TWO DAYS, ONE QUESTION NOBODY COULD ANSWER There was no single headline that explained it. No earnings miss, no regulatory bombshell, no executive resignation. And yet over two consecutive trading sessions this week, the Nasdaq Composite shed 580 points on Tuesday alone, layering onto Monday’s 1.3% decline, as investors across Wall Street simultaneously, almost wordlessly,…
The Bet Nobody in Indian Finance Wanted to Take In 2011, when Sumant Sinha left his position as Chief Financial Officer of the Aditya Birla Group’s renewable energy business to found his own company, the Indian renewable energy sector was not yet the story it would become. Installed solar capacity in India at that point…
A NUMBER NOBODY TALKS ABOUT ENOUGH Here is a fact most Indians don’t carry in daily conversation: for most of the post-independence era, between 65 and 70 per cent of India’s military equipment was procured from abroad. Not built. Not designed. Bought often at a premium, often with strings attached, occasionally from countries whose interests…
FROM ASPIRATION TO ARCHITECTURE The PIB release on June 14, 2026 noted a significant political milestone: Prime Minister Narendra Modi became India’s longest-serving elected Prime Minister. World leaders sent congratulatory messages. But beyond the ceremony of milestone-marking, the release carried something more substantive: a statistical ledger of what twelve years of continuous governance had produced…
THE NUMBER THAT DIDN’T EXIST 12 YEARS AGO In 2014, India had approximately 350 to 400 startups. The concept itself was relatively unfamiliar in policy circles. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the startup ecosystem in his Independence Day address from the Red Fort in 2015. This was formalised through the Startup India initiative in…
THE QUESTION NOBODY WANTED TO SKIP Nations building AI capability generally face a political temptation: deploy first, govern later. The history of technology regulation suggests that temptation is almost always acted upon. India, in early 2026, chose a different path. The release of the India AI Governance Guidelines was anchored in 7 guiding principles and…
A DECADE IN NUMBERS There is a version of India’s startup story that begins with a number: 502. That is how many startups the government had formally recognised when Startup India was launched in January 2016. By March 2026, that number stood at 2,23,000. The numbers saw a 444-fold increase in a single decade. Those…
INTRODUCTION On 1st June 2026, consignments of Indian gems, agricultural produce, and pharmaceutical goods were flagged off into the Gulf. This was observed as a quiet, historical event at the ports of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Fortunately, this time, not a single rupee of import duty waiting on the other side. The India-Oman Comprehensive Economic…
On June 5, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Robin Khuda, the founder and CEO of AirTrunk, at his New Delhi office. What followed was an announcement that set a new benchmark for foreign investment in India’s digital economy. Modi announced AirTrunk’s plans to invest around Rs 3 lakh crore (USD 30 billion) in India…
The Summit That Was Also a Market Arjun Mehta arrived at WAVES 2025 in Mumbai with a portfolio of three animated short films made with his eight-person studio in Hyderabad. He had never pitched to an international buyer before. On the second day of the summit, he met a content acquisition executive from a Southeast…
