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Beyond Assembly: How India’s Mobility Boom Can Deepen Industrial Capability

Introduction: India’s “100 Products” Moment On 12 May, DPIIT Secretary Amardeep Singh Bhatia said, at the CII Annual Business Summit 2026, that the central government is identifying around 100 products that the country still cannot manufacture in sufficient quantity despite possessing both domestic demand and a large industrial base. The list reportedly spans a wide range of industrial categories — from axles and bearings to electronic systems, industrial intermediates, machinery, and rare-earth-linked products. At first glance, such reports may appear to be another routine addition to India’s long-running manufacturing discourse. But the significance of this development lies elsewhere. For decades, much of India’s manufacturing conversation revolved around increasing production volumes, attracting investment, improving ease of doing business, or raising exports. What this latest policy thinking appears to recognise, however, is that the deeper challenge is not merely manufacturing out...
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Beyond Chips and Energy: Why AI Data-Centres Could Anchor India’s Next Industrial Revolution

Introduction: The AI Supercycle and the Missing Layers Beneath It The world is in the middle of an AI supercycle. AI chip companies—especially those in East Asia and the United States—have witnessed enormous investor enthusiasm. Many of these companies have seen their market-valuations surge to trillions of dollars — which in turn have sharply increased the total valuations of national stock markets of those countries. The dominant global narrative of the AI era has therefore become deeply chip-centric. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly interpreted through the lens of GPUs, semiconductor manufacturing, frontier AI labs, and stock-market valuations. Countries lacking globally dominant AI-chip companies are casually described as "missing" the AI boom. India, in particular, has been described as a "loser" (by Bloomberg) in the AI supercycle because it lacks major listed AI-chip champions comparable to those in Taiwan, South Korea, or the United States. Such narr...
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Beyond Plantation Drives: An Urban Ecology-Based Thermal Resilience Strategy

The Urban Heat Problem India's cities are getting hotter. This is not merely a seasonal observation. It is a structural trend with deep roots in how Indian urbanisation has proceeded over the past several decades — through dense concrete expansion, disappearing tree cover, shrinking waterbodies, and heat-trapping built-layouts that leave little room for ecological breathing. The consequences are increasingly visible. Urban heat islands — zones where ambient temperatures are significantly higher than surrounding rural or peri-urban areas — are intensifying across Indian cities. Heat stress is no longer confined to summer peaks. It is extending across more months, affecting more populations, and placing growing pressure on energy systems, public health infrastructure, and urban liveability. Some state governments are beginning to respond. On 12 May, Delhi's Chief Minister Rekha Gupta announced a significant funding boost for parks and gardens across the mega-city, channelled thro...
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From Dashboards to Machines: Transforming India’s Hackathon Culture for the Edge AI Era

India’s AI conversation is expanding rapidly. Engineering colleges are now full of hackathons. Government ministries are organising sector-specific innovation competitions. Coding assisting platforms from companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are becoming increasingly popular among Indian students and developers. AI-powered coding itself is gradually becoming mainstream. This is a positive development.  But a limitation is emerging. Most of the energy remains concentrated around dashboards, chatbots, workflow interfaces, and enterprise software abstractions. The physical economy — mines, refineries, factories, warehouses, substations, logistics depots, construction machines, power plants, MSMEs — remains comparatively under-instrumented and under-optimised. India's biggest productivity bottlenecks are not sitting inside dashboards. They sit inside machine downtime, transmission losses, maintenance failures, energy wastage, logistics inefficiencies, and poor real-time vis...
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