Mishik Sharma

Over the past decade, India has become significantly better at building industrial capability. Production-linked incentives, logistics corridors, cluster-based development, and targeted skilling programmes have begun to produce credible manufacturing and technology ecosystems. In sectors ranging from electronics to renewable energy, the state has shown that it can assemble land, infrastructure, policy support, and demand visibility into functioning industrial nodes. But a structural gap remains. These successes tend to stay localised. They do not reliably replicate across geographies. India does not lack industrial policy. It lacks a scale-out system. Early Signals of Scale—But Not Yet Systemic There are early signals that India is beginning to move beyond isolated capability creation into scaling. India's smartphone manufacturing ecosystem has vastly expanded over the last few years. More recently, the broader electronics manufacturing ecosystem has also expanded. In parallel, gre...

Indian cities are expanding, yet daily life for most residents feels increasingly strained. Congested streets, strained public services, and financially weak local governments have become the norm rather than the exception. The recent launch of the Urban Challenge Fund (UCF), on 15 April, by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs offers a fresh approach — ₹1 lakh crore in central assistance to catalyse ₹4 lakh crore in total investment, with a clear push towards market-linked financing, redevelopment, and strengthening Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). Central share is capped at 25%, and the scheme emphasises bankable projects, municipal bonds, PPPs, and credit guarantees for smaller cities. This is a welcome shift from pure grant dependence. However, history shows that even well-designed central schemes often remain paper exercises if ULBs lack genuine interest and ownership — especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Without building real capacity and fiscal strength at the local level, th...

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 in January, this push remains incomplete without reliable storage. Generation without storage leaves homes, farms, factories, and hospitals 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 project...

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...

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, were built in eight months by seven institutions spanning six Indian cities, with a predominantly domestic supply chain. They are  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...

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...