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India’s Battery Vision 2047: Unlocking Innovation, Employment, and Digital Opportunities in Storage

India’s solar revolution has been impressive, with schemes like PM Surya Ghar and PM KUSUM driving rooftop installations and farmer-focused solar pumps. Yet, as I argued in an earlier blogpost on January, this push remains incomplete without reliable storage. Generation without storage leaves homes, farms, and institutions dependent on the grid or diesel during non-sunny hours, risking stranded capacity and undermining true energy independence. The government’s recent India Battery Vision 2047 and plans for an Approved List of Battery Manufacturers (ALBM) (originally reported by Livemint on 14 April, and recycled by other media) mark a significant step forward. This initiative targets rolling out about 47 GW of battery storage capacity in the near term, requiring investments of around $38 billion, while aiming for nearly 3 TWh of cumulative battery storage by 2047 across mobility, power, and electronics. The ALBM creates a “battery moat” by restricting government-backed projects to app...
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From Care to Capability: Rebuilding India’s Healthcare System for the AI Era

India’s healthcare system is often described through its visible expansions—new hospitals, wider insurance coverage, the rise of digital health platforms, and a steady policy push to move from generic pharmaceuticals toward innovation-led biopharma. Each of these developments is significant in its own right.  Yet, taken together, they point to something deeper: the emergence of an integrated, multi-layered system that is transforming not just how care is delivered, but how capability is created, distributed, and sustained. What appears as a set of parallel developments is, in fact, a structural transition. Healthcare in India is no longer just a service sector organised around hospitals and clinicians. It is evolving into a system that combines care delivery, industrial production, scientific research, digital infrastructure, and human capability into a single, interdependent architecture. The Missing Lens: Healthcare as a System Conventional discussions of healthcare tend to focus...
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Quantum Without a Middle: Why India’s Materials Discovery Ambition Needs an Institutional Bridge

On April 14, 2026 — World Quantum Day — Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the Amaravati Quantum Reference Facilities at SRM University-AP. Two systems, Amaravati 1S and Amaravati 1Q, built in eight months by seven institutions spanning six Indian cities, with a predominantly domestic supply chain. India’s first indigenous, open-access quantum computing platforms — designed, assembled, and tested on Indian soil. It was a genuine milestone. Not hype, not a press release dressed as progress — but a real machine, cooling its processor, ready for use. And yet, the more consequential question was barely asked in the coverage that followed: connected to what, exactly? What Quantum Computing Actually Does in Materials Science Before asking what India should build around its quantum investments, it is worth being precise about what quantum computing actually contributes to materials discovery.  The discourse around quantum tends toward either breathless optimism...
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Compute-Led Urbanisation: The Next Phase of India’s Economic Development

Over the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that artificial intelligence is entering an infrastructure-heavy phase. What was less clear, until recently, was how quickly this shift would begin to express itself in physical investment patterns—particularly outside the United States. That clarity is now emerging. On 13 April, Bengaluru-based real-estate company RMZ announced plans to invest approximately $35 billion in India over the next five years in data-centre, office, housing, retail, and logistics infrastructure.  Even allowing for execution uncertainty and phased deployment, the scale of this commitment is difficult to ignore. It implies sustained, multi-billion-dollar annual capital deployment into long-duration physical assets. At first glance, this appears to be a large-scale real-estate expansion push. On closer examination, it signals something more consequential: the spatial expression of the industrialisation of AI. Infrastructure, Not Real Estate The natu...
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From Vehicles to Value: Unlocking India’s Hidden Metals Economy

India’s vehicles industry is booming. Retail sales of vehicles reached an all-time high of 21.71 million units (+13.30% YoY) in FY26. All categories — two-wheelers (+13.4%), cars (+13.0%), commercial vehicles (+11.7%), and tractors (+18.9%) — reported record-breaking sales.  Each new vehicle adds to human mobility and economic activity. It also adds to a growing stock of embedded metals—steel, aluminium, copper, and specialised alloys engineered for durability and performance. Over time, this stock transitions out of primary use. What India does with that transition will increasingly determine whether it remains an extraction-led industrial economy or evolves into a transformation-led one. Today, the transition is weak. Despite a formal vehicle scrappage policy, incentives for owners, and provisions for authorised scrappage centres, throughput remains limited. The constraint is not merely regulatory—it is economic. End-of-life vehicles (ELVs) do not yet command sufficiently high, p...
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Between Solar Parks and Smart Factories: The Missing Electrical Layer in India’s Industry 4.0/5.0 Strategy

India’s industrial growth narrative is undergoing a visible shift. The language of Industry 4.0/5.0 now dominates corporate strategy, policy discussions, and public discourse. Factories are expected to be powered by green energy, optimised by Artificial Intelligence, and embedded within digitally coordinated supply chains. This vision is directionally sound—but structurally incomplete. The current conversation makes a conceptual leap: from renewable energy parks to intelligent factories. In doing so, it overlooks the critical infrastructure that connects the two. Between the generation of electricity and its use in industrial systems lies an entire ecosystem—one that remains under-emphasised despite being indispensable. That ecosystem is electrical infrastructure. The Missing Middle: More Than Just Power Electrical infrastructure is often reduced to a simplistic idea: wires carrying electricity from point A to point B. In reality, it is a complex, multi-layered system that determines w...
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From Data Scarcity to Data Sovereignty: Building India’s National Sensing Grid

India’s AI ambitions are rising rapidly—but they are being built on a fragile foundation. The problem is not a shortage of algorithms, talent, or even capital. It is far more basic: India lacks a reliable, continuous, and trustworthy data generation system for its physical economy. Without fixing this, the promise of AI-driven governance will remain uneven, delayed, and often ineffective. Most current public systems rely on periodic, human-reported data—monthly updates, quarterly filings, delayed surveys. These are prone to error, manipulation, and lag. In a country where environmental risks—from floods to landslides to droughts—are intensifying, such latency is not just inefficient; it is dangerous. What India needs is not just more AI—it needs AI-ready infrastructure. This requires a shift from episodic reporting to continuous sensing, from fragmented datasets to shared, verifiable data systems, and from discretionary inputs to machine-generated ground truth. The Missing Layer: A Nat...
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