Mishik Sharma

In the last few weeks, we have seen multiple stories of car and bike drivers falling into open pits along city-roads and losing their lives. The incidents have triggered visible anger across urban India — amplified by news media and social media. The public reaction  is not just outrage at tragic accidents. It is something deeper: accumulated frustration with the everyday disorder of Indian cities — poorly maintained roads, unchecked encroachments, haphazard digging, weak enforcement, and a pervasive sense that no one is truly in charge of urban space. When road infrastructure becomes so unmanaged that it turns lethal, the problem is no longer “traffic”.  It is governance failure. These deaths were not freak events. They were manifestations of a larger, structural condition — one that Indian cities are drifting into quietly, and dangerously. A Nation on Wheels India is motorizing at a historic pace. Vehicle sales — two-wheelers, cars, commercial fleets — have expanded sharply ...

In recent public policy discussions, a familiar argument has gained traction: the Indian bureaucracy is excessively risk-averse. In a rapidly expanding economy, the argument goes, civil servants must become more bold, more entrepreneurial, and existing safeguards must be relaxed to enable more dynamism. This framing, I argue, is inadequate.  India does not need a risk-taking bureaucracy.  India needs a structurally-aligned, growth-enabling bureaucracy. The challenge before us is not personality reform. It is architectural reform. The Myth of Administrative Inertia The claim that Indian bureaucracy is disconnected from industry or resistant to growth, collapses under scrutiny. Across states, competitive federalism is now political reality. Investment summits are not symbolic exercises; they are followed by land aggregation, regulatory coordination, infrastructure provisioning, and monitoring frameworks executed by bureaucrats. The headline metric is no longer just capital commi...

Every morning I open my phone expecting to catch up on the day's business and economic pulse—only to slam into paywalls. The Economic Times (ET) has become particularly brazen: 80–90% of their stories are locked behind the ET Prime paywall. Worse, they even wall off stories that are already public—PIB releases, government announcements, even widely shared updates on X. It is creating a growing black hole in accessible information. This isn't just an irritation for readers. It's a systemic problem for AI too. Most large language models (LLMs) were trained on broad web crawls from years ago, before paywalls hardened and publishers started aggressively blocking crawlers. Newer models increasingly miss high-quality, exclusive content, falling back on open snippets, social media noise, aggregated summaries, or lower-effort reposts. The result? AI knowledge on current events gets shallower over time—especially for nuanced stories from countries like India. I’ve been turning this ...

Early 2026 has brought two noteworthy developments in the AI sphere. First, the SpaceX-xAI merger, announced a few days back. Elon Musk outlined a vision for scaling AI compute to extraordinary levels through orbital data centers in space and, in the longer term, lunar manufacturing and further scaling. Second, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, introduced in preview in January and now expanding. Cowork has been positioned as a virtual teammate capable of handling desktop tasks, file management, and workflow coordination for knowledge workers. Both initiatives carry genuine ambition. They reflect serious efforts to address real constraints — whether solving energy and infrastructure limits for large-scale data centres, or automating clerical work of enterprises.  At the same time, they invite a calm, contextual re-look at what is actually achievable in the near and medium term, and where familiar structural realities apply. The Two Visions in Brief Musk’s post-merger direction centers on ...

India’s technology discourse has recently shifted towards projecting India as an "AI-led services hub”.  Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has framed the Union Budget's data-centre hosting initiative as a step toward positioning India as a global centre for AI-enabled services. Leading companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have similarly articulated ambitions to become AI-first transformation partners for enterprises worldwide. This alignment between government and industry is strategically sound. India already dominates global IT services. AI could deepen that advantage. But we must delve deeper and ask a structural question: Should India’s AI ambition be primarily export-facing — or domestically rooted? The “River” Advantage — and Its Limits India occupies a powerful middle position in the AI stack. If we imagine the AI ecosystem as a landscape: - The “mountain” consists of frontier LLM/LMM developers building foundation models. - The “river” consists of systems in...

Much of commentary on the Union Budget 2026–27 has focused on fiscal arithmetic, capital expenditure, and strategic manufacturing. They are important. But a closer reading reveals something deeper: a deliberate, sector-spanning architecture for job creation, skilling, and entrepreneurship.  What stands out, to me, is not just the emphasis on employment—but where that emphasis is placed.  The Central government deserves appreciation for foregrounding sectors that rarely feature in mainstream economic conversations, yet carry enormous employment and entrepreneurship potential.  This is not a metro-centric, unicorn-driven employment strategy. It is far broader—and far more distributed. Reviving and Upgrading Traditional Value Chains 1. Coconut, Cocoa, Sandalwood and High-Value Agriculture The Budget places renewed emphasis on high-value agricultural value chains—particularly coconut, cocoa, sandalwood, cashew and related tree crops. These are not minor crops. They represent...