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From Fashion to Fibre Again: Building India's Textile Transformation Economy

Introduction: A New Phase in India's Textile Journey India's textile sector is entering a new phase of development. Over the past decade, initiatives such as PM MITRA, the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), the promotion of technical textiles, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 5F vision—Farm to Fibre to Fabric to Fashion to Foreign—have laid the foundations for a globally competitive textile production economy. Bharat Tex has emerged as the flagship platform showcasing this ambition, bringing together policymakers, manufacturers, exporters, researchers, investors, designers, artisans, and entrepreneurs to position India as one of the world's leading textile manufacturing and sourcing destinations. The 2026 edition of Bharat Tex, held on 14-17 July 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, however, reflected a subtle but important evolution.  Alongside production, exports, investment, and handloom, the event devoted increasing attention to...
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Wrong Diagnosis, Right Fund: What India's DeepTech Debate Is Missing

Part I: Beyond Categories, Towards Capabilities On July 2, 2026, at the launch of the AI Council of India in Mumbai, senior economist and policy adviser Neelkanth Mishra said that India's ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund has struggled to identify enough deserving DeepTech startups to absorb capital at the scale originally envisaged. He says that India's DeepTech ecosystem remains immature, and the venture-capital community has yet to develop the expertise needed to evaluate and finance frontier technologies. His observation is correct on its own narrow terms — and that is precisely the problem.  As a description of the startup-financing pipeline, this is accurate. As a diagnosis of India's innovation capacity, it mistakes a symptom for the disease. A shortage of investable DeepTech startups is not evidence that India lacks deserving projects, or even deserving institutions. It is evidence that we have let one financing category — startups — stan...
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