Mishik Sharma

India’s fertilizer debate is usually framed in narrow economic terms—subsidy burdens, input costs, and fiscal pressures. This framing misses a deeper structural reality: fertilizers are not merely agricultural inputs; they are foundational to food production, rural livelihoods, and social stability. In a country where nearly 45 percent of the population depends on agriculture, fertilizer availability is as critical as soil and rainfall. Without it, crop yields collapse, food inflation spikes, and rural incomes destabilize. The disruptions resulting from the ongoing war in West Asia—especially gas supply disruption—have exposed the fragility of India’s fertilizer system. The anxiety around potential shortages is not an aberration; it is a symptom of deeper structural dependence. India imports a significant share of its fertilizer requirements or the inputs needed to produce them. This makes the country vulnerable not only to price shocks but also to disruptions in global supply chains. ...

The Strait of Hormuz shipping crisis, triggered by the escalation of the US-Israeli war on Iran and Iran's resultant retaliation, has placed unprecedented strain on global energy supplies. This narrow waterway, through which roughly 20% of the world's oil and a substantial share of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) normally flow, has become a flashpoint. Iran has imposed severe restrictions on commercial shipping—effectively blocking narrow strait—leading to stranded tankers, reduced flows, soaring war-risk insurance costs, and sharp spikes in global crude-oil and natural-gas prices (Brent crude-oil is hovering at around $100–$105 per barrel in mid-March, for example). For India, a major energy importer from the Gulf countries (about 40% of its crude-oil imports and 80–90% of its LPG imports), the disruptions have hit hard. In early March, domestic LPG prices rose sharply by ₹60 per 14.2-kg cylinder—the first hike in over a year—pushing the non-subsidized rate to ₹913 in Delhi. Com...

When Y Combinator partner Tom Blomfield posted on X (on 1 March) that "the entire Accenture workforce is about to be outperformed by a 24-year-old who learned Claude Code last Tuesday", he was doing what Silicon Valley does best: collapsing a complex structural question into a punchy provocation.  The post sparked widespread debate about AI disrupting IT, consultancy, and other white-collar jobs. It was covered by multiple outlets in India (where Accenture and similar companies have massive workforces)  feeding an already anxious conversation about AI's threat to India's $290 billion IT services sector. It deserves a serious response — not a defensive one, but a strategic one. The Disruption Narrative Gets the Diagnosis Wrong The fear driving headlines like Blomfield's rests on a simple substitution logic: if AI can do what IT workers do, IT workers become redundant. This logic is not entirely wrong — it correctly identifies that agentic AI compresses the value of...

The announcement of a proposed $300 billion new refinery project in Brownsville, Texas, USA—made directly by Donald Trump yesterday—has been presented as a historic moment in American industrial revival. If realized, the facility would represent the first major new refinery project of its kind in about five decades in the US. Yet beyond the visible political symbolism lies a more structural question: how do large investment announcements translate into real industrial assets? The refinery project, reportedly organised by a new US venture called America First Refining (AFR), illustrates the answer. Projects of this scale require several layers of preparation—financing frameworks, land acquisition, intake and offtake agreements, tax incentives, and regulatory approvals. AFR appears to have assembled much of this political and financial architecture. What remained essential, however, was execution credibility: a partner capable of designing, building, and operating a complex refining syst...

Open any business news app today and the employment headlines seem contradictory. On one side, India's IT sector is visibly pulling back on recruitment, mainly because of the rapid automation of IT (and other office-based) services by advanced agentic AI tools, like Anthropic's Claude Cowork. The sharp drop in Indian IT companies' market valuations last month was precisely because of this fear. On the other side, manufacturers, energy companies, defence contractors, and infrastructure builders are struggling to find engineers — not because engineers don't exist, but because the engineers they need don't quite exist yet. The Manpower Group 2026 Talent Shortage Survey (released a few days back), covering 39,000 employers across 41 countries including 3,051 in India, puts a sharp number on this: 82% of Indian employers report difficulty finding the right talent. That places India among the most talent-constrained markets in the world, worse than the global average of ...

Structural Crisis, Not a Temporary Disruption  The ongoing war in West Asia has disrupted global energy supplies. Most recently, Qatar stopping it's natural gas production has given rise to a potential global gas crisis. For India, this vulnerability is not new. India produces about half of its total gas requirement from domestic fossil sources. The remainder is imported (about half of which from Qatar), leaving industrial supply chains, individual and commercial consumers, and the agricultural sector simultaneously exposed to the same external shock. The consequences are already visible. The government has ordered supply cuts to industrial consumers — steel, ceramics, glass, paper, and food processing among them — while prioritising piped natural gas for homes and commercial establishments, compressed natural gas for vehicles, and gas feedstock for fertilizer production ahead of the Kharif sowing season. These are triage decisions, not policy choices. They signal a supply position...