Mishik Sharma

Over the past decade, India has emerged as the global nucleus of Global Capability Centers (GCCs) — offshore hubs set up by multinational corporations to manage IT, engineering, design, and even core R&D work. There are now around 1,900 GCCs in India as of mid-2025, with projections pointing to 2,500+ by 2030. This includes not just the usual IT players — Microsoft, Google, SAP, Bosch, Oracle — but also banks like JPMorgan Chase, insurers like Swiss Re, automakers like Mercedes-Benz, and pharma majors like GSK and Pfizer. Even aerospace and advanced robotics companies are setting up shop. Global companies choose India for GCCs for 3 key reasons: - - Cost advantage (up to 3x lower than in the West) - Abundant and easily up-skillable tech talent - Favourable  work ethic and  English fluency But now, this model is facing stress. The Metro Overload India’s success in attracting GCCs is also its Achilles heel: most of these centers are concentrated in four or five cities — Beng...

What comes to your mind when you think of an agri fair or a farm fair?  Farmers’ produce, right? A wide variety of grains, vegetables, fruits, oils, maybe even handmade items and processed foods. In other words, outputs from the field — harvested, packaged, sometimes processed — are what define our conventional imagination of a “farm fair" or a "krishi mela". But let’s flip this perspective. What if a farm fair was not about what farmers produce, but about what farmers consume? Farmers as Buyers, Not Just Sellers Think of a different kind of farm fair — where the booths and stalls aren’t stocked with cabbages and lentils, but with:- -Tractors and tractor accessories -Fertilizers — chemical and organic -Irrigation equipment and water pumps -Solar panels and wind turbines for decentralized power generation  -Agri-drones and soil monitoring sensors -AI-based farm planning tools and software -Crop insurance and digital credit products Sounds futuristic? It shouldn’t. Agricul...

In India’s consumer-facing industries, quarterly outlooks are built on a familiar mix of hard numbers — GDP growth, inflation rates, fuel prices, monsoon forecasts, and other macroeconomic indicators. In some sectors, weather patterns are closely watched because they directly affect supply chains or customer demand. Yet there’s another set of forces, equally powerful but less systematically tracked: the rhythms of social life. Across the year, India experiences multiple social and cultural cycles that strongly influence consumer spending. Marriage seasons. Pilgrimage seasons. Festival clusters stretching over months. Agrarian sowing and harvest cycles. Pitripaksha periods when auspicious purchases are avoided. Flood seasons affecting mobility and local markets. Spring and winter festivals and fairs that bring specific types of demand. These cycles are pan-India in presence but highly regional in flavour. A single festival might drive jewellery sales in one region, hospitality bookings ...

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an interesting trend: data annotation companies in the U.S. are attracting substantial investor interest. Curious, I dug deeper. What I discovered was more than just a funding pattern — it was the quiet emergence of a manpower-heavy, globally relevant, low-threshold industry that could hold serious promise for India. What is data annotation? It’s the process of labeling or tagging data — images, text, audio, video — so that AI models can be trained to understand patterns. Think of it as the invisible scaffolding behind every AI product we use today, from chatbots to facial recognition systems. Here’s the part that caught my attention: Unlike many tech jobs, data annotation doesn’t require an engineering degree. Even humanities graduates, with some training, can participate meaningfully. The work is often task-based, sometimes part-time, and doesn’t need a high-tech setup — just a computer, stable internet, and focus. In other words, exactly the kind of o...

India’s data centre industry has been in the news a lot recently. The growth is fast, the investment flowing in is huge, and the interest from both Indian and global players is only going up. What is happening here is not just an “infra story,” it is also a technological and social shift. When we look closely, three things stand out: 1. Data centre companies are expanding ambitiously. 2. Foreign investment firms are treating them like attractive, stable assets. 3. Some, like Airtel’s Nxtra, are already moving “upstream” into cloud and cybersecurity services. The first two points are expected. The third one is where the story becomes interesting The Demand Explosion Digital transformation is sweeping across India — in government, corporations, MSMEs, academia, healthcare, and even among individual professionals. This means demand for e-storage is already exploding, and with it, the demand for upstream services like cloud, cybersecurity, and data management will also explode. In other wo...

Over the past decade, the Ambani industrial family has become impossible to ignore. From lavish public celebrations to deeply symbolic nods to the Indian civilization, and from their green energy mega-projects to the unmatched commercial heft of Jio, they have etched themselves into the nation’s psyche. Jio Infocomm  Jio, in particular, stands out. In just a few years, it has reached tens of crores of Indians — a scale that few companies in the world can match. Through affordable SIMs, OTT platforms, and payment solutions, Jio has not only disrupted industries but also reshaped how Indians access and consume the internet. Mukesh Ambani himself has spoken of his desire to bring affordable AI to every Indian person and enterprise through the Jio SIM. But here lies the point of contention: Is that enough? More Needed  For all their wealth, industrial experience, and professed love for India’s future, the Ambanis seem to be stopping short in one critical domain — foundational tech...

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of the Ola companies, is a rare breed—a tech entrepreneur with a patriotic mission to make India a global leader in electric vehicles (EVs) and digital innovation. His Ola Sankalp 2024 and 2025 livestreams (which I watched in full on X) showcased a dizzying array of promises: electric motorcycles, e-commerce EVs, home energy storage, AI-driven software, and even modular micro-warehouses. Aggarwal’s “India Inside” vision, backed by his defiance of tech giants like Google and LinkedIn, paints him as a disruptor. But does Ola deliver on its lofty goals, or is Aggarwal over-promising? More intriguingly, could Ola’s MoveOS spark a revolutionary consumer OS? Let’s dive in. The  Grand Promises: Ola’s Ambitious Roadmap At Sankalp 2024 and 2025 (and through posts on X, in between) Aggarwal has unveiled Ola’s plan to redefine mobility and tech: Electric  Motorcycles: A portfolio of mass and premium bikes, like the Roadster X+ and Diamondhead, powered by Ola’s ...