior players like Jos Buttler, England have continued to win, with captain Harry Brook backing his experienced core to deliver soon. Opener Phil Salt has also rediscovered form at a crucial time.Pakistan, led by Salman Ali Agha, face a far more precarious situation. Their opening Super 8 match against New Zealand was washed out, leaving them with little margin for error. While their spin attack offers variety, their batting has struggled for consistency beyond leading scorer Sahibzada Farhan.

IBM shares suffered their worst single-day drop in over 25 years on Monday, February 23 after AI startup Anthropic announced that its Claude Code tool can automate the modernisation of COBOL—the decades-old programming language that sits at the heart of IBM’s mainframe business. The stock fell 13.2% to close at $223.35, wiping roughly $40 billion off IBM’s market value and dragging it down more than 24% year to date.The selloff was triggered by a blog post from Anthropic claiming that Claude Code could handle the exploration and analysis work that makes COBOL modernisation so expensive and time-consuming for enterprises. The company argued that AI tools can now compress what used to be multi-year, consultant-heavy migration projects into a matter of quarters.For IBM, which earns recurring revenue from mainframe hardware refresh cycles, software licences and COBOL-related services, the implication was hard to ignore: if AI can do what armies of consultants once did, a significant chunk of the company’s business model faces disruption.

What exactly is COBOL, and why does it still matter?

COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language. It was created in 1959—the same year Alaska became a US state—partly drawing on work by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The language was built for one job: processing business data. Payroll, transactions, administrative records.Sixty-six years later, it still does that job. Every day. An estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US still rely on COBOL. It supports 80% of in-person credit card swipes. Hundreds of billions of lines of the language are in active production every day, powering critical systems at banks, airlines and government agencies worldwide.The COBOL Working Group of the Open Mainframe Project estimated in 2021 that roughly 250 billion lines of COBOL are still in use at businesses globally. And most of this code runs on IBM mainframes—the massive, customer-owned servers optimised for large-scale transaction processing.

The problem: Fewer people speak COBOL every year

The catch with COBOL is not that it doesn’t work—it works extremely well for what it was built to do. The problem is that the pool of developers who understand it has been shrinking for years. Most computer science graduates today are trained on Python, Java and cloud-native architectures. Taking a job maintaining COBOL systems is widely seen as career-limiting rather than career-building.This has created an expensive talent bottleneck. Organisations are competing for a shrinking number of specialists who can keep these systems running, while struggling to attract younger developers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several US states found themselves scrambling for COBOL programmers when unemployment systems—many still running on legacy code—buckled under sudden demand.Banks have tried multi-year migration projects to move off COBOL, and some of these efforts have ended with widespread service disruptions and regulatory fines. The IRS only recently announced a transition from COBOL to Java. For most organisations, understanding the legacy code has historically cost more than rewriting it—which is precisely why so much of it is still around.

What Anthropic actually said—and why markets panicked

In its blog post on Monday, Anthropic framed the announcement as a direct solution to this bottleneck. The company said Claude Code can map dependencies across thousands of lines of COBOL, document workflows and flag risks that would take human analysts months to surface. It also released what it calls “The Code Modernisation Playbook,” laying out a phased approach where AI agents read through COBOL programs and JCL scripts, extract business logic, generate code translations to Java or Python and create test suites—all within weeks rather than years.Anthropic’s broader pitch is that legacy code modernisation stalled because comprehension was the real expense, not the rewriting itself. AI, the company argues, flips that equation by making the analysis cheap and fast.Markets took the message seriously. IBM’s 13.2% drop was its steepest daily decline since October 2000. According to Bloomberg data, the stock is now down 26% in February alone—putting it on track for its worst monthly decline since at least 1968. The selloff also dragged down cybersecurity stocks after Anthropic unveiled a separate security scanning capability built into Claude Code on Friday.

IBM’s mainframe business is the real target

IBM isn’t just any company that happens to use COBOL. It owns the mainframe platform the language runs on. The company earns revenue from hardware, software licences and performance upgrades tied to COBOL workloads. Its modernisation strategy has been to connect COBOL to modern tech—exposing COBOL programs as APIs, integrating them with cloud apps and running them alongside Java and AI workloads—rather than to eliminate the language entirely.If an external AI tool can handle the heavy lifting of understanding, documenting and migrating COBOL systems, it threatens a core part of what IBM sells. It’s not that COBOL will disappear overnight. But the consulting-heavy, multi-year modernisation model that has sustained IBM and a roster of large IT services firms—including companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro—could shrink significantly.Indian IT benchmarks felt the ripple too. The Nifty IT index dropped nearly 4% on Tuesday, February 24 as fears of AI-driven disruption to legacy IT services spread.

IBM isn’t alone—AI disruption fears are wrecking havoc on the entire software industry

IBM’s Monday crash is part of a much wider rout. On Friday, cybersecurity heavyweights like CrowdStrike and Datadog slumped after Anthropic unveiled a separate security scanning feature in Claude Code. A major software ETF has now shed 27% this year—its steepest quarterly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. The pattern is becoming predictable: an AI company drops a new capability, and investors dump the legacy names that capability threatens.The fear driving all of this has a name—”vibe coding.” The idea that AI can now write functional software from plain-English prompts has led investors to question the long-term pricing power of companies selling tools and services that developers might soon replace themselves. It’s not just IBM. Consulting firms, IT services giants and enterprise software vendors are all being repriced on the assumption that AI shrinks the addressable market for their products.Whether Anthropic’s COBOL claims hold up at enterprise scale—where decades of undocumented business logic, regulatory requirements and organisational inertia complicate every migration—remains an open question. But Wall Street isn’t waiting to find out. The market has decided that the era of expensive, multi-year legacy modernisation projects is ending. The only debate left is how fast.

Real GDP in India is calculated by adjusting nominal growth figures for inflation through the use of price indices. (AI image)

India is set to release its first set of GDP or Gross Domestic Product data on the basis of a new series that may also address recent criticism from economists. The government is revamping the methodology used to estimate real GDP growth under a new national accounts series scheduled to be released this week. The revised framework will incorporate more detailed price deflation techniques to respond to concerns raised by economists.Real GDP in India is calculated by adjusting nominal growth figures for inflation through the use of price indices. Critics have argued that the existing approach is outdated because it depends largely on the wholesale price index rather than the more widely followed consumer price index.In November, the International Monetary Fund highlighted shortcomings in India’s national accounts system. It pointed to the continued use of the 2011–12 base year, heavy dependence on wholesale price data and extensive reliance on single-deflation techniques. The IMF assigned the methodology a “C” rating.

New GDP data series: What changes

“We will now use about 500–600 items from the new CPI and the old WPI series, compared with about 180 earlier, to deflate the output and improve accuracy of the data,” Saurabh Garg, secretary in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, said in an interview according to a Reuters report.He noted that this approach will remain in place until a revised WPI series is introduced, which is expected in the near term.Under the earlier system, periods marked by subdued nominal GDP expansion and low wholesale inflation often resulted in inconsistencies, as they tended to produce comparatively higher real growth estimates.As per the current data series, India’s economy, which is one of the fastest-expanding among major global economies, is projected to grow by 7.4% in 2025–26. This is compared with an estimated 6.5% growth in 2024–25.Nominal GDP, which measures economic output at prevailing market prices, is expected to increase by 8.0% during the current financial year.A revised GDP series with 2022–23 as the base year will be released on February 27, along with updated historical data covering the previous four years.These modifications form part of a wider overhaul of India’s statistical framework, following the introduction of a new retail inflation series earlier this month. Updates to the wholesale price index and industrial production data are also in progress.A key element of the revised framework is the adoption of double deflation, which adjusts both output prices and input costs separately to derive real value added.Garg said the changes are expected to enhance data precision, especially in the manufacturing sector, where differences between input and output price movements had previously raised concerns about distortions under the single-deflation approach.

BENGALURU: An SOS call from a Karnataka teammate a month ago prompted KL Rahul to join the former champions for their final Ranji Trophy league match against Punjab, as the side faced a must-win clash in Mohali after a heavy home defeat to Madhya Pradesh left them close to elimination.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Rahul was initially expected to link up only for the knockouts, but he advanced his return ahead of the Punjab fixture. In three matches, he has scored 457 runs, including two centuries and two half-centuries, at an average of 91.40.

His contribution extended beyond runs. In a dressing room that included five Test players, Rahul was the most experienced, and his calm authority, clarity of thought and willingness to engage with younger teammates added a different dimension to Karnataka’s campaign. Head coach Yere Goud pointed to Rahul’s influence within the squad. “Rahul has made a huge impact. We have young players like R Smaran and KV Aneesh, and he talks to them about handling certain situations. So him being there has given confidence,” Goud said.As Karnataka head into the Ranji Trophy final against Jammu and Kashmir in Hubballi starting Tuesday, the team will draw on Rahul’s consistency and record in previous title wins. He has struck tons in the last two finals that Karnataka have won.Players said Rahul’s everyday conversations left a mark, with many having watched his rise from age-group cricket to becoming an all-format international. Earlier this season, when he played a couple of Vijay Hazare Trophy matches, younger players described the experience as surreal.Wicketkeeper-batter Kruthik Krishna said Rahul’s versatility and approach offered invaluable lessons. “There’s so much to learn from him. He has done everything possible as a batter, opening, batting at No 6 or No 7, and he is also a keeper. So having him is a boost. I can learn how to plan and shape my innings, and that’s irrespective of the performance. That simplifies your game a lot rather than you thinking about the pitch, the opposition and all of that. I’ve had a lot of conversations with him,” Kruthik said.For younger cricketers, exposure to Rahul’s preparation methods and mental approach proved valuable, with an emphasis on temperament, understanding phases of a game, reading match situations and responding rather than reacting.Among those learning was the season’s top run-getter, R Smaran, who has logged 950 runs so far. He said Rahul’s guidance extended across formats. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about how you can go about the game, not only in the Ranji Trophy but also in the shorter formats. We were really glad that we had him in the team for a couple of matches during the Vijay Hazare as well,” Smaran said, adding with a smile, “Till the time that we have him in the Karnataka dressing room, I would like to keep picking his brains.”Smaran said Rahul shared inputs with players across roles. “He’s the kind of guy who prioritises the state when he’s playing for us. He has a lot of inputs to give to youngsters in the team, be it a bowler, keeper or batter.”

The rivalry between India and Australia in women’s cricket reached a fever pitch today as the three-match ODI series kicked off at the Allan Border Field in Brisbane.

On Tuesday, the opening clash of the India Women tour of Australia 2026 lived up to the hype, though not in the way the visitors had hoped. After electing to bat first, India struggled against a relentless Australian bowling unit, but the defining moment of the innings was undoubtedly a piece of individual brilliance in the field by Georgia Voll.

Georgia Voll pulls off a blinder to send Richa Ghosh packing 

The highlight of the first innings came in the 34th over, a moment that effectively broke the back of the Indian middle order. Richa Ghosh, known for her explosive power and ability to finish innings, was looking to rebuild alongside her captain after India had slumped to 103/5. Having reached 23 off 38 deliveries with two crisp boundaries, Ghosh looked set for a big score.

However, the introduction of Sophie Molineux changed the complexion of the game. In the first ball of the 34th over (33.1 overs), Molineux extracted significant bounce and turn from a good length, pushing the ball wide of the off-stump. Ghosh attempted a cut shot but failed to get on top of the bounce. The result was a thick slice that flew rapidly toward backward point.

Voll, patrolling the inner ring, reacted with feline reflexes. Launching herself horizontally to her left, she plucked a screamer inches from the turf while completely airborne. The Brisbane crowd erupted as Voll emerged from the grass with the ball firmly in hand. This spectacular dismissal left India reeling at 140/6 and robbed them of their primary late-innings aggressor.

Here’s the video:

Richa Ghosh had to depart after Georgia Voll dived for a beauty! #AUSvIND pic.twitter.com/exiCjYezlP

— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) February 24, 2026

Also WATCH: Pratika Rawal’s return cut short by Megan Schutt’s unplayable inswinger during WODI series opener

Disciplined Australian attack restricts India to a low total

While Voll provided the flash, the Australian bowlers provided the fire. From the very first over, India found themselves under the pump. Megan Schutt set the tone by trapping Pratika Rawal lbw for a duck in just the second ball of the match. While Smriti Mandhana played a classy knock of 58 runs, she lacked a consistent partner at the other end.

The Australian spinners, led by Ashleigh Gardner, were clinical. Gardner finished with impressive figures of 3/33 in 7 overs, including the crucial wickets of Jemimah Rodrigues and the well-set Harmanpreet Kaur, who fought a lonely battle for her 53 (84 balls). The middle-order collapse was exacerbated by Alana King‘s tight spell (1/43) and Tahlia McGrath‘s useful breakthrough.

India’s tail showed some late resistance, with Kashvee Gautam contributing a gritty 43 to push the total past the 200-run mark. However, Australia’s discipline was reflected in the scorecard, as India was eventually bundled out for 214 in 48.3 overs. With a modest target on the board and the momentum of Voll’s blinder behind them, the Aussies head into the chase as clear favourites in this encounter.

Also READ: Australia vs India, Women’s ODI Series: Schedule, Team News, Broadcast and Live Streaming Details

This article was first published at WomenCricket.com, a Cricket Times company.

The story of AI in business is not one of universal acceleration. (AI image)

Two stories from the past few weeks capture something essential about where we are with AI.The first concerns Salesforce, the enterprise software giant that aggressively embraced AI for customer service. CEO Marc Benioff proudly announced that AI deployment had allowed the company to cut support staff from 9,000 to roughly 5,000. Then reality intervened. Reports from late 2025 indicate that the company is now withdrawing from AI due to widespread failure. The AI agents confidently gave wrong answers, dropped instructions when given more than eight steps, and lost focus when users asked unexpected questions. Customers complained that AI support took longer than the simple old search function. Salesforce is now retreating to rigid, rule-based scripting–essentially admitting they were, in their own words, “more confident” than the technology warranted.The second story is a zeitgeist shift. Over the past couple of months, the conversation around AI and coding has transformed completely. People who were skeptical six months ago–senior developers who actually write code for a living–are now saying the age of human beings writing code is ending. Not in some distant future, but imminently. Entire features are being shipped by AI with minimal human intervention. The productivity gains are no longer incremental; they’re structural.How can both be true? How can AI fail comprehensively in customer service–seemingly straightforward–while revolutionising software development, which appears far more complex?The answer is that we’ve been thinking about AI wrong. We treat it as a single phenomenon that will sweep through the economy at roughly the same pace. However, AI in business is not a single story. It’s many parallel stories, moving at wildly different speeds. And the distinction has almost nothing to do with how intelligent the AI is.I’ve written about this tension before. A year ago, I argued that “the fact that a revolution is real doesn’t mean that every business claiming to be part of it will succeed.” More recently, I observed that “the gap between what AI demos well in controlled environments and what it actually delivers when confronting the messy real world remains enormous.” I now think there’s a more precise way to understand this gap. It’s not random. It’s structural.Consider what makes coding fertile ground for AI. Code is formally structured and machine-verifiable–it runs and passes tests, or it doesn’t. The feedback loop is immediate. When AI makes a mistake, a developer (or another AI agent) notices, fixes it, and moves on. Errors are private and reversible. Now consider customer service. Customers don’t speak in data schemas. Emotion, sarcasm, and cultural context matter enormously. One wrong answer can escalate to social media outrage or regulatory complaints. The failures are public and often irreversible.The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s what I’d call error economics. AI thrives where mistakes are cheap, private, and correctable. It struggles where mistakes are expensive, public, and permanent.We received a clear illustration of executive disconnect just a few days ago. During Bajaj Finance’s Q3 call, CEO Rajeev Jain announced that AI had listened to 2 crore calls and generated 100,000 new customer offers. “We’ll be able to listen to 100 million calls next year,” he said proudly. The response on social media was predictable hilarity. As the entire country, except apparently Mr Jain knows, Bajaj Finance’s incessant spam calls are the butt of countless jokes. Here was a CEO using sophisticated technology to optimize something customers actively despise. Machine learning works perfectly; the learning about customers is absent.For investors, the implications are significant. When you hear “AI” attached to a business function, ask: what happens when it’s wrong? If the answer involves customers, regulators, or reputations, progress will be slower than vendor PPTs claim. If the answer is “someone notices and fixes it,” that’s a different world entirely.The story of AI in business is not one of universal acceleration. It’s one of the selective escape velocities. Coding has left the atmosphere and gone into orbit. Customer service is still fighting gravity. Most other functions lie somewhere in between–mistakenly assumed to be closer to the rocket than they really are. The many worlds of AI are not converging. They’re diverging. And that divergence will determine which investments succeed and which disappoint.(Dhirendra Kumar is Founder and CEO of Value Research)

Mumbai: After two days of satisfactory air, Mumbai’s air quality deteriorated sharply on Friday, with the city’s overall Air Quality Index (AQI) rising to 130 from 67 on Thursday and 70 on Wednesday — the steepest single-day spike recorded in the last three months. The reading pushed the city back into the moderate air category, undoing the brief mid-week gains. According to air quality standards, prolonged exposure at this level may cause breathing discomfort among sensitive groups.Within the city, Worli emerged as the most polluted locality at 278, slipping into the poor bracket. Bandra Kurla Complex followed at 160, while Kurla recorded 155. In contrast, Sion registered the cleanest air at 69, remaining in the satisfactory category. Byculla and Colaba recorded AQI levels of 79 each, and Mazgaon stood at 89, reflecting relatively better conditions than other pockets.The deterioration extended across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Navi Mumbai’s AQI rose to 112 from 88 on Wednesday and 93 on Thursday. Within Navi Mumbai, Sanpada was the most polluted at 129, while Kalamboli recorded the cleanest air at 77. Thane witnessed a pronounced spike, climbing to 132 after four consecutive days in the 80-90 range, thereby entering the moderate category. Despite wind speeds of 16.7 kmph — typically favourable for pollutant dispersion — air quality worsened across the region.Sunil Dahiya, founder and lead analyst at Enviroclysts, an environmental research organisation, said the pollution readings recorded on Friday were virtually double those seen on Wednesday and Thursday. “Across Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, wind speed and other meteorological conditions remained largely the same. What changed was the wind direction, with the early hours recording inland winds from the southeast, which are comparatively more polluted than winds from the west and north-west that originate from the sea,” he said, adding that another reason for particular pockets in the city is the “valley effect” created by clusters of skyscrapers which disrupts wind flow, preventing pollutants from dispersing and creating concentrated pockets of pollution in areas such as BKC and Worli, which routinely top AQI charts.