Mishik Sharma

In recent months, a rehashed view has been gaining currency in Indian economic discourse—most prominently articulated by popular economist Sanjeev Sanyal—that a healthy economy requires continuous corporate churn. According to this argument, each generation of large firms should be replaced by a new generation; today’s largest companies should not remain so a decade later. In the Indian context, legacy conglomerates are portrayed as self-preserving, inward-looking, and insufficiently innovative, while new firms are cast as the rightful agents of dynamism. At first glance, this thesis is academically elegant. On closer inspection, it is economically misleading and strategically obstructive. The Wrong Question: Startup vs Legacy The most fundamental flaw in the “continuous churn” narrative is that it asks the wrong question. From a policy perspective, it should not matter whether a firm originates as a startup, a family conglomerate, a public-sector enterprise, or a cooperative. What mat...

The Government of India's achievement of onboarding and providing social and food security access to more than 30 crore informal workers, through the E-SHRAM platform, is unprecedented and laudable. This is not just a digital expansion achievement, but a global-scale social-capability upgrade.  However, for the larger economy, I argue, this is insufficient: Worker-side digitisation and provision, by itself, does not constitute a functioning labour market. It constitutes only half of one. The next logical—and far more complex—step is to bring the demand side of informal labour into view. The structural gap in India’s informal labour reforms India’s informal economy is not defined merely by informal workers; it is equally defined by informal employers—small service-providing entrepreneurs and enterprises that operate across cities, towns, and villages. These include contractors, event organisers, construction supervisors, logistics operators, household service aggregators, and countl...

India’s development narrative today rests heavily on two pillars: AI-fication and greenification. From green steel and green cement to AI-enabled manufacturing, data centres, and smart infrastructure, the vision of Viksit Bharat is being articulated as a technologically sophisticated and clean-energy powered future. What is conspicuously absent from this discourse is a third, equally fundamental input: water . This omission is not rhetorical—it is structural. Without explicit planning for industrial and urban water security, India risks building an AI- and energy-rich economy constrained by a far more basic bottleneck. Water: The Silent Binding Constraint of the New Economy Most of the sectors central to India’s green and AI transition are intrinsically water-intensive: Steel and cement (cooling, dust suppression, processing) Oil refining and petrochemicals Chemicals and fertilizers Infrastructure and real estate Data centres (cooling, directly or indirectly) Emerging sectors such as g...

India’s green transition is often discussed as a question of technology adoption, consumer incentives, or startup innovation. But recent developments suggest that something more consequential is underway: the quiet emergence of a procurement-led, scale-first model of green industrialisation. Two examples, published yesterday, illustrate this shift: First, the Central government has tendered out the manufacturing, deployment, operation, and maintenance of 10,000+ electric buses to a group of EV firms, with companies such as PMI Electric, EKA Mobility, and Olectra Greentech emerging as winners.  Apparently, established incumbents like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland missed out in the tender process. The e-buses will be provided to four large city transport authorities. Second, the Uttar Pradesh government has awarded a large contract to Sahaj Solar to manufacture, deploy, and maintain distributed solar power generation systems (ranging from 100 KW to 2 MW) across government premises. T...

India is entering a decisive phase in its civil aviation trajectory. Indian airlines have placed one of the largest aircraft orders in global aviation history—about 1,500 aircraft currently on order—reflecting the country’s position as the world’s third-largest aviation market and among the fastest growing. Rising passenger demand, regional connectivity, and income growth have made this expansion inevitable rather than speculative. Public discourse around this aircraft surge has so far focused on the most visible labour implications: the projected requirement for tens of thousands of pilots, hundreds of thousands of cabin crew and ground staff, and the rapid expansion of flight schools and aviation training facilities over the next decade. These projections are valid—but incomplete. They overlook a quieter, structurally more consequential requirement: aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO). Every aircraft inducted into a fleet creates a multi-decade obligation for inspection,...

In recent months, a curious doom narrative is being propagated, perhaps inadvertently, by celebrated tech leaders. This narrative basically extrapolates AI's success in cognitive domains to the physical economy, concluding that AI will soon replace physical human labour. Two recent, prominent examples illustrate this drift particularly well. First is Eric Schmidt. At a media event  recently, he highlighted the 'danger' of AI with a 'possibility': He just has to tell an AI he wants to build a house in his beloved Virgina state, and AI can take over from there: AI can select the best location, design the house, hire the building company, negotiate the price, write the contract, and later can even falsely sue the builder for 'violating' the contract!  The other is Sridhar Vembu. At the India Economic Conclave, he noted, rightly, that AI is rapidly displacing coding and routine software jobs. But he went on to predict that a similar fate is awaiting deep-tech an...

At a time when global discourse on quantum technology is oscillating between hype and apprehension, IBM’s recent investment announcements in India stand out for their clarity, restraint, and long-term seriousness. While much of the technology world remains fixated on artificial intelligence alone, IBM has been quietly—but decisively—laying the groundwork for India’s participation in the next technological paradigm: quantum computing. A few days back, IBM announced an ambitious plan to skill lakhs of Indian youth in quantum technology (as well as in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity). This is notable not merely for its scale, but for its sequencing. IBM is not treating quantum as a distant, abstract science problem; it is treating it as a future enterprise technology that requires early workforce preparation. A few months earlier, IBM had entered into strategic partnerships with the Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra governments to anchor quantum infrastructure, skilling, and enterp...

India’s technology discourse today is overwhelmingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI). The scale, speed, and breadth of AI adoption across sectors has created a perception—sometimes exaggerated—that labour is becoming progressively irrelevant to economic growth. This perception is analytically flawed. India’s growth story over the next two decades will remain decisively anchored in the physical economy: green energy, electric vehicles, infrastructure, real estate, mining, refining, component manufacturing, assembly lines, logistics, warehousing, rail–road–air transport, and e-commerce, etc. All of these sectors continue to require large numbers of blue-collar and grey-collar workers. AI may reshape tasks and productivity, but it does not eliminate the need for skilled labour. The real constraint, I argue, is no longer labour availability. It is labour mobilisation, matching, reliability, and trust.  A small funding round with a large signal Against this backdrop, the fundr...

India’s healthcare sector has been expanding at an exceptional pace over the past few years. Large private hospital chains have attracted record investments from private and sovereign investment firms, scaling across tier-1 and tier-2 cities. At the same time, the public healthcare system has also expanded rapidly, driven by a strong push from the central government and several proactive state governments. New district hospitals, medical colleges, insurance-backed care capacity, and primary healthcare infrastructure have significantly widened access. These parallel expansions, as I argued in a blogpost back in July, are unlikely to collide. The reason is structural: India’s healthcare system is evolving along two distinct but complementary tracks. Public healthcare focuses on scale, affordability, and risk pooling, while private healthcare increasingly caters to insured, specialised, and convenience-driven demand. Growth in one track does not automatically cannibalise the other; in man...

When the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was enacted in 2005, it addressed a fundamental vulnerability of rural India: income insecurity. By legally guaranteeing wage employment, it functioned as a shock absorber during droughts, agrarian distress, and economic downturns. For that role, it deserves enduring credit. Yet, from the mid-2010s, social sector professionals at the grassroots (including myself) have noticed a structural limitation. Panchayats are often compelled to approve works not because they were economically meaningful, but because the statute required job-days to be generated. Asset creation, in many cases, has become incidental rather than intentional. This is not a failure of intent, but a consequence of design: the system rewarded employment quantity, not economic quality. Two decades since the enactment of MGNREGA, India stands at a different juncture. The new Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-GRAM) Bill , ...

A few days back, Honeywell — a large American industrial technology company — licensed out its newly-developed ethanol-to-jetfuel (ETJ) technology to an Indian company, as per a news report by the BusinessLine. On the surface, this appears to be a routine technology-licensing deal. In reality, it signals something far more consequential: Honeywell is not a startup experimenting at the margins, but a century-old industrial corporation with deep expertise in process engineering tools, catalysts, thermal systems, aircraft components, and large-scale deployment. Its foray into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (the formal name for biojetfuel) production technology suggests that biomass-based fuels are moving out of pilot territory and into commercial feasibility.  However, at the same time, this development also reveals that despite abundant biomass availability in India, Indian companies do not yet possess the complex technologies needed to transform biomass into  advanced liquid fuels a...