Mishik Sharma

India’s real estate sector is booming, again. Across states — from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh — governments are announcing new industrial cities, capitalising on private investment and rising land values. These new cities promise jobs, growth, and industrial dynamism. But, there an invisible structural flaw. I argue that these state-led industrial city projects, while grand in ambition, neither strengthen India’s structural democracy nor ensure structural sustainability. What I suggest, instead, is India's next urban leap should not be another round of state-created industrial hubs — but the creation of what I call “sub-cities”: autonomous, self-contained ecosystems within large cities, governed under the broader sovereignty of existing municipal bodies. The Real Problem: Disempowered Municipalities India’s municipalities remain among the weakest in the world. Despite the 74th Constitutional Amendment, which promised greater ...

India Maritime Week 2025 was not just a conclave—it was a convergence. With participation from 85+ countries, 600+ MoUs, and ₹12+ lakh crore in investment proposals, the event marked a decisive shift in how India imagines its maritime frontier: not as a boundary, but as a developmental interface. At the heart of this transformation lies a simple but powerful idea—port-led growth. But what does it mean when ports are no longer just cargo gateways, but nodes in a living system of industrial expansion and social development? Ports as Industrial Routers Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address set the tone. With a $26 billion investment push, the launch of Bharat Container Shipping Line, and infrastructure asset status granted to large ships, the message was clear: India’s ports are being reimagined as sovereign infrastructure. The Shipping Corporation of India’s fleet expansion to 216 vessels by 2047 is not just a logistics upgrade — it’s a signal of industrial ambition. Adani Group’s twin ...

A couple of days back, Bloomberg News published a story provocatively titled “Why the US Economy Might Benefit from Abandoning Green Energy Goals". The story is based on a report by  Bloomberg Economics, which itself is based on data collated by Bloomberg New Economy Forum. The report argues that green energy goals are burdening the US economy, inflating costs, and weakening traditional industries. It suggests that abandoning these goals might actually benefit the US economically. But even without digging into technical reports, one can tell this is an ideologically loaded narrative. It’s not an economic analysis—it’s a polemic dressed up as a forecast. What the Report Gets Wrong Let’s start with the framing. The report:- - Treats green energy as a cost center, not a platform for innovation. - Frames sustainability as ideological, not infrastructural. - Treats traditional and green energy sources as conflictual, rather than complementary.  - Assumes US oil & gas exports wi...

India’s inter-city and regional bus transportation sector remains one of the last large mobility domains still dominated by fragmentation, opacity, and low trust. Tens of thousands of small private operators, often informal, operate with inconsistent safety standards, weak compliance, and low transparency. Meanwhile, large public-sector state transport corporations (STCs) shoulder the burden of unviable routes and welfare obligations. What if there is a third path? A path where a new generation of tech-platform companies organise the private bus sector — not by replacing the public sector, but by professionalising and scaling the private segment? This could mark the next chapter of coordinated capitalism in India’s mobility ecosystem.  We’ve already seen how mobility-tech platforms transformed personal mobility. Ride-hailing apps like Ola and Uber turned a chaotic taxi market into an organised, app-mediated, trust-driven service. Drivers became independent partners, booking became ...

Global artificial intelligence companies are accelerating their presence in India—not merely as a market, but as a strategic frontier. Firms such as OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), xAI (Grok), and Perplexity are deploying consumer-facing services at unprecedented scale, often bundled with telecom partnerships and offered free for extended periods. These moves signal a deliberate shift: from product launch to infrastructural embedding. India’s appeal lies not only in its demographic scale but in its systemic diversity. With over a billion internet users, a mobile-first digital culture, and a rapidly evolving institutional landscape, India offers multiple entry points for AI integration—across education, healthcare, industry, governance, and social media. The Strategic Wedge: Free Access as Infrastructure Seeding The 12–18 month free access model adopted by many AI firms is not a loss-leader—it is a wedge strategy. By partnering with telecom giants such as Reliance...

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...