Mishik Sharma

Announcements from global technology leaders at NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (March 16-19, 2026) point towards a decisive shift in the trajectory of semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Advances in energy-efficient, specialised chips are making it possible to run powerful AI models directly on machines, devices, and industrial systems. At the same time, partnerships between AI companies and industrial software companies are embedding AI across the entire lifecycle of design, engineering, and manufacturing. These developments signal something fundamental: AI is moving beyond its role as a digital productivity layer and entering the core of industrial systems. Yet, much of today's policy thinking continues to treat AI as a "topping"—an add-on to existing digital workflows, governance tools, and enterprise software. This approach delivers incremental gains, but it misses the deeper opportunity. India's real strategic advantage lies in using AI not...

On March 18, the Union Cabinet cleared BHAVYA — the Bharat Audyogik Vikas Yojna — a ₹33,660 crore scheme to develop 100 plug-and-play industrial parks across India over six years. The announcement has received well-deserved enthusiasm in the news media. India's perennial manufacturing bottleneck has never been a shortage of investment intent; it has been the pre-production friction — land acquisition delays, clearance bottlenecks, absent utility connections — that kills momentum before a single unit is produced. A scheme that promises to resolve that friction deserves genuine appreciation. But appreciation must be matched by analytical honesty. Plug-and-play industrial parks are necessary infrastructure. They are not, by themselves, a theory of industrial transformation. Whether BHAVYA becomes a genuine inflection point in India's industrial trajectory, or another well-intentioned scheme that underperforms its promise — will depend on evolving the scheme into a broader architec...

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...