The Latest
Business
Why LIC's HDFC Bank Stake Stops At 9.99 Percent
RBI approved LIC to raise its HDFC Bank holding to 9.99%, a single basis point under the line where its own rules get stricter. LIC hit the identical number at Kotak Mahindra Bank in 2021.
August 20, 2026
Business
RBI Opens Outward Remittances to Fintechs, Leaves the Ceiling Untouched
RBI's May 2026 circular lets fintech apps team up with banks to handle outward remittances without its individual sign-off. The dollar limit on how much any one person can send has not moved since 2015.
August 20, 2026
Geopolitics
India's Arms Imports Fell While Pakistan's Jumped 66 Percent
India's arms imports shrank in SIPRI's latest five-year window even as Pakistan's jumped 66 percent. That surge ran through just two suppliers, China and Turkiye, for whom Pakistan has quietly become an outsized customer in its own right.
August 20, 2026
Business
India's No-Penalty Currency Withdrawal Left a Bigger Unreturned Share Than Demonetisation
The RBI says 98.47% of withdrawn Rs 2,000 notes have returned, with no deadline and no penalty for holding on. Demonetisation, criminalized and given weeks instead of years, still recovered a bigger share of its cash.
August 19, 2026
Geopolitics
PM-CARES Earned 534 Times More in Interest Than It Spent
PM-CARES was designed to move money fast in an emergency by sitting outside RTI and CAG oversight. The same design now removes any pressure to spend: it disbursed Rs 88 lakh of its Rs 8,452 crore corpus in FY2024-25 and earned 534 times as much in interest.
August 19, 2026
Geopolitics
India Is Still the World's Second-Largest Arms Buyer After Six Import Ban Lists
Six rounds of import bans since 2020 have not dented India's global arms-import ranking. What actually moved was who India buys from, not how much it still buys.
August 19, 2026
Business & Markets
Business
India's Sugar Price Fix Targets Stock Limits, Not the Ethanol Mandate
India kept raising its ethanol-blending mandate straight through a cane shortfall that sent sugar to a record price. The fixes on the table, a stock cap and a possible duty cut, leave the mandate itself untouched.
August 20, 2026
Business
Why LIC's HDFC Bank Stake Stops At 9.99 Percent
RBI approved LIC to raise its HDFC Bank holding to 9.99%, a single basis point under the line where its own rules get stricter. LIC hit the identical number at Kotak Mahindra Bank in 2021.
August 20, 2026
Business
RBI Opens Outward Remittances to Fintechs, Leaves the Ceiling Untouched
RBI's May 2026 circular lets fintech apps team up with banks to handle outward remittances without its individual sign-off. The dollar limit on how much any one person can send has not moved since 2015.
August 20, 2026
Technology & Science
Technology
India Regulates What Meta Posts, Not How Meta Is Built
A 29-state trial against Meta rests on product-liability law, not speech law, the same route once used against tobacco companies. India's IT Rules and DPDP Act can order a takedown or fine a data violation, but neither can reach the algorithm itself.
August 19, 2026
Technology
A Law Built for Case-by-Case Review Now Blocks Accounts by the Thousand
Section 69A requires a committee to individually judge each blocking order 'justifiable,' with reasons recorded in writing. In practice, one 2025 order blocked 2,355 accounts inside an hour, and the government has not published an annual count since 2022.
August 18, 2026
Technology
Nvidia Is Now Financing the Data Centers That Buy Its Chips
Nvidia has lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion for the data centers that buy its chips. Wall Street has seen this circularity before, in Cisco and Lucent's dot-com bust.
August 12, 2026
Health, Culture & Geopolitics
Health
Congo's Worst Ebola Outbreak Ever Has No Vaccine Behind It
The Democratic Republic of Congo's Ebola outbreak just became the deadliest ever recorded there. The virus behind it has never had a licensed vaccine, and the fastest candidate in testing is still months from proving it works.
August 17, 2026
Health
Why Kerala's Dengue Patients Are Twelve Times More Likely to Die Than Tamil Nadu's
Tamil Nadu carries India's biggest dengue caseload and one of its lowest death tolls; Kerala runs the opposite trade, with far fewer cases but far more deaths. The gap is Kerala's population, not its outbreak.
August 1, 2026
Health
India Meets Just 0.2 Percent of Its Own Heart Transplant Need
A new Lancet analysis finds India covers just 0.2 percent of its own heart transplant need and 7.2 percent of kidney need. The shortfall traces to where transplant capacity sits, not to how many people need one.
July 30, 2026