Mishik Sharma

For four decades, the story of Indian IT was primarily a story of human labour. We were the world’s "back office"—a relentless army of IT specialists performing outsourced work on other people’s machines, in other people’s clouds. But as we enter 2026, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has quietly pulled the trigger on a strategy that ends the era of labour arbitrage, and begins the era of Infrastructure Arbitrage . TCS is no longer content just doing the work. They are backward-integrating to own the silicon , the power , and the space where that work happens. The "HyperVault" Strategy: Building the 1 GW Grid The pivot began with the incorporation of HyperVault AI Data Center Limited. While traditional IT companies are scaling back on physical assets, TCS—partnering with private equity giant TPG in a ₹18,000 crore joint venture—is building a 1 GW AI-ready data center network. To put 1 GW in perspective: it is equivalent to India’s entire data center capacity just a ...

On December 30, 2025, Mr. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), addressed the conglomerate's workforce of 4,00,000+ employees. In his address, he unveiled the draft Reliance AI Manifesto.  Mr. Ambani described artificial intelligence (AI) as "the most consequential technological development in human history" and positioned  RIL  to lead India's AI revolution, mirroring its earlier leadership in the country's digital transformation. He emphasized that the world has only seen "the tip of the iceberg" of AI's possibilities, which can solve complex global problems if used wisely. Mr. Ambani called for a transformative adoption of AI to turn RIL into an AI-native deep-tech company with advanced manufacturing capabilities. The core ambition is to achieve a ten-fold (10x) improvement in productivity, velocity, efficiency, quality, and outcomes across the entire workforce by fundamentally re-thinking workflows. T...

India’s debates on decentralisation often stall at a familiar impasse. While state governments demand greater autonomy from the Centre, they remain reluctant to devolve real power—especially economic power—to panchayats and municipalities. As a result, sub-state governments remain largely policy implementers, not economic actors. Yet, there is no need to be either revolutionary or hopeless, I argue. Even within India’s existing pseudo-autonomous structure, sub-state governments can be strengthened, productivised, and made fiscally relevant—if we move beyond schemes and focus on institutions that generate revenue. One such instrument already exists in India’s governance vocabulary but is almost entirely absent below the state level: Public Sector Undertakings / Public Sector Enterprises (PSUs/PSEs). The Core Idea: Why Not Sub-State PSUs? If the Centre and states use PSUs to convert policy priorities into productive and strategic capacity, there is no principled reason why sub-state gove...

As the new year begins, it is worth asking not only what new challenges lie ahead, but why we continue to live with old, ubiquitous problems that we have long normalised. Stray animals are one such problem. Dogs, monkeys, cattle, pigs, goats, mules, cats, pigeons—depending on geography, some or all of them occupy our streets, markets, temples, and residential lanes. They chase pedestrians, frighten children, block roads, raid shops, overturn garbage, and leave behind litter that degrades public space. People adapt quietly: carrying stones at night, avoiding certain lanes, walking faster, or simply looking away. What is striking is not merely the presence of stray animals, but the collective resignation around them. The real issue is not animals. It is unbundled ownership. Stray animals in India do not exist independently of humans. Dogs, in particular, are not wild hunters; their survival depends almost entirely on human feeding. In many neighbourhoods, households regularly feed one or...

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...