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 ba...

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 Economi...

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...

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...

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 clos...

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 Spac...

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 Indi...

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 pla...

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...

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....

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 ra...

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...

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’...

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 f...

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...

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 re...

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 mak...

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...

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 bureau...

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...

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 Genera...

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...

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 n...

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 Per...

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 c...