Mishik Sharma

Introduction As anticipation builds around Jio’s potential IPO — expected in the first half of 2026 — market observers are debating its valuation, with estimates ranging between $130-180 billion. The market conversation (as reported by Financial Express yesterday) has largely centered on whether the offering will be dominated by an Offer for Sale (OFS), allowing early investors to exit, or shift toward a fresh issue of shares that would inject capital directly into the company for future growth. For now, Dalal Street views Jio primarily as a formidable telecom and bundled services player — delivering mobility, broadband, and enterprise solutions — powerfully backed by massive investments in data centers and AI infrastructure. This framing, while important, misses a more profound opportunity. Mr. Mukesh Ambani has repeatedly signaled a bolder vision: taking artificial intelligence beyond servers and data centers into the physical world — embedding intelligence into machines, processes, ...

India is heating up. Every summer now seems harsher than the last. Heatwaves are becoming longer, cities are becoming hotter, electricity demand is surging, and millions of Indian homes and enterprises are increasingly dependent on cooling devices merely to function normally. But the conversation around cooling in India still remains surprisingly narrow. Cooling is usually discussed either as: a household comfort issue, an electricity consumption problem, or an environmental concern. That framing is no longer sufficient. In a hot, populous, rapidly urbanising, rapidly electrifying, and rapidly industrialising country like India, cooling is becoming something much larger: an economic necessity, an infrastructure imperative, a labour productivity requirement, a digital economy requirement, an industrial opportunity, and potentially one of the largest distributed employment ecosystems of the coming decades. India therefore needs to stop treating cooling machines merely as consumer applian...

Raghavan Rao's article in Swarajya on Indian conglomerates' battery retreat, published yesterday, is sharp and well-documented. The reactions to the article post and thread on X are predominantly concerned and critical, aligning with the post's warning about India's battery/EV sector becoming "born dependent" on China (especially for cells, chemistry, and upstream materials). Many users view it as a cautionary tale of policy execution gaps, corporate risk-aversion, and geopolitical vulnerability — shifting from petroleum import dependence to battery-material import dependence.  The article's core observation is accurate: companies that announced battery sovereignty ambitions between 2021 and 2023 have, by 2026, largely settled into assembling Chinese cells into Indian enclosures. The contrast with Korean and Japanese firms — who paired technology licensing with sustained, long-horizon R&D investment and gradually converted external knowledge into indig...

The Manufacturing Competitiveness Question As I wrote in my previous article, India's export ambitions have entered a new phase. After crossing a record USD 863 billion in exports in FY26, the government has set a USD 1 trillion target for FY27. But beneath the export numbers lies a deeper industrial question: what kind of manufacturing ecosystem will sustain India's competitiveness over the long term? For years, the answer has been framed around cheap labour, market size, and production-linked incentives. These remain important. But as industrial systems become increasingly intelligent, competitiveness will depend less on the cost of labour and more on the ability to embed technology directly into the operational core of manufacturing itself. That technology is Industrial AI — and its most strategically relevant form for India is Edge AI. Unlike cloud-dependent AI architectures, Edge AI moves intelligence closer to the point of action. Models run directly on machines, sensors,...