Mishik Sharma

The Urban Heat Problem India's cities are getting hotter. This is not merely a seasonal observation. It is a structural trend with deep roots in how Indian urbanisation has proceeded over the past several decades — through dense concrete expansion, disappearing tree cover, shrinking waterbodies, and heat-trapping built-layouts that leave little room for ecological breathing. The consequences are increasingly visible. Urban heat islands — zones where ambient temperatures are significantly higher than surrounding rural or peri-urban areas — are intensifying across Indian cities. Heat stress is no longer confined to summer peaks. It is extending across more months, affecting more populations, and placing growing pressure on energy systems, public health infrastructure, and urban liveability. Some state governments are beginning to respond. On 12 May, Delhi's Chief Minister Rekha Gupta announced a significant funding boost for parks and gardens across the mega-city, channelled thro...

India’s AI conversation is expanding rapidly. Engineering colleges are now full of hackathons. Government ministries are organising sector-specific innovation competitions. Coding assisting platforms from companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are becoming increasingly popular among Indian students and developers. AI-powered coding itself is gradually becoming mainstream. This is a positive development.  But a limitation is emerging. Most of the energy remains concentrated around dashboards, chatbots, workflow interfaces, and enterprise software abstractions. The physical economy — mines, refineries, factories, warehouses, substations, logistics depots, construction machines, power plants, MSMEs — remains comparatively under-instrumented and under-optimised. India's biggest productivity bottlenecks are not sitting inside dashboards. They sit inside machine downtime, transmission losses, maintenance failures, energy wastage, logistics inefficiencies, and poor real-time vis...

Introduction As anticipation builds around Jio’s potential IPO — expected in the first half of 2026 — market observers are debating its valuation, with estimates ranging from 130 billion dollars to 180 billion dollars. The market conversation (as reported by Financial Express yesterday) has largely centered on whether the offering will be dominated by an Offer for Sale (OFS), allowing early investors to exit, or shift toward a fresh issue of shares that would inject capital directly into the company for future growth. For now, Dalal Street views Jio primarily as a formidable telecom and bundled services player — delivering mobility, broadband, and enterprise solutions — powerfully backed by massive investments in data centers and AI infrastructure. This framing, while important, misses a more profound opportunity. Mr. Mukesh Ambani has repeatedly signaled a bolder vision: taking artificial intelligence beyond servers and data centers into the physical world — embedding intelligence int...

India is heating up. Every summer now seems harsher than the last. Heatwaves are becoming longer, cities are becoming hotter, electricity demand is surging, and millions of Indian homes and enterprises are increasingly dependent on cooling devices merely to function normally. But the conversation around cooling in India still remains surprisingly narrow. Cooling is usually discussed either as: a household comfort issue, an electricity consumption problem, or an environmental concern. That framing is no longer sufficient. In a hot, populous, rapidly urbanising, rapidly electrifying, and rapidly industrialising country like India, cooling is becoming something much larger: an economic necessity, an infrastructure imperative, a labour productivity requirement, a digital economy requirement, an industrial opportunity, and potentially one of the largest distributed employment ecosystems of the coming decades. India therefore needs to stop treating cooling machines merely as consumer applian...

Raghavan Rao's article in Swarajya on Indian conglomerates' battery retreat, published yesterday, is sharp and well-documented. The reactions to the article post and thread on X are predominantly concerned and critical, aligning with the post's warning about India's battery/EV sector becoming "born dependent" on China (especially for cells, chemistry, and upstream materials). Many users view it as a cautionary tale of policy execution gaps, corporate risk-aversion, and geopolitical vulnerability — shifting from petroleum import dependence to battery-material import dependence.  The article's core observation is accurate: companies that announced battery sovereignty ambitions between 2021 and 2023 have, by 2026, largely settled into assembling Chinese cells into Indian enclosures. The contrast with Korean and Japanese firms — who paired technology licensing with sustained, long-horizon R&D investment and gradually converted external knowledge into indig...