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From Data to Financial Intelligence: Reimagining Fintech’s Role in India’s Financial System

I. From Fintech to Financial Intelligence  1.1 Beyond the technology showcase The seventh Global Fintech Fest, held in Mumbai in September 2026, brought together many of the technologies now shaping the future of finance: agentic artificial intelligence, tokenisation, digital currencies, quantum computing, cybersecurity, and increasingly sophisticated digital financial infrastructure. India’s own fintech journey, meanwhile, has already moved well beyond the original story of digital payments. UPI has demonstrated what can happen when technology, public infrastructure, private innovation, and mass adoption come together at scale. Yet the most interesting question emerging from this transformation may not be about any particular technology. It is about what fintech itself is becoming. The first great wave of fintech made financial transactions digital. The next wave made them faster, cheaper, more accessible, and increasingly frictionless. The enormous volume of digital transactions ...
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Multiply, Don't Substitute: From ISRO to a National Space Ecosystem

1. India's Space Question Has Changed India's space programme has entered an interesting institutional moment. In early September 2026, nine employee associations representing personnel across the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sought written clarity from its Chairman and the Department of Space over reports and public statements concerning the transfer of some manufacturing and operational functions to private companies and public-sector undertakings. Their concerns were not a rejection of private participation. They sought clarity over where the boundary would lie between expanding India's private space industry and withdrawing ISRO from capabilities that its employees regarded as core to the organisation's technical competence, institutional memory, and strategic role. The concerns emerged just as India was preparing for the ninth Bengaluru Space Expo, where the country's rapidly expanding private space ecosystem was on full display. ISRO responded on ...
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Recovering the Missing Middle: A National Silt Productisation and Commercialisation Strategy

As the monsoon enters its last month, I have, over the past several weeks, watched the season do what it always does here: gather itself over the ridges, break, and run downhill. Rainwater moves fast through slopes — down the nalas into the streams, and eventually into the Ganga, carrying with it a fine suspension of the very soil it just fell on. It is easy, watching this, to think of it only as loss: topsoil that will not return to the field it came from, fertility quietly leaving the hills for the plains.  But the water does not destroy what it carries. It relocates it. Somewhere downstream — in a riverbed, a reservoir, a delta — that same soil settles, waits, and accumulates. What leaves a hillside field as erosion arrives somewhere else as silt . This is not a new observation. It is, in fact, close to the founding insight of the Gangetic plain itself, whose fertility was built by exactly this process over millennia. What is new — or ought to be new — is the policy attention si...
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