Mishik Sharma

As an alumnus of Tezpur University (TU), I have watched the unfolding drama on the campus with a mix of nostalgia, frustration, and, increasingly, a call for accountability from all sides. What began as a tragic cultural loss has spiraled into an institutional paralysis that threatens the very soul of a once-promising university. Let’s dissect this mess, hold the guilty accountable, and chart a path forward—because TU deserves better than the collective failures we’ve witnessed. The Spark: Zubeen Garg’s Tragic Death and a Tone-Deaf Response The unexpected death of Zubeen Garg, Assam’s beloved singer and cultural icon, on September 19, 2025, sent shockwaves across the state. Found unresponsive while swimming near a yacht during the Northeast India Festival in Singapore, Garg—often called the "Voice of Assam"—was pronounced dead on arrival, initially attributed to drowning. The news plunged Assam into profound grief, with the government declaring a three-day mourning period (Se...

It is not often that a country receives two major tech investment announcements — back-to-back — from the world’s top two fundamental technology companies. Yet that is exactly what happened recently.  On October 14, Google announced a $15 billion investment over five years (2026-2030) to establish its first India AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. This represents Google's largest investment in India to date and the largest AI hub the company is building anywhere outside the United States. A couple of days back, Microsoft announced a $17.5 billion investment in India, focussing cloud and AI infrastructure, over four years from 2026 to 2029. This represents Microsoft's largest investment in Asia and builds upon the $3 billion investment announced in January 2025. And yesterday, it inked partnerships with India’s four major technology services companies and committed 200,000 Copilot licenses across them — a scale never seen before. Some may brush these off as routine corpora...

India's digital landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by ambitious government initiatives like BharatNet and the entry of global players like SpaceX's Starlink. As satellite broadband services gain traction, questions are also arising about competition, affordability, and optimal deployment.  Recent developments, including Starlink's regulatory approvals, revised pricing announcements, and a policy clash between the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), highlight both opportunities and challenges.  In this blogpost, I analyze these dynamics, and propose a three-dimensional win-win-win framework that leverages the strengths of three key stakeholders: BharatNet, Starlink, and Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs). I show that by fostering collaboration rather than competition India can bridge its digital divide more effectively, ensuring inclusive growth across its vast and diverse geography, demographics, economy, ind...

In a recent interview, popular economist Sanjeev Sanyal suggested that India cannot rely on traditional universities to rapidly skill its vast workforce, and that online training will soon become the dominant mode of preparing youth for jobs. He argues: India’s birth rate peaked around the early 2000s, and India’s college-age population peaked around the mid-2020s, Therefore — he suggests — India should rethink the expansion of physical universities and that online skilling platforms could be more useful than physical universities. This appears intuitive, but his demographic logic is more fragile than it looks. Demographic Peaks Are Not Permanent: Lessons From the U.S. COVID Baby-Bump A crucial counter-example comes not from India, but the United States. During the pandemic, despite fear and disruption, the U.S. experienced a modest but real baby-bump. After a 4% fall in 2020, births actually rose by 1% in 2021 — the first increase in years. Demographers attribute this reversal to: agg...

A few days back, Union Electronics & IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav revealed an ambitious ₹4,500 crore plan to revive and upgrade the Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali, Punjab — India’s only government-owned chip fabrication facility. The mission is clear: turn it into the country’s first large-scale, industry-facing tape-out and prototyping facility, primarily for academia and startups. Chips to Startups Since 2022, an ambitious programme called Chips to Startup (C2S) has been quietly training 85,000 engineers, funding the design of more than 175 custom ASICs and SoCs, and giving hundreds of academic institutions and startups free access to million-dollar EDA tools and multi-project wafer runs.  The goal was simple yet audacious: turn India into a nation of chip designers rather than just chip assemblers. However, for three years, one big question hung over C2S:  “Great designs — but where do we actually fabricate and test them without spending tens of crores of rupe...

Over the past year, hiring patterns across India Inc have begun to display a clear divergence. Recruitment in the IT services sector — long considered the country’s white-collar growth engine — has visibly slowed, pressured by weak Western demand and the rapid adoption of AI-driven automation. Meanwhile, non-IT sectors, particularly core engineering industries, are quietly expanding their hiring plans. This twin dynamic has been repeatedly reported in the Economic Times's Tech and Careers sections and in the BusinessLine’s Company and Infotech sections, respectively. The emerging picture is unmistakable: manufacturing-led sectors—renewables, automotive, EVs, defence, chemicals, heavy engineering, construction technology, and utilities—are revving up. This has naturally triggered a question with significant implications for labour mobility: Can IT services engineers relocate into core engineering roles? The answer is neither a simple 'yes' nor a flat 'no'. Instead, i...

Over the past year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has generated more heat, hype, and headlines than any other technology. But beneath the noise, two quiet revolutions are forming—revolutions that could reorganise industries, labour markets, and even national competitiveness. These two revolutions arise from the convergence of Agentic AI with two new technological forces: digital twins and Large Behavioural Models (LBMs). Together, they form the backbone of the next wave of transformation in factories, logistics networks, offices, and households. This is the real story of the AI transition. And it is only just beginning. The First Convergence: Agentic AI + Digital Twins The industrial world is about to become self-optimising Digital twins—high-fidelity virtual replicas of factories, warehouses, production lines, or even entire cities—have existed for almost a decade. But their true power remained dormant until the rise of Agentic AI: AI systems capable of planning, simulating actions, an...

A couple of days back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated Skyroot Aerospace’s new manufacturing facility and launch vehicle. In his speech, he emphasised something subtle but significant: India’s Gen Z is increasingly drawn to the space sector, and young innovators are driving a technological wave that did not exist even a decade ago. The next day, The Economic Times wrote an editorial reinforcing the same idea — that India’s youth is being absorbed into high-skill, mission-driven innovation ecosystems, keeping them productively engaged and off the streets, unlike in several countries facing youth unrest. These two signals — one political, one editorial — point to a deeper transformation underway. India is entering its first truly public–private space age, and the implications go far beyond rockets or satellite launches. This is not merely a tech story. It is a story about India’s economy, state capacity, youth aspirations, and the revival of scientific education. As a sociologis...