Make India Competitive Again (Private)

The telecom ministry issued an order requiring phone manufacturers to pre-install Sanchar Saathi, a cybersecurity app developed by the state. 

Then, it changed its mind less than a week later, after criticism arose in many corners—the Opposition, civil-liberties groups, and companies that make phones.

India’s rapid digitisation is a positive development, but it also comes with opportunities for bad actors to commit fraud. The government wants this infrastructure to be safe for everyone, but the way it tried to go about it ruffled everyone’s feathers. Forcing a cybersecurity app onto every phone, after a...

Eight hours a day, 48 hours a week. That’s the new limit on how much time India’s central government says people should spend at work. If an employee agrees to do more than that, then their employer must pay overtime—double their wage.

India, as it turns out, has one of the world’s highest overtime wage rates, but that doesn’t mean everyone can benefit from it.

The government’s own 2024–25 Economic Survey indicates that regulations like these discourage job creation and limit wages, so some workers are enticed to enter informal employment.

Meanwhile...

Tenneco Clean Air, the manufacturer of auto components, went public last week. Aside from being an important moment for the company, that instance was an important outlier.

It listed with a premium close to 27% at a time when many Indian firms backed by private equity have had weak debuts. Its anchor book—pre-IPO share allocation to major institutional investors—was oversubscribed by 170X.

The US parent of Tenneco Clean Air is owned by Apollo Global Management, an asset management firm based in New York. 

Other companies with similar PE backing haven’t fared so well...

Deep tech is increasingly connected to India’s national and regional sovereignty, and the way companies in this space are funded is changing.

The Indian cabinet earmarked Rs 1 lakh crore ($12 billion) earlier this year for a Research, Development, and Innovation Fund, then followed up this month with a call for “second-level fund managers”—entities such as alternative investment funds, development finance institutions, and non-banking financial companies.

All types of VCs recognise this is their new frontier. After all, the verticals of blitzscaled digital platforms, D2C, and consumer apps are things of the past, while artifici...

Earlier this month, the Competition Commission of India, or CCI, got a slap on the wrist. Its ban on Whatsapp from sharing user data with parent company Meta was overturned. Even though Whatsapp still had to pay a Rs 200 crore fine, the ruling was a blow to the CCI.

The fact is the antitrust watchdog has lost its bark when it comes to the digital economy. Where it used to take three months to close an investigation, the CCI now takes up to eight, and it currently dismisses 80% of the complaints that go its way. Among the...

There’s one company that exemplifies the current moment in India’s AI investments. It doesn’t make advanced semiconductors or train large language models. Instead, it rents out space to companies that do.

The arrangement is called colocation—think of it as real estate for servers, where clients plug in their machines while the “landlord” provides power, cooling, and connectivity.

Sify Infinit Spaces, the data-centre arm of Sify Technologies, is India’s poster child for this setup. It will be behind the country’s first IPO for a company of its kind.

By tracking the...

Artificial intelligence is no longer an option or privilege. It’s here to stay, even in schools.

OpenAI and India’s education ministry have partnered to distribute free ChatGPT licences to government schools, and AI is being introduced into CBSE and ICSE’s curricula.

The Ken conducted a survey in August to find out what our readers thought about language models becoming a constant presence in India’s education facilities. These were some of the questions in the survey:

India is relaxing rules for states to approve and fund standalone battery-storage systems. There’s a rush to build those projects, and tariffs are going lower and lower.

Rajasthan set a “lowest tariff” record last week at Rs 1.77 lakh per megawatt per month, undercutting Andhra Pradesh. Maharashtra is now sending out feelers, so there may be an even lower figure soon.

It’s a situation that has played out in renewable energy before. Solar and wind projects were rapidly installed, but little was done to build local manufacturing muscle. 

The current rush of activity...

The Indian Semiconductor Mission, or ISM, is one of the most ambitious initiatives undertaken by the government in decades. Out of Rs 76,000 crore earmarked for production-linked incentives, roughly Rs 65,000 crore has already been committed, and the mission supports 10 major projects across the value chain.

This is all good and great for building the infrastructure and facilities for making chips, but the right kind of human capital is just as important—and largely absent.

The ISM launched a skilling programme in July 2023 to address precisely that problem, aiming to train the professionals who would then populate In...

India’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme is meant to boost domestic manufacturing and exports. It rewards a range of companies, including those that produce 41 critical molecules in active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs.

Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers have slashed their prices of several important APIs by 40–50%. In some cases, these prices are below the cost of production in India.

Even though the adjustment won’t be permanent, those lowered prices are a major blow to Indian companies that were making headway for the past five years in API production, and which formed India’s muscle in this space.<...

AU Small Finance Bank received in-principle approval in August from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to become a universal bank. It was the first institution of its kind to reach this milestone. This also marked the first time in a decade for the RBI to issue a full-fledged banking licence.

This has a couple major consequences. For AU, the transition means it will be able to offer a much broader range of services to its customers—and significantly expand its business. For the RBI, it was a development that demonstrated how small finance banks, which were in...

India’s MSMEs operate in informal frameworks that have barely evolved over the past two decades. The result is that small businesses have largely the same struggles as they did before, whether it’s the absence of adequate credit, difficulties in entering new markets, or payment delays.

Since MSMEs are the second-largest employer in India, solving these problems represents a significant opportunity.

After all, opportunity has already come knocking. Take for example the shift of manufacturing out of China. India should be a natural destination, but the smaller manufacturers in the country simply were not prep...

Let’s think back to what happened a little more than a week ago: On 30 August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart, Shigeru Ishiba, boarded Japan’s fastest bullet train, the Hayabusa, and cruised toward Miyagi prefecture at 320 km/h. They were heading to a facility of semiconductor equipment giant Tokyo Electron Limited, or TEL, in Sendai, to spotlight India and Japan’s collaboration in the semiconductor sector.

Japan is a major player in chipmaking, and it’s a model for the way disruption-free operations are crucial for any nation that is a meaningful part of...

It’s been a month since India’s nationwide shift to E20 petrol—20% ethanol-blended petrol. Vehicle owners have come forward to complain about falling mileage, damage to their vehicles, voided warranties, and the absence of insurance coverage.

The change has sparked outrage, and nothing is being done to placate the country’s many millions of angry drivers.

India’s move to E20 fuel took place much faster than originally planned. This pace may have been inspired by a previous success, when the government had to address worsening air pollution in the 2010s. 

At the time, r...

Dialysis is a tough business, and not because of any serious lack of demand. Over 280,000 patients were undergoing regular dialysis in 2024, a number that’s projected to go up to 520,000 by 2029. Add in less frequent or one-time treatments, and the number of patients who need the procedure every year breaches one million. 

It is the economics that is the tricky bit. High procurement costs, tricky consumable-stock management, and very low margins—in fact, nowhere on the planet can one run a small dialysis business sustainably. 

And India, with the lowest dialysis price point in the world...

India’s stock market seldom tends to influence the workings of its federal bureaucracy. But for the country’s telecom mandarins, who have just floated a new draft national policy for the sector, the investor response to one listed company could be the canary in the coal mine. 

At Rs 9,800 crore, the market value of Tejas Networks, a Tata-owned maker of telecom equipment, is now half the peak it reached 10 months ago. What’s odd is that Tejas Networks is now worth only a little more than its revenue. At the heart of investor frustration, and perhaps even fe...

Software needs to be free to access, modify, and redistribute to be called open source. Anything less can’t carry the label.

This matters right now because generative-AI company Sarvam will open-source its models built for the IndiaAI Mission, the government’s initiative to foster artificial intelligence development within the country. That means it will release its weights, or parameters that make AI models “smart”.

By referencing Chinese releases like Deepseek and Alibaba Group’s Qwen, open-source software isn’t just a nice thing to have, there are elements of soft power as well. AI models that...

Let’s face it: opportunities are scarce for most graduates in India, particularly those who don’t have financial support to fall back on. A job at a major enterprise is the dream—and a path to better economic and social standing. Yet there’s a widening mismatch between what most graduates can offer and the skills required by corporations. 

The Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme (PMIS) was meant to close this chasm. The goal was to help 10 million people find internships over five years and place them in 500 of India’s top companies. These interns would then acquire...

India’s official figure for its unemployment rate in June was 5.6%. But that may well be lower than reality—out of 50 economists polled by Reuters, 37 believed that to be inaccurate. Seventeen of them estimated it falls somewhere between 7% and 35%.

That’s all to say Indians want gainful employment—no matter what the job is.

One type of coveted position is public service. For many, being a bureaucrat is an upward path for social and economic mobility.

In the 10 years leading up to FY23, the number of people who applied to take the civil service...

Two of India’s most prominent family business groups are in a fight. They’re both after a majority share of Chinese electronics company Haier’s India arm.

In one corner of the ring is Reliance, which recently launched its own electronics brand, Wyzr. In the other is the Bharti group, which has never sold consumer electronics. But this is a space where fortunes are being made, so it makes sense to have a hand in it.

Bharti appears to be in the lead, given it has teamed up with private-equity firm Warburg Pincus. They’re after...

Hospital bills in India are becoming more expensive, and a growing number of people are one medical emergency away from going bankrupt. Even for those with health insurance, the costs are going up.

In fact, patients who tell hospitals that they have coverage are charged more than others, which leads to higher premiums. It’s a prevalent practice that the chairman and managing director of the General Insurance Corporation of India (GIC), Ramaswamy Narayanan, characterises as “a systematic form of fraud”.

This has led both GIC and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irdai), to call f...

India’s logistics sector is hotter than ever. There are mergers and acquisitions, market debuts, startup energy, and investor attention. In the last five years, startups in this space have attracted more than $4 billion in investor money.

D2C e-commerce and quick commerce have catapulted firms such as Delhivery, Ecom Express, Blackbuck, Xpressbees, Shiprocket, and Shadowfax into the limelight. All of them promise tech-first logistics, national networks, and lightning-fast shipments.

Delhivery was the first of the pack to go public in 2022. Others are following suit. Shadowfax filed confidential IPO papers with Sebi in June, and Sh...

Long queues formed outside bank branches across India in 2014 and 2015, with a range of people opening their bank account for the first time. These were farmers, day labourers, homemakers—Indians who had largely been neglected by the formal banking system until then.

This moment was part of the Indian government’s Jan Dhan Yojana Scheme, which enabled people to open zero-balance bank accounts at no cost. By the end of 2015, when the initiative ended, 250 million accounts had been opened.

Jan Dhan Yojana was a success, so much so that the State Bank of India reported in 2...

Starlink can keep internet service going in Ukraine during wartime. It can move hardware into the Amazon Rainforest. The company can overcome all sorts of challenges to bring its high-speed satellite internet connection all over the world, but red tape has kept it from going live in India for three years.

The Department of Telecommunications gave Starlink a GMPCS licence—that’s a Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite licence—in early June, but there’s one snag. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, has capped satellite spectrum licences at five years, with a possible two-year...

If you were to think about the world’s most technologically advanced economies, a few nations come to mind. The United States has Silicon Valley as its cradle of innovation, China’s scientists and researchers develop state-of-the-art IP every day, and Japan remains a global leader in robotics, especially industrial automation.

India doesn’t register in that cluster.

A few figures show us present conditions in more detail. Thirty years ago, India spent 0.6% of its GDP on R&D. In 2025, it’s at the same rate. The share occasionally inched up to 0.8% between then and now, but...

2024 was a record-breaking year for mergers and acquisitions in India, and the government seems to want to speed up the frenzy.

One of the proposals put forward by the finance minister was an overhaul of M&A regulations. She wants to introduce fast-track mergers for a range of companies, including unlisted firms and fellow subsidiaries. 

But lethargy isn’t really the biggest problem afflicting Indian M&As. In fact, forcing these deals to move faster may worsen other fundamental problems. There are recent examples that show us how this can play out, such as Jet Air...

Wi-fi is a miracle. Not because it lets you go online wherever it’s offered, but because there’s no bureaucratic headache whenever users connect to a network.

This is only possible because of what’s called “unlicensed spectrum” that governments leave open. In India, more is about to be added to it. Call it the first real systemic reform for wi-fi in the country.

The plan is hardly new. It’s rooted in a roadmap developed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 2023. And it’s an outcome that tech companies like Meta, Google, and Mi...

A cursory look at the way India’s workforce has changed in recent years suggests that “women are striding into economic activity”, as Mint reported in mid-May. In fact, by FY24, three in four working women were self-employed. Women generally have a growing share in India’s workforce—a development that public officials persistently tout.

But look closely and you’ll find that the details paint a different picture.

The ministry of labour said last year that India added 80 million jobs in the four years leading up to FY22. The truth is self-employment and agriculture, much of whic...

There are plenty of reasons for India’s semiconductor companies to win. The US is seeking to dial back its reliance on China’s tech providers, shaking up global supply chains. Since one-fifth of global semiconductor-design talent is located in India, the country should be coming out on top.

But that isn’t how the shakeup is unfolding. Some projects like those of Murugappa Group, Micromax, and Tata Electronics are chugging along, but there are hardly any internationally noteworthy players.

Here’s one absent piece of the puzzle: there isn’t enough capital being directed into India...

India wants a sovereign AI model. It’s a big goal, and success means stringing together contributions from a range of entities, including Big Tech firms and domestic AI developers of all scales. The ideal version of this plan was meant to lead to plenty of competition—no preordained winners.

The latest development, however, is one that runs against that framework. Sarvam has been tapped to build India’s own large language model (LLM), while firms like Gan AI, Soket AI Labs, and Krutrim—all shortlisted to be part of the process—are still waiting for a call from...

India had as estimated 101 million diabetics in 2023, with another 136 million people in pre-diabetic state. Among them, 11 million people are on insulin therapy. 

It’s a market worth nearly Rs 5,000 crore with Novo Nordisk as the leader, controlling 60%. Two other MNCs—Sanofi and Eli Lilly—control another 25%. 

All three companies are phasing out their insulin products in the country.

One pair of entities stand to benefit from those departures: the Bengaluru-based Biocon Group and its new commercial partner, Eris Lifesciences.

Even though Biocon is India’s largest pharmaceutical company, it never had more than...

Despite low yields, debt, and climate change, India should be an agricultural powerhouse.

In some ways, the country is on its way to attain that status.

One figure tells this story: in the five years leading up to 2022, the number of Indians who couldn’t afford a healthy diet—that’s an intake of 2,330 kilocalories from six different food groups a day—went down by 16%, outpacing the global decline.

India’s increasingly abundant food production doesn’t just address needs at home. It also gives the country an edge in global trade.

Even thoug...

You’ve seen the news: US President Donald Trump is playing roulette with the global trade order. Then, there’s the massive Rs 23,000 crore performance-linked incentive scheme that the Indian cabinet approved for electronics makers at around the same time.

For companies in the manufacturing sector, it’s been a mad, hectic April. They know it’s necessary to strike new alliances—or renew old ones—if they are to emerge from the chaos in better shape than before. That means they’re looking for technology partners and opportunities for joint ventures.

But...

One of the first reactions to Donald Trump’s tariffs in the Indian media was: let’s have more of “Make in India”.

On the surface, the rationale for stepping up domestic manufacturing is clear. The US is inflicting pain on China, and that’s supposed to work to India’s advantage, given the wide gulf in tariffs on the two Asia giants.

But “Make in India” has been around for more than a decade, and manufacturing is no more important to the Indian economy now than it was before Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Even the introdu...