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As India builds its manufacturing and exports, one country it must study for hard lessons in scale, speed, and systems is China – which in less than three decades has built enough factories, ports, and processes to become the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter. In 2024, it exported $3.6tn of goods and ran a record…

Consumption inertia has weighed heavily on consumer-facing companies for nearly two years, as the “revenge spending” euphoria that followed the pandemic fizzled out after the 2023 festive season. For years, govt undertook aggressive capex, but while infra spending built the rails for the future, it required resources – partially raised through taxes. This, combined with…

Based on signs of strong GDP growth and benign inflation, many economists and market experts anticipated a status quo on repo rates. Still, the RBI’s MPC unanimously decided to cut the repo rate by 25 basis points to 5.25 per cent. At the same time, RBI projected real GDP growth for FY26 at 7.3 per…

Welcome back to another edition of My Take 5, your weekly round-up of top international news. This week we are covering Putin’s visit to New Delhi, Lithuania declares emergency over Belarussian balloons, Trump reiterates an America First National Security Strategy, fighting breaks out again between Thailand and Cambodia, and Sudan’s civil war sees another massive…

These days, everyone seems to be only speaking about residential real estate as an asset class. Conversations around it seem to be everywhere – in media interviews, social media discussions and full page ads. There is huge FOMO around this space but most people have got one one part of this story right and the…

In city after city, homeowners’ associations and resident welfare associations (RWAs) in India are locked in what has become a recurring, bitter debate: should maintenance and common-service charges be based on flat size or on occupancy and use? Recent court rulings — especially in Bengaluru — show the logic of revisiting traditional models. As India’s urban middle…

The PLFS (periodic Labour Survey) data on employment from 2017–18 to 2022–23 paints an optimistic picture of women’s participation. There has been an increase in WPR for women aged 15 years or more from 22 percent in 2017–18 to 40.3 percent in 2023–24. Both Urban and rural employment have shown similar trends with women’s participation…

Is there anyway that a state can de-radicalise a section of population who are being targeted by neighbouring countries that are intent to destroy democracies? The plot to bomb various cities in India with 3000 kilos of RDX could have resulted in mayhem and deaths but thanks to a vigilant police officer in Kashmir the…

“Whoever is not grateful for blessings is in grave danger of them disappearing. Whoever is grateful for them ties them up with their own tether,” said Hazrat Ibn Ata’illah Iskandari (1259-1310), a renowned Egyptian Sufi and the third great spiritual master of the Shadhili Sufi order. His most famous work, Kitab al-Hikam (The Book of Wisdoms), a classic…

India’s ambition to build a modern, self-reliant navy is unquestionable. Yet its procurement processes continue to rely on episodic, stop-start orders that break industrial momentum, inflate costs, delay deliveries, and freeze innovation. Nothing illustrates this more sharply than Project 75(I), where India is negotiating for 2020-era submarine technology that—if contracts are signed soon—will only enter…