Mishik Sharma

India’s technology discourse has recently shifted towards projecting India as an "AI-led services hub”.  Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has framed the Union Budget's data-centre hosting initiative as a step toward positioning India as a global centre for AI-enabled services. Leading companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have similarly articulated ambitions to become AI-first transformation partners for enterprises worldwide. This alignment between government and industry is strategically sound. India already dominates global IT services. AI could deepen that advantage. But we must delve deeper and ask a structural question: Should India’s AI ambition be primarily export-facing — or domestically rooted? The “River” Advantage — and Its Limits India occupies a powerful middle position in the AI stack. If we imagine the AI ecosystem as a landscape: - The “mountain” consists of frontier LLM/LMM developers building foundation models. - The “river” consists of systems in...

Much of commentary on the Union Budget 2026–27 has focused on fiscal arithmetic, capital expenditure, and strategic manufacturing. They are important. But a closer reading reveals something deeper: a deliberate, sector-spanning architecture for job creation, skilling, and entrepreneurship.  What stands out, to me, is not just the emphasis on employment—but where that emphasis is placed.  The Central government deserves appreciation for foregrounding sectors that rarely feature in mainstream economic conversations, yet carry enormous employment and entrepreneurship potential.  This is not a metro-centric, unicorn-driven employment strategy. It is far broader—and far more distributed. Reviving and Upgrading Traditional Value Chains 1. Coconut, Cocoa, Sandalwood and High-Value Agriculture The Budget places renewed emphasis on high-value agricultural value chains—particularly coconut, cocoa, sandalwood, cashew and related tree crops. These are not minor crops. They represent...

Every few weeks, a familiar argument resurfaces in Indian policy discourse: that regulation — not capital, labour, or technology — is the binding constraint on India's economic growth. This argument was again articulated today as an opinion article — complete with English and Roman allegorical references  — by an "assistant consultant" at the EAC-PM, in the Economic Times.  The claim is seductive. It simplifies complexity, identifies a villain, and promises acceleration through subtraction.  But when applied indiscriminately, this framing is analytically narrow and institutionally risky. India’s regulatory ecosystem is too vast, too heterogeneous, and too sector-specific to be reduced to a single friction variable. Treating “regulation” as a monolithic growth suppressant is not reformist clarity — it is reductionism. The way forward, I argue, is not deregulation absolutism. It is regulatory maturity. Regulation Is Not a Single Object “Regulation” in India spans profoundly...

In Indian policy discourse, universities are typically framed in narrow functional terms: centres of research, skill formation, placement pipelines, faculty employment, or sites of student politics. Budget debates revolve around grants, autonomy, accreditation, and rankings. What is almost entirely missing is a structural economic lens. Residential universities are not merely educational institutions. They are bounded, recurring, governable economic ecosystems. And once we recognise that, an entirely new development architecture becomes visible. The Blind Spot: Universities as Controlled Consumption Clusters A large residential university possesses: A stable, predictable population Annual demand cycles Centralised governance Defined geographic boundaries Captive consumption markets In economic geography terms, this is a dense micro-urban node. Yet higher education policy remains siloed within academic and regulatory frameworks, while economic ministries rarely model universities as gro...

Introduction India's innovation narrative is at risk of being hijacked by a single-minded, almost obsessive focus on ramping up R&D spending—chasing elusive GERD-to-GDP targets (still stubbornly stuck around 0.6–0.7% in recent years, with private contribution limping at 36–37%) as if percentages alone will catapult the country to global leadership. This fixation, while well-intentioned, dangerously diverts attention from an equally—if not more—critical imperative: massive, irreversible capacity expansion. In a vast economy like India's, with its demographic scale, infrastructure deficits, and manufacturing ambitions, R&D without corresponding physical capacity is largely performative—ideas without factories, simulations without fabs, breakthroughs without output.  Capacity expansion announcements by large conglomerates in 2025 tell a far more compelling story: Adani Group's record ₹1.5 lakh crore FY26 capex push across renewables, data centres, ports, and more; Reli...

1. Introduction: The Political Problem Beneath the Identity Debate Indian politics has long been analysed through the lens of identity mobilisation—caste, ethnicity, language, religion, etc. While these categories remain socially salient, recent electoral and policy signals show that identity-first politics is losing its monopoly as a source of political legitimacy. Development performance, employment generation, mobility, and entrepreneurship are increasingly central to voter evaluation, even in historically identity-dense states. The critical policy question is no longer whether identity will persist—it will—but whether identity can be reorganised around productive civic capability rather than grievance or exclusion. In this article I argue that emerging state-based civic identities, anchored in economic performance rather than on caste or ethnicity, can be institutionalised through policy, rather than through rhetorical contestation. I also advance a concrete framework to do so. 2. ...

In the crisp Alpine air of Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum's annual summit 2026 (January 19-23) unfolded not merely as a global economic conclave but as a vivid tableau of India's evolving political landscape. India's largest-ever Davos delegation—featuring four Union ministers, the National Security Advisor, chief/senior ministers from at least ten states, and over 100 CEOs—descended upon the Swiss town, transforming the India Pavilion into a bustling arena of bipartisan pitches and billion-dollar MoUs.  This spectacle, far from being incidental, confirms and amplifies a thesis I explored just before the summit: development is no longer a peripheral agenda in Indian politics but a structural competitor to identity-based mobilization. As mass mobility reshapes voter horizons and comparative governance becomes the norm, states are compelled to court private capital with unprecedented zeal. Even those governed by traditionally socialist parties—Kerala, Karnataka,...