Mishik Sharma

Every major technological revolution changes how societies work, earn, and imagine the future. Yet, it rarely changes all societies in the same way. The ongoing tech revolutions in USA and India — one led by AI, the other by e-commerce — reveal two distinct paths to modernization. In  USA , AI is quietly reprogramming white-collar work. In India, e-commerce is reengineering the foundations of everyday enterprise. Both are reshaping human life, but in strikingly different directions — one displacing, the other distributing. The AI-fication of USA The US tech economy is running on an AI supercharge. Startups are no longer raising millions — they’re raising tens of billions. In early 2025, OpenAI reportedly closed a funding round worth around $40 billion, giving it a post-money valuation near $300 billion. Soon after, Anthropic followed with a $13 billion round that pushed its valuation to roughly $183 billion. These are no longer startup numbers; they are state-level budgets. Such st...

India’s festive e-commerce season just clocked ₹1.24 lakh crore in sales—a 31% year-on-year surge. On the surface, it’s a retail triumph. But beneath the numbers lies a deeper story: one of aspiration, identity, and symbolic participation. This isn’t just about what Indians are buying—it’s about who they’re becoming. Tier II Cities: The New Cultural Nodes Amazon’s internal data, as reported by the Financial Express, reveals that Tier II cities contributed over 60% of fashion and beauty sales this festive season. Cities like Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, and Bhopal weren’t just participating—they were leading. - Fashion and beauty purchases signal more than consumption—they reflect self-expression and curated identity. - E-commerce platforms are enabling regional self-fashioning, where non-metro India asserts modernity on its own terms. Amazon also noted a 3X increase in demand for ethnic wear and festive grooming products from Tier II and III cities—suggesting that digital consumption is blen...

Western institutional theory, as popularised by economists James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu in their book "Why Nations Fail", hinges on a binary: inclusive institutions drive prosperity, while extractive institutions cause stagnation. But what if this framework—while elegant—is contextually flawed, even racially skewed? What if India’s most powerful industrial actors, often derided as oligarchs, are in fact building the very infrastructure that prevents nations from failing? This blogpost reframes the extractive/inclusive debate through two archetypes: Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, India's richest entrepreneurs by a long distance. I argue that they are not barons of extraction, exclusivity, and privilege; but are architects of sovereign-scale inclusion, resilience, development.  Mukesh Ambani: The Consumer-Focused Visionary  Reliance Industries’ expansion is not a tale of elite capture. It’s a story of massification—telecom, FMCG, OTT, cloud, financial services, and no...

India’s electric vehicle (EV) industry is growing fast. EV adoption has surged from 0.01% to 7.31% in just a decade. In H1FY26, electric car sales reached 91,076 units, up 108% YoY! At the same time, India’s charging landscape is also expanding rapidly, at least on paper. According to Redseer’s "Powering India’s EV Future" report, the country has grown from just 1,800 public chargers in FY22 to more than 30,000 by August 2025. Growth has doubled year after year — 6,586 in FY23, more than 16,000 in FY24, and now 30,000. But, of the 30,000+ public chargers installed as of August 2025, less than half are operational, and overall utilization remains below 10%. This isn’t just a hardware problem. It’s a systems failure — and the plausible solution, I argue, is lies in social engineering as much as in electrical engineering. Charging Is a Dwell-Time Activity Unlike petrol-diesel refuelling, EV charging takes time — anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes depending on the vehicle and charger...

A few days back, L&T Semiconductor Technologies announced a strategic partnership with Hon Young Semiconductor (HYS), a Foxconn subsidiary, to co-develop high-voltage silicon carbide (SiC) wafers. These chips will power electric vehicles, industrial motors, and energy systems — marking a quiet but profound shift in India’s semiconductor story. This isn’t just a business deal. It’s a signal. India’s chip ecosystem, long overshadowed by the glamour of AI and consumer electronics, is beginning to recognize the strategic value of “non-glamorous” chips—those embedded deep within the energy and industrial value chains. From metering and inverters to grid controllers and battery management systems, these chips form the invisible scaffolding of India’s energy transition. The Case for Power Electronics India’s energy infrastructure is expanding rapidly. EVs, charging stations, solar energy parks, wind energy parks, smart grids, and battery storage systems are no longer fringe — they’re now ...

A few days back, Airtel announced a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its Airtel Cloud platform—now branded as Airtel Xtel. The collaboration brings IBM’s Power11 autonomous servers and AI-ready infrastructure into Airtel’s fold, targeting regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and government. But beneath the headline lies a deeper systems story: Airtel is quietly re-architecting itself from a telecom provider into a full-stack technology conglomerate. This transformation isn’t cosmetic—it’s structural. Airtel Xtel sits upstream of Airtel Nxtra, the company’s data center arm, which itself is built upstream of Airtel’s core telecom infrastructure. Fiber, spectrum, submarine cables, and edge zones form the physical substrate. Nxtra adds hyperscale data centers and multizone regions. Xtel wraps it all in AI-ready services, compliance zones, and cloud-native orchestration. What emerges is not just a service provider—but a sovereign compute platform. The Telco Stack: Airtel ...

In recent months, leaders of India’s largest banks—HDFC Bank and State Bank of India—have made a striking declaration: AI adoption will not lead to layoffs in their banks. Instead, they envision AI as a force multiplier, enhancing staff capacity and enabling internal upskilling. Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, and Kotak Mahindra Bank have echoed similar sentiments, framing AI as a tool for productivity and transformation—not redundancy. This stands in sharp contrast to projections from Western banking giants. Bloomberg estimates that up to 200,000 jobs may be cut globally in the next few years due to AI! This may be an exaggeration, since Bloomberg is more a doom-speculating platform and less a news-reporting platform. But the trend is clear. CIOs and CTOs in the West anticipate 5–10% workforce reductions, especially in roles vulnerable to automation. So what explains this divergence? A New Lens: Horizontal vs Vertical Displacement AI doesn’t just “replace jobs”—it displaces roles. The crit...

For decades, India’s engineering graduates have been funneled into the IT services sector, often regardless of their subject. Mechanical, civil, electrical, electronic, and chemical engineers have become coders, testers, and support staff — not because they've wanted to, but because that’s where the jobs have been.  That era, I argue, is ending. Today, a quiet revolution is underway. India is expanding its industrial capacity across industries — mining, refining, steel, cement, aluminium, copper, infrastructure, real estate, electricals, electronics, vehicles, renewables, highways, shipping, aviation, railways, and more. These sectors demand core engineers, not just software developers. And they’re led by familiar industrial conglomerates — Tata, Reliance, Adani, Jindal, Vedanta, L&T, Mahindra, Kirloskar, Mittal — who are now reactivating their talent pipelines. RIL’s Hiring Spree: A Signal of the Shift Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) recently launched one of the largest core...

Every earning-announcement season, like the ongoing one, India’s IT giants step onto the stage with ritualistic predictability. They announce moderate revenue growth rates, talk about operational discipline, and reassure investors that the demand environment is stable. The script hasn’t changed in decades. Stability has replaced excitement. Growth has been replaced by guidance. And while they repeat this performance for the umpteenth time, something far more dynamic is happening outside their orbit — in the Indian startup ecosystem. Here, the term “research and development” isn’t mentioned like an afterthought in annual reports; it’s part of every funding announcement, every pitch deck, and every hiring plan. The Quiet Rise of R&D-Driven Startups Just browse through the Tech section of the Economic Times or any major Indian tech portal. Most startups that raise multi-million-dollar infusions mention one specific use for that capital: research and development. A couple of years ago,...

There is something quietly transformative happening in India’s industrial landscape — a shift that may not grab headlines but could shape the next two decades of growth. A small example appeared recently in the Economic Times: Reliance Consumer Products’ foray into bottled mineral water, in partnership with local bottlers. On the surface, this looks like just another product diversification. But it actually reflects a much larger industrial pattern taking shape — one in which partnership replaces ownership as the dominant model of production and distribution. This phenomenon isn’t limited to Reliance. Consider the array of partnerships already defining India’s industrial economy: Suzuki and Maruti, Toyota and Kirloskar, Apple and Tata Electronics, MG Motor and JSW, GE and Wipro, Vivo and Dixon, Ericsson and VVDN, Vodafone and Idea, Reliance/Jio and BP, Coca-Cola and Jubilant Bhartia; among many others. In almost every sector — automobiles, electronics, telecom, energy — India is becomi...

The wedding season is upon us again — and with it, the ritual inflation in vegetable and pulse prices. It’s a yearly phenomenon.  I know it beyond debate because it bites my wallet every time. Call it irritation or insight, but every time this happens, I feel the same way: India needs the Food Corporation of India (FCI) to play a much bigger — not smaller — role in our food economy. Food Is Fundamental — To Everyone Food, in India, isn’t just a private consumption item. It’s a public emotion and a political variable. It feeds not only stomachs but also narratives — of poverty, of prosperity, of electoral promises. About 45% of Indians depend on the farm sector for livelihood; the rest depend on it for survival. That’s practically the whole nation. So, what if the FCI stopped being just a procurement-and-distribution bureaucracy for rice and wheat — and became a true price stabilizer for the Indian food system? The Radical Idea Here’s my proposition. The FCI should procure all majo...

India’s waste problem is not just a sanitation challenge — it’s a missed opportunity for employment, dignity, and industrial growth. As a sociologist, I argue that waste recycling tech startups are not merely aggregators; they are potential co-creators of local enterprises. The recent ₹5.3 crore funding raised by the startup Recove to transform India’s plastics recycling supply chain is a case in point. Their tech-driven B2B marketplace and pre-processing infrastructure signal a shift from aggregation to ecosystem-building. But the real opportunity lies deeper—in the physical processes of collection, segregation, collation, and processing. T hey are the backbone of a circular economy.  They need not remain undignified tasks. Mechanization can elevate these roles, and with the right infrastructure, they can become permanent, semi-skilled jobs distributed across every Indian city and town. The Waste to Wealth Stack: From Waste to Dignity I propose a modular stack at the municipal lev...

India’s MSME sector—six crore strong—is the beating heart of our economy. From street vendors to aircraft-part manufacturers, these enterprises span the full spectrum of scale, ambition, and complexity. Yet, despite their diversity, they share common pain points: fragmented supply chains, limited access to credit and insurance, poor compliance infrastructure, and constrained market reach. In recent years, a new breed of startups has emerged to address these challenges. What’s exciting is not just their individual growth—but the possibility of collaborative convergence. In this blogpost I outline a vision for how B2B e-commerce, NBFC, fintech, insurtech, SaaS, and B2C e-commerce startups can come together to build a modular, scalable, and sustainable MSME enablement ecosystem. Why This Moment Is Ripe - All six categories of startups have attracted record amounts of funding in recent years. - Most are targeting the MSME sector as a core growth vertical. - Many are expanding their on-the-...

The festive season is upon us, and the signs of buoyancy are unmistakable. E-commerce players and enablers across India are ramping up their capacities to meet the surge in demand, with several platforms reporting double — even triple — digit growth in sales during the Navratri-Durga Puja season. But another trend has also been unfolding in parallel: the rapid rise in popularity of the Arattai messaging app, signaling that Indians are ready to explore new, homegrown communication platforms. Put these two trends together, and an idea begins to take shape — one that blends technology, sociology, and commerce in a uniquely Indian way. Messaging Apps Are the True Social Networks of Our Time I belong to a generation that remembers when social media platforms were called social networking sites. Those early platforms connected real people — classmates, colleagues, cousins — with the promise of staying in touch. But over time, social media became megaphones for expressing political, social, i...

The United States government’s recent tightening of work visa rules has set off a flurry of commentary in the Indian media and the India-gazing foreign media. Much of the latter's noise can be ignored. But among the Indian media commentary, there is a visible constructive pattern: India must build, retain, and repatriate Indian talent. And to do that, the commentators give two recommendations:  improve India's urban infrastructure and governance; and strengthen its education and research ecosystem. Both are important. But the former depends heavily on political vision and capacity that are complex and risky. The latter, however, can be advanced largely at the administrative level. This is where India has a real opportunity. Large-Scale Private Universities as a Driver of National Progress  India’s business conglomerates already invest notable sums in R&D, schools, and corporate skilling programs. It is time for them to move into the next stage—establishing world-class, mul...