Library
Business
217 articles in Business
Business
India Is Cutting Its Diesel Export Tax Just as America Hunts for Europe's Diesel
India's diesel export levy fell to ₹16 a litre on 1 October, the day Washington reportedly told Europe to release diesel stocks or face a US export ban. The levy is not a tax. It is a dial, and it is being turned toward the exporter.
October 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Maruti Beat the Forecast by Eight Points and Its Shares Still Fell Nearly 5 Percent
Maruti's September sales grew 24.4 percent against a projected 15 to 17, and its shares closed down 4.86 percent. September 2025 was a pre-GST-cut trough, so the growth was a base effect, and Bajaj's domestic sales show what is left once the base is stripped out.
October 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's New Fuel Rules Count One Electric Car as Three and Give Small Cars Nothing
India's CAFE-III rules, notified on 29 September 2026, tighten the fuel target by about 16.7 per cent and drop the small-car concession. The bigger lever is the 3x credit for electric cars.
September 30, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India Is Spending ₹1.86 Lakh Crore on a Grid That Its Solar Farms Outran
The Cabinet has approved ₹1.86 lakh crore to evacuate up to 135 GW of renewable power. The scheme funds state grids, while the curtailment measured so far sits on the inter-state network.
September 30, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Deficit Is on Pace After Five Months, but Taxes Are Not Carrying It
The Centre has used 41.9 percent of its full-year deficit in five months, almost exactly what five-twelfths of a year implies. The mix underneath is lopsided: taxes are behind pace and non-tax revenue is far ahead.
September 30, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Capex Forecast Came True While Private Investment Shrank as a Share of GDP
The RBI's forecast for private capex proved almost exactly right. Private investment still slipped as a share of GDP. The gap sits between financed projects and announced ones.
September 29, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Government Worries More About AI Jobs Than Its Public Does
Indians are far less worried about AI destroying jobs than people in richer nations, a new Pew survey finds. New Delhi's own budget behaves like it doesn't fully share that calm.
September 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Tata Sons Has Double the Assets RBI's Listing Rule Allows
The RBI rejected Tata Sons' request to skip a public listing. Seventeen days later, Tata Trusts proposed folding two units into Tata Sons instead, a structural move aimed at the definition that put it there.
September 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Maharashtra Declared Drought in 265 Talukas It Has Not Yet Measured
The government's resolution covers 265 of Maharashtra's 358 talukas on a rainfall-deficiency formula. The only quantified crop-damage estimate on record so far belongs to one region, Marathwada.
September 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Ethanol Corn Incentive Worked So Well It Broke Its Own Price Floor
A record corn harvest, grown to chase India's ethanol mandate, crashed prices below the government's own support level. A weak monsoon and a bigger ethanol claim on the crop are already pushing them back up.
September 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The 96 Indian Jets Nobody Has Linked to Boeing's Software Flaw
India's Boeing 737 MAX fleet has swelled to about 96 aircraft, roughly 4 percent of Boeing's worldwide total. No public report, including the one that broke the story, has named a single Indian jet running the flawed software.
September 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
The Fine for Fake Paneer Costs Less Than Amul Earns in a Minute
FSSAI's new draft rule reserves the word paneer for milk-derived products. The fine for breaking it hasn't moved since 2006, and it is smaller than a minute of Amul's revenue.
September 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The IIT Placement Ban Assumes Companies Still Want to Hire
IITs just barred 22 companies from campus hiring for two years. The ban only works if those companies still want to come back, and corporate hiring itself is slowing.
September 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
PB Fintech's Stock Crash Shows Its Premium Was Never About Technology
A regulatory paper on insurance commissions wiped a fifth off PB Fintech's stock in a single session, exposing how much of its business was commission, not technology.
September 24, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
SEBI's Insider Trading Rules Face a Second Bank Leak This Year
A misdirected email put more than 100 of Morgan Stanley's confidential Asia deals in front of its own clients. Eight months earlier, a single leaked deal was enough to earn Bank of America a SEBI notice.
September 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Indian Banks Are Cleaning Up Their Data to Avoid RBI Scrutiny
RBI's bank data-quality score just posted its sharpest jump in nine quarters. The gain came from the sub-score that measures compliance with the rulebook, not the one that tests whether a bank's own numbers actually hold together.
September 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
How a 1949 Law Keeps Mumbai's Movie Tickets Outside GST
BMC wants to raise the tax on a Mumbai multiplex ticket from Rs 60 to Rs 400 a show. The power behind that charge predates the GST by nearly seven decades, and GST was written to leave it standing.
September 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Rating Agencies Want India's Central Bank to Raise the Rate It Just Held
Four global forecasters raised India's FY27 growth outlook within the same week. Two of them paired the upgrade with a call for the RBI to raise a rate it has now held four meetings running.
September 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI Is Asking ICICI's Own CEO to Vet HDFC Bank's Next Chief
HDFC Bank's board picked its next CEO on September 12. Before the choice is final, RBI wants the boss of its closest rival, ICICI Bank, to weigh in on the pick.
September 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
SpiceJet's Staff Went Unpaid for 3.5 Months Before DGCA Made It Formal
The DGCA has run this exact oversight on SpiceJet before and quietly stood down. This time the airline has gone 3.5 months without paying staff, and the market share it is losing is going almost entirely to one rival.
September 22, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
The Doklam Standoff Reached Mumbai Through a Bank, Not a Border
China's largest bank rationed $185 million in Mumbai lending during the 2017 Doklam standoff, acting without any order from either government.
September 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Is Rebasing the GDP Numbers It Just Celebrated
MoSPI's new base year has already turned a 9.2% growth year into a 7.2% one, without a single fact about the economy changing. A back series due by December could do the same to years still being cited as proof of strength.
September 21, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
Why India's Cheap Russian Oil Isn't Cheap Anymore
India's government says it never needed anyone's permission to keep buying Russian oil, and it kept buying. But the price edge that made that choice cheap fell from more than $10 a barrel to $1 to $2 by late August 2026.
September 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's China Deficit Reached $112 Billion Even as Exports Jumped 39 Percent
India's exports to China are growing faster than at any point in years. The deficit that measures how much India still depends on China just hit a record anyway.
September 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Reliance Profits From the Same Squeeze That Triggered India's Fuel Export Tax
India revived the same windfall export tax that ended its 2022 diesel crunch, only this time it never really left. Reliance's giant Jamnagar refineries sit at the center of the shortage they also profit from.
September 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Female Work Rate Hides a 62-Point Gap Between Districts
MoSPI's first-ever district-level labour bulletin lets India's female work-rate story be checked locally for the first time. Even each state's single best district ranges from over 80% to under 19%.
September 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI Removed the Minister but Not the System That Elected Him
The RBI removed Maharashtra's Cooperation Minister from a district cooperative bank board for overstaying his term. Seven colleagues quietly resigned over the same complaint; he alone needed a direct order.
September 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Worn Fingerprints Could Cost India's Poorest Their Cooking Gas Subsidy
India's LPG subsidy now runs on a fingerprint scan. The same biometric checkpoint has a documented history of locking out the elderly and manual labourers it is meant to protect, not the duplicate connections it was built to catch.
September 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Software Exports Hit a Record While Product Sales Slipped
RBI's FY2025-26 survey shows software exports at a record $239.3 billion. The one sub-category that shrank was Software Product Development, and the US client share is doing the rest of the work.
September 19, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
IndiGo Raised Every Fee Except the Airfare
IndiGo raised fees on infant travel, baggage, unaccompanied minors and priority boarding, some by half. Its shares rose. The one number it left untouched was the airfare.
September 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The Rupee's Slide Is Rewarding Capital, Not Labor, in India's Exports
A weaker rupee is supposed to subsidize India's garment and leather exporters. Instead the composition data show electronics, pharma and engineering pulling away, while textiles barely move.
September 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Just Measured 60 Percent of the Sector That Runs Its Economy
MoSPI's first Index of Services Production tracks three-fifths of a sector that generates more than half of India's GDP. The decades-old factory index was built to cover a much larger share of what it measures.
September 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Tata Trusts Own Two Thirds of Tata Sons and Still Lost the Vote
Two Tata Sons board votes went against the Tata Trusts on the same afternoon, a chairman's reappointment and a stock listing, despite the Trusts owning roughly two thirds of the company.
September 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Biggest AI Users at Work Are Not in Customer Service
SHRM's workforce forecast puts back office jobs at the top of AI's disruption list. Google's own usage data says India's heaviest AI users at work are designers, writers and other creative professionals instead.
September 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Formal Safety Net Just Got Wider and More Avoidable
The Cabinet widened the wage band that forces provident fund coverage by two thirds, pulling 51 lakh more workers into the net by law. For a small employer, it just made the cheaper option, hiring the same worker off the books, look better.
September 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's R&D Boom Owes More to New Accounting Than New Labs
India's official R&D-to-GDP ratio jumped from 0.64% to 0.84% within a few years. NITI Aayog's own growth target, published two months before the new figure reached Parliament, was still built on the old number.
September 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Record Export Month Only Narrowed the Trade Gap by 360 Million
August exports hit a record 43.81 billion dollars, up 26 percent from a year earlier. Imports rose almost as fast, so India's trade deficit narrowed by just 360 million dollars.
September 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Wholesale Prices Are Rising Twice as Fast as What Shoppers Pay
Wholesale prices climbed 9.92 percent in August, almost exactly double the 4.82 percent shoppers actually paid at the till. The gap has held near two to one for two straight months, producers absorbing it, not consumers.
September 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI's Account Freeze Fix Also Hands Money Mules a Deadline
RBI's draft rules end indefinite account freezes by capping a bank's hold at 60 days and limiting it to the disputed amount. The same fixed clock tells a money-mule network exactly when its account comes back online, and RBI issued the fix ten days after its own court deadline lapsed.
September 14, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
RBI Rejected Tata Sons' Bid to Escape Being Listed
Tata Sons spent two and a half years trying to surrender its NBFC licence and escape a mandatory stock listing altogether. RBI just closed that door for good.
September 13, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
Delhi's Post-Collapse Drive Reached 67 Buildings, Not Two Lakh Rooms
MCD demolished 67 buildings and sealed nine more within 48 hours of the Satya Niketan collapse. Delhi's unlicensed PG market runs an estimated two lakh rooms deep, and the enforcement math was never built to reach it.
September 13, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
PwC Cut Its Global Headcount and Gave India More Control
PwC's global headcount fell even as its consulting revenue grew. Its answer, a new joint venture with PwC India, puts the CEO's chair in India, not at the US head office.
September 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Is Formalising Its Young Workforce, Not Its Women
EPFO's newest payroll data show India's formal job market turning younger. It is not turning more female: women account for only about 28 percent of the new accounts.
September 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Has Never Cut a Dairy Tariff in Any Trade Deal
The EU-India trade deal moving toward signature cuts India's car tariff from 110 percent to 10 and its wine tariff from 150 to 20. Dairy gets nothing, exactly as it got nothing from Australia and the UK before it.
September 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
Wipro Added Nearly 10,000 Workers in the Year AI Freed 20,000
Wipro's chief technology officer says AI has freed capacity worth 20,000 workers, all of them redeployed rather than cut. The company's own quarterly filings show headcount grew by nearly 10,000 over the same year, and its operating margin fell.
September 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Needs Two Bad Nutrients to Trigger a Warning Label, Not One
FSSAI's draft warning label needs a product to breach two nutrient thresholds at once before it carries a warning. Chile, Mexico and the WHO's own model need just one.
September 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
A Third of India's Informal Economy Sits in Just 50 Districts
The NSO's first district-level count of India's informal economy shows a third of it sitting in just 50 districts, and the most productive ones are not the busiest ones.
September 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Refiners Will Book This Quarter's Profit on Last Quarter's Cheap Crude
IOC, BPCL and HPCL are projected to swing to a large profit even as Brent crude tops $100 a barrel and pump prices stay frozen. The numbers were built before the spike, not after it.
September 10, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Rail Freight Costs About Half as Much as Road Freight, Yet Moves Barely a Quarter of the Cargo
The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor is now finished end to end, built to pull freight off India's roads. Rail still moves barely a quarter of the country's cargo, and truckers are headed for a record year anyway.
September 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Is Hosting a BRICS Payment Push Its Own Data Law Would Slow
India chairs the BRICS summit that puts a shared payment system on the table this week. The data rules it already enforces on its own payment systems are exactly the kind of friction that system would have to work around.
September 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
BSNL Is Winning Rural India While Losing Its Cities
In July 2026, BSNL outgained Jio and Airtel combined in India's Haryana telecom circle. TRAI's own numbers show that win barely moved BSNL's national market share.
September 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
CBI's Second Reliance Chargesheet Names Six Bank Officials, Not Just Executives
CBI's July chargesheet in the Reliance Commercial Finance case named only company executives. Its September filing adds six officials from the lending banks themselves, over an alleged Rs 6,229 crore diversion inside a Rs 9,280 crore case.
September 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Indian Companies Are Borrowing Back the Dollars RBI Just Sold to Defend the Rupee
Selling dollars to defend the rupee drained rupee liquidity at home. Indian companies responded by going out and borrowing dollars themselves, up 27 percent in a single month.
September 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The Carbon Tax India Just Escaped Is the Smaller One
The UK just recognized India's domestic carbon credits, sparing about $775 million of exports from its incoming carbon tax. That relief is a rounding error next to what the EU's carbon border tax, already in force, can reach.
September 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Households Are Saving More and Borrowing Even Faster
Household debt has risen every reading since 2021, driven mostly by loans for spending, not homes, even as a one-year dip in new borrowing gets read as an improving balance sheet.
September 8, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
The Alleged PVR Inox Kickback Equals 60% of a Year's Profit
PVR Inox shares fell 8.24% on a kickback probe, not the buyback it ran days earlier. The alleged sum is worth 60% of a year's profit, and the buyback was sized to need no shareholder vote at all.
September 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
JLR's Job Cuts Threaten More of Tata Motors Than India Ever Could
Jaguar Land Rover is cutting 4,000 jobs after US tariffs and a profit collapse. JLR now generates more of Tata Motors' car revenue than India's own market does, so the damage is really an Indian balance-sheet story.
September 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Every RBI Approval for LIC's Bank Stakes Tops Out at 9.99 Percent
RBI has cleared LIC to hold up to 9.99% of ICICI Bank, the same ceiling it has now set for four different banks since 2021. The bank keeps changing. The number never does.
September 6, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
Three Independent Hydraulic Systems on an Air India Jet Failed in Four Seconds
An Air India jet's three hydraulic systems, engineered so a fault in one cannot reach another, all failed within four seconds. The preliminary report does not yet explain how, even as the airline moved fast on a second, unrelated finding.
September 6, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
How India's Bid to Cool Sugar Prices Raised Them Abroad
India opened duty free sugar imports to calm retail prices at home. The FAO's own numbers show that announcement was one of the reasons the world price, the one India will actually pay, jumped instead.
September 5, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Coal Buffer Failed the One Test It Exists For
India's coal buffer exists to absorb exactly this kind of forecastable monsoon and demand risk. The country's weather office flagged it a month ahead, and the buffer fell behind anyway.
September 5, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI's Rupee Rescue Carries a $5.7 Billion Annual Bill
RBI's dollar-deposit facility drew a record $136 billion and closed a month early, its own success outrunning its target. Analysts estimate the bill RBI itself is carrying for that rescue at $5.7 billion a year.
September 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The Same GDP Data Produced a 7.8% Growth Rate and a 2.6% One
A critique of India's headline 7.8% GDP print puts real growth at just 2.6%, using the same Rs 88.27 lakh crore both sides agree on. The fight is over which year you compare it to, and that same base year sets the government's own deficit and debt ratios.
September 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Tata Sons Put Conditions on Its Air India Bailout for the First Time
Air India is close to receiving over Rs 10,000 crore from its owners. For the first time since the airline's turnaround began, the money comes with conditions attached.
September 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Grows Enough Onions to Never Need an Export Ban
India is the world's second-largest onion grower, yet Delhi keeps reaching for the same export ban whenever prices spike. The real leak is the 30 to 40 percent of the crop that rots in storage before it reaches a market at all.
September 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Current Account Deficit Rose Just $800 Million Even as Trade Gaps Widened
India's merchandise trade deficit widened by $17.2 billion in a year. Its current account deficit widened by $0.8 billion. Services exports and remittances explain the gap between the two.
September 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Investment, Not Government Spending, Drove India's Growth Beat
Real GDP grew 7.8% in the June 2026 quarter, beating the RBI's own 7.0% forecast. The composition shows why: investment grew nearly three times faster than the government's own consumption spending, the slowest of the economy's three main engines.
September 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Byju's and Unacademy Show What India's Edtech Unicorns Are Actually Worth
A negotiated acquisition and a compulsory fund filing, at two different companies, both just tested what a 2021 Indian edtech valuation is actually worth today.
September 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Subhash Chandra's Creditors Are Set to Recover Just 0.03 Percent of What They Are Owed
An NCLT order lets Subhash Chandra settle Rs 22,006 crore in debt for Rs 6.5 crore. India's personal-guarantee insolvency cases were already recovering almost nothing before his.
August 31, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Assembles Nearly Every Phone It Sells but Barely a Quarter of the Value
India assembles 99 percent of the phones it sells, up from a quarter in 2014. The value inside each handset is still mostly imported.
August 31, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Arunachal Pradesh's Revenue Surplus Dwarfs Punjab's Deficit
Punjab's 2024-25 budget commits 76 percent of its revenue to salaries, interest and pensions before a rupee reaches anything else. In the same fiscal year, Arunachal Pradesh closed a revenue surplus worth 15 percent of its economy.
August 31, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Punjab Carries India's Heaviest State Interest Burden
RBI data show Punjab hands over 23 percent of its own revenue just to service debt, the highest ratio of any Indian state or Union Territory, while smaller, less developed states post surpluses. State wealth and state fiscal health are not the same thing.
August 31, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's 7.8% Growth Quarter Isn't Fast Enough for Its Own 2047 Goal
A 7.8% quarter beat the central bank's forecast, but reaching India's own 2047 income target needs a compounding pace near the top of the government's own range, not the middle of it.
August 31, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
The RBI Tenure Cap Does Not Explain HDFC Bank CEO's Exit
Sashidhar Jagdishan is retiring five months after HDFC Bank's chairman quit citing personal ethics, and nine years before the RBI's tenure cap would force him out. The bank's lending margin, not the regulator's clock, looks like the more likely story.
August 30, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why Two Hing Brands Failed a Purity Test Already Set Below Pure Asafoetida
FSSAI just banned two hing brands for missing a purity floor that was already set well below pure asafoetida. The bigger story is why the floor sits that low to begin with.
August 30, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Jio's Profit Margin Is Rising as Its Market Share Falls
Airtel added more new mobile subscribers than Jio in July, narrowing Jio's market-share lead to 1.3 percentage points. Jio's own numbers hint at why it may not be fighting to keep it.
August 30, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
A Glacier Collapse Has Nepal Turning to India for Electricity
A 2026 glacier-collapse flood knocked out about 360 MW of Nepal's hydropower, forcing a country that just posted a record power-export surplus to lean on India's spare grid margin instead.
August 30, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
A 3 Percent Gold Drop Just Breached India's Loan to Value Ceiling
Gold fell 3 percent the day the Fed's new chair turned hawkish. Because RBI caps gold loans at a fixed share of collateral value at all times, that one move pushed a slice of India's biggest gold lenders past their ceiling.
August 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Own Quality Rules Are Turning Away the Factories It Wants
Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal just led India's biggest-ever trade delegation to Japan chasing factory investment. The compliance regime his own government built is what a trade think tank says prices ordinary manufacturers out first.
August 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI Toughens Digital Banking Rules as the Real Money Moves to Loans
RBI just made banks prove customers weren't careless before denying a digital-fraud claim. The money problem it doesn't touch, loan fraud, is now 85 percent of everything banks report losing.
August 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Mumbai Milk Crosses Rs 100 Because Maharashtra Sets the Farmer Price Floor
A Rs 9 wholesale jump crossing Rs 100 a litre looks like dairies chasing margins. It traces to a 2024 state order that legally fixes what every dairy, cooperative or private, must pay farmers.
August 29, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Government Spending Grew Slowest of India's Three Growth Engines
MoSPI's own FY2025-26 data show government consumption grew slower than private consumption and investment, not faster. The real shift is inside the government's own budget, from consumption to capital spending.
August 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
HDFC Bank Fined Its Executives Rs 1 Lakh Each For A Rs 45 Crore Scheme
HDFC Bank's board fined its own CEO, CFO and retail chief Rs 1 lakh each over a Rs 45 crore scheme it called business overreach. Days after the US let Gautam Adani's bribery case go, an investor sued HDFC Bank in New York.
August 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
More Indians Are Crossing a Disclosure Line That Never Moved
FAST-DS caps its full tax amnesty at a fixed Rs 1 crore of undisclosed foreign assets. The rupee has kept sliding since, so the same rupee line now closes in on fewer dollars than it did two years ago.
August 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's $200 Billion Data Centre Pledge Is Nearly 32 Times What the Build-Out Needs
Piyush Goyal cited $200 billion in hyperscaler pledges to justify exempting high-tech manufacturers from certification checks. India's own coal, semiconductor and incentive schemes show pledges this size rarely convert into delivered investment.
August 26, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
Why India's ATMs Keep Disappearing as Currency Hits a Record High
RBI data show India's ATM count has fallen for three straight years, almost entirely because off-site machines are closing, even as currency in circulation hits a record high. The squeeze is landing hardest on Tier-2 and Tier-3 India.
August 26, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Credit Flow More Than Doubled, and Almost All of It Came From Banks
RBI data show financing to India's commercial sector more than doubling in April-July 2026-27. Corporate bonds, QIP placements and IPO proceeds shrank in the same year bank credit surged nine-fold.
August 26, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Only 8 in 100 Graduates Get a Matching Job
NITI Aayog says India has skilled 7.67 crore workers since 2014-15. Its own numbers show barely 8 in 100 land a job that actually matches their degree.
August 26, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India Undid the Gold Duty Cut That Killed Smuggling
In May 2026, New Delhi raised its gold and silver duty back to 15%, undoing the July 2024 cut that had driven unofficial imports to near zero. By July, the government was already weighing whether to cut it again.
August 26, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
TCS Gains 4,500 Jobs in Germany as Headcount Falls 23,460 at Home
TCS is buying Porsche's AI-savvy consulting arm for 320 million euros and 4,500 employees, a workforce smaller than the headcount it shed at home in a single year.
August 25, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India Inc's Sales Hit a Three-Year High While Two of Three Sectors Lost Margin
India's listed companies grew sales at the fastest pace in three years in 2025-26. Manufacturing and non-IT services margins fell anyway, and only IT's improved.
August 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Closed the Bank Account Gap for Women but Not the Banking Skills Gap
A new ILO-NCAER brief shows Indian women's bank accounts have nearly caught up with men's. The skills to use those accounts online, and the capital to buy into a gig platform, have not.
August 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Manufacturing Base Is Shifting States, Not Vanishing
Manufacturing's share of Maharashtra's economy has shrunk by nearly a third since 2011-12, while in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu it is the fastest-growing sector in the state. The central government's own incentive scheme cannot say which state its money actually built.
August 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why Akasa Reports More Defects Than an Airline Eleven Times Its Size
Akasa Air's defect count looks damning next to IndiGo's, until you account for IndiGo flying eleven times as many aircraft. DGCA's own fleet-adjusted audit narrows the gap, but does not close it.
August 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's Consumer Price Index Cannot See the Air Fare Spike
A new wholesale price index shows India's air fares up 31.94% in Q1 FY27. The blended consumer price index, still near 4%, was never built to isolate that move.
August 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Dream11 Lost 95 Percent of Its Revenue and Kept 250 Million Users
India's real money gaming ban wiped out Dream11's revenue overnight. A year on, the app, the contests and the 250 million accounts are all still there, just running on ads instead of entry fees.
August 23, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India's Space Economy Bet Assumes Cheaper Rockets It Doesn't Have
India's rockets cost about four times as much per kilogram to orbit as America's, a Cambridge study finds. The government's $40-45 billion space economy target assumes that gap closes on its own.
August 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
FSSAI's Maximum Fine Would Not Cover One Day of Nestle's Ad Spending
FSSAI has sent more than 150 notices to Nestle, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola's India arms over misleading ads. The law caps the fine at Rs 10 lakh, a fraction of what Nestle alone spends on advertising in a single day.
August 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
8.7 Crore Young Indians Count As Neither Employed Nor Unemployed
NITI Aayog's own report counts 8.7 crore Indians aged 15 to 29 as idle: neither working, studying nor training. Most never show up in the unemployment rate at all.
August 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Housing Bookings Fell 21 Percent While Prices Kept Rising
Listed developers' bookings fell 21% and DLF, India's biggest by market value, barely sold anything. Home prices across India's top cities kept climbing anyway. Cheap credit is why sellers didn't have to blink.
August 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Ultra-Rich Still Won't Touch Illiquid Private Markets
Family offices say 40 to 45 percent of their money now sits in alternatives. Most of that is listed REITs and InvITs bought for their liquidity, not the illiquid private equity and venture capital the number implies.
August 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Coming El Nino Could Hit Two Harvests, Not Just One
Most El Ninos fade before India's wheat is even sown, so they only cost the country one harvest. The one that hit both in 2015-16 sent food inflation past 6 percent. This one is forecast to be stronger.
August 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Delhi Wants London's Congestion Charge Without London's Transit System
Delhi's draft Master Plan 2047 proposes London and New York style congestion pricing zones. Its own transport ministry has said the city's buses cannot absorb the drivers a toll would push off the road.
August 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
A Customs Hold in China Pushed a German Machine Maker Into India
India has proposed a $1.2 billion scheme to build tunnel boring machines at home. A German manufacturer already got there first, pushed in not by the promise of a subsidy but by a Chinese customs hold.
August 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI's Governor Denied a Dollar Window Closure Nine Days Before Ordering One
On August 5, the RBI governor said no closure was under consideration. Nine days later the RBI moved up the deadline, and banks that had already committed dollars are now racing to refinance them on tighter notice.
August 21, 2026 · 7 min read
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 · 7 min read
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 · 7 min read
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 · 6 min read
Business
Only 1 Percent of Reliance's Rs 2.73 Lakh Crore Coal Bet Is Committed
Reliance's proposed Rs 2.73 lakh crore coal-gas complex in Andhra Pradesh has committed just Rs 3,000 crore before 2028. The other 99 percent depends on a technology test that has not run in India before.
August 20, 2026 · 7 min read
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 · 7 min read
Business
How a Legal Technicality Built India's Five Billion Dollar Meat Export Trade
Most Indian states ban cow slaughter outright. Buffalo meat exports still made India the world's largest exporter of the product in FY2025-26, because the law has never treated a buffalo as a cow.
August 19, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI's Growth Forecast Assumed an Oil Price the Market Has Already Broken
RBI's FY27 growth and inflation math rests on an $85-a-barrel oil assumption set in April. Brent has already cleared $91, and the central bank's own numbers show it saw the rebound coming.
August 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Median Firm Got Bigger After Covid, Not Smaller
A new EAC-PM working paper tracked the median Indian firm, not the largest ones, through the pandemic years. Its capital, revenue and profitability all rose, the opposite of what the K-shaped recovery story predicts.
August 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
A Blocked Trustee Nomination Just Stalled Tata Sons' Annual Meeting
Tata Sons' AGM collapsed for want of one seat, reserved for two trusts that own 51.5 percent of the company. The market check that might have caught this never arrived either.
August 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Three in Four Indian Space Startups Have Never Raised Equity Capital
A Tracxn count finds three in four Indian spacetech startups have never closed an equity round. The government fund built to fix that has not made a single investment either.
August 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The UPI Fee India Said Was False Just Became Law
Parliament just handed the government the power to charge a UPI fee it dismissed as false fourteen months earlier. The survey data and the currency numbers suggest free UPI was never actually beating cash.
August 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Unemployment Rate Fell as More People Started Looking for Work
A falling jobless rate usually invites a discount: maybe people just stopped looking for work. Not this time. India's participation rate rose too, and the gain landed almost entirely in rural India.
August 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Blinkit Added More Stores in a Quarter Than Maharashtra's Hygiene Drive Inspected
Maharashtra's food safety drive flagged 87 percent of the dark stores it checked. That drive covered a sliver of the network Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart have built.
August 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Before This Scheme Existed, Taxpayers Had Already Disclosed Rs 29,208 Crore
A one-time window for small taxpayers with undisclosed foreign assets opens August 16, 2026, framed as a fresh chance at leniency. CBDT's own numbers show a separate disclosure drive had already pulled in more money than the last full amnesty ever raised, years before this scheme existed.
August 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Indian IT's Billing Model Is Breaking Under AI Discounting
TCS just posted its first full-year revenue decline in company history. In the same window, Coforge grew revenue 33 percent. The gap is the billing model, not the technology.
August 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Factory Margins Are Being Squeezed by Raw Materials, Not Wages
RBI's FY2025-26 corporate data show manufacturing profit growth cooling because raw material costs jumped 18 percent, not because of wages. IT, which held wage growth to the low single digits, was the only sector to grow its margin at all.
August 13, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Coal Mine Pipeline Nearly Doubled as Non-Fossil Capacity Passed Half
India proposed nearly twice as much new coal mine capacity in 2025 as in 2024, the same window in which non-fossil sources became the majority of its installed power capacity. The mine pipeline is the harder forecast to ignore.
August 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Bank of America Buys Half of Jio Credit Without Buying Control
Bank of America is paying up to $1.9 billion for a stake in Reliance's fast-growing lender that tops out at 49.9 percent, just short of a majority. The number reveals what foreign capital wants from India's shadow-banking boom: exposure, not control.
August 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Direct Tax Collections Are Growing Three Times Faster Than the Economy
Net direct tax receipts are up 23 percent so far this fiscal year, while GDP estimates sit at 6.7 to 8 percent. Even the Budget's own growth math cannot explain the gap.
August 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Tata Sons' Next Chairman Answers to the Trusts, Not the Market
Chandrasekaran's exit looks like boardroom drama. The real story is the mechanism behind it: trusts, not any market, pick the chairman of companies worth hundreds of billions in public shareholder money, and this has happened before.
August 12, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India's Banks Wrote Off Rs 10 Lakh Crore and Recovered a Fraction of It
A Parliament reply puts India's 12-year corporate write-off tally near Rs 10 lakh crore. The government's own recovery data show banks have got back well under half of it, however you slice the window.
August 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Rural Female Employment Rate Fell Sharply Even as Participation Held Steady
Rural women's participation in India's labour force held roughly steady this year. The share who actually found work collapsed anyway, and by June 2026 female unemployment had climbed to a 13-month high.
August 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Adani's Charges Were Dropped, Not Disproven
A US judge dismissed the criminal case against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain on a Justice Department motion, not a trial verdict. The reasoning behind it rides the same enforcement pullback that has shelved other foreign-bribery cases.
August 11, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India's Flagship Skilling Scheme Missed 90 Percent of Its Own Target
PMKVY 4.0 set out to certify 30 lakh candidates in FY2025-26. It certified 2.87 lakh, and it had spent only 14 percent of its budget.
August 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI Now Expects Inflation Well Above What Its New Index Has Printed
MoSPI's new inflation index, rebuilt on a 2024 base year, has climbed at every reading since its January 2026 launch, reaching 4.38 percent by June. The Reserve Bank's own August 2026 forecast already assumes it goes higher.
August 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Non-Fossil Power Capacity Overtook Coal, Not Its Generation
India's installed power capacity crossed the halfway mark for non-fossil sources in June 2026. Its electricity generation, and the CEA's own forecast through 2035-36, did not follow.
August 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
For Every Chinese FDI Approval in India, Hong Kong Got Thirteen
India approved a single Chinese FDI proposal in FY26, worth Rs 1 crore. Hong Kong, spared the land-border screening China faces, cleared thirteen worth Rs 610 crore.
August 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Has Two Official Highway Death Tolls, and They Disagree by 12,000
One government tally says deaths on India's national highways fell for the first time since Covid. A second, older government tally, for the same year, says they hit a record instead.
August 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Zepto's Revenue Doubled While Its Valuation Fell by Two Thirds
Zepto's revenue more than doubled this year, but mutual funds priced its shares at about a third of what late-stage investors paid. The gap traces to a SEBI-mandated valuation rule funds must follow, not to the business turning bad.
August 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
EPFO's Own Rulebook Let It Lose Rs 1,800 Crore to Anil Ambani's Company
The CBI's Rs 1,816 crore case against Anil Ambani follows an investment EPFO's own mandate permitted, and a debt resolution the NCLT had already closed two years earlier.
August 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's Satellite-Tolling Plan Is Stalled as NH-48 Goes Barrier-Free
NHAI's satellite-tolling plan has been stuck in committee review since mid-2025 over security and privacy concerns. The barrier-free system now live on NH-48 runs on number-plate cameras and FASTag instead, and it already delivers most of the promised speed.
August 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI Lets Banks Pay Big Depositors More Than Everyone Else
RBI's new rules let banks price deposits of 3 crore rupees and up against a Basel liquidity formula from October 2026. Three of five bank categories, and every small saver, still get one fixed rate.
August 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Record July Car Sales Are Dealer Stock, Not Customer Demand
Maruti and Hyundai just posted their best months ever, but those are factory dispatches to dealers, not cars bought by customers. Dealer lots already hold more stock than the industry's own benchmark allows.
August 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's GST Jump Owed As Much to Imports as to Domestic Sales
July's GST print grew 15.4%, the fastest pace in over a year. Split the number into its domestic and import lines and a smaller, price-sensitive import base added almost as much as the far larger domestic economy did.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Fertiliser Subsidy Rewards the One Nutrient It Wants Farmers to Use Less
Government appeals for balanced fertiliser use keep failing. Parliament's own committee has already explained why: urea's price is fixed and cheap while everything else went to market pricing.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
IndiGo Doubled Its A350 Order, Then Grounded Its Wide-Body Fleet
IndiGo is handing back every wide-body jet it flies, more than a year before a single owned Airbus A350 lands. The international push was built entirely on borrowed aircraft.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Industrial Boom Is Running Ahead of Its Consumers
India's factory output grew 5.1% in May 2026, but capital goods surged 12.9% while consumer non-durables managed just 3.6%. The boom is being built well ahead of the households it is meant to serve.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Approves Rs 84,084 Crore for Offshore Oil It Still Cannot Convert to Production
The new Samudra Manthan scheme extends an oil-exploration program that awarded 144 blocks and produced from just one. The bottleneck it funds may not be the one keeping India dependent on imports.
July 31, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why Private Banks Fine Account Holders Twice as Hard as Public Banks
Private lenders collected Rs 4,949 crore in FY26 minimum-balance penalties, more than double what public sector banks collected. The rule that permits that gap sets no ceiling on it at all.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Haryana Pays Every Eligible Woman in a Family, Delhi Pays Only the Eldest
Delhi's new Lakshmi Yojana borrows Madhya Pradesh's exact income cutoff for its cash transfer to women, then adds two eligibility rules that neither Madhya Pradesh nor Haryana's comparable scheme carries.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Airtel and Fino Turned a Profit While Paytm's Payments Bank Was Wound Up
The Delhi High Court has wound up Paytm's banking arm on the RBI's petition. Of the original eleven payments banks the regulator licensed in 2015, only two, Airtel and Fino, have a confirmed profit to show for it.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The Rs 100 Crore Club Is Growing Nearly Four Times Faster Than India's GDP
A record 576 Indians declared gross income above Rs 100 crore in Assessment Year 2025-26, a headcount growing nearly four times faster than the economy that produced it, and far faster than the tax take it fed.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's AI Data Centres Need More Than Renewables Promise
The government's estimate for AI data-centre power demand nearly doubled within months, to 26.3 gigawatts by 2032. Meeting that load with renewables that clear a regulatory floor of 21 to 35 percent capacity utilisation is a very different problem than meeting it on paper.
July 29, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
Bank of Baroda's Breach Puts India's Data Penalty Law to the Test
Bank of Baroda traces its data leak to one compromised employee email account. The real test is whether that counts as failing India's law on reasonable security safeguards.
July 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Tata Sons Grew Profit While Its Dividend Income Fell
Tata Sons booked a one-off gain to cover a 10% fall in its core dividend income, even as Air India, Tata Digital and Tata Electronics lost a combined Rs 28,823 crore in FY26.
July 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Migrant Workers Send Home More Dollars Than Foreign Investors Bring In
Indians working abroad sent home an estimated $129 billion in 2024, the largest remittance inflow to any country and well ahead of what foreign investors put into India. Industrial policy still spends its subsidies chasing factories instead.
July 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Sells China More Engineering Goods Even as the Trade Deficit Hits a Record
India's engineering goods exports to China grew nearly three and a half times faster than the sector overall in June, even as India's total trade deficit with China set a fresh record. The reversal is real, but it is still small.
July 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Rupee Trade With Russia Leaves Moscow Holding Money It Cannot Spend
Russian oil's share of India's imports hit a two-year high in May 2026, cast as proof rupee trade with Russia works. The rupees Russia earns are hard to spend, and Washington just showed it can reopen the tariff question at will.
July 26, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why 1.53 Percent of India's Withdrawn ₹2,000 Notes Have Not Returned
RBI says 98.47% of India's withdrawn ₹2,000 notes have returned after three years, a mark that 2016's demonetisation cleared faster and more completely. The difference is that the ₹2,000 note never stopped being legal tender.
July 26, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
Apple Wants Chips From the Chinese Firms Washington Blacklisted
Apple wants memory chips from the Chinese makers Washington restricted, to escape an AI-driven shortage that is enriching Micron. The exception it is asking for tests how fixed that wall really is.
July 26, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
A Paper Leak, Not a Budget Cut, Cost India's Education Minister His Job
Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister citing an exam scandal, not a funding shortfall. The Union budget for his own ministry is already at a record this year, months after a mid-year cut that drew no protest at all.
July 26, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's New Financial ID Turns One Breach Into an All-Accounts Breach
CKYC 2.0 lets banks, insurers and mutual funds pull one customer's record with a single consent. That convenience is also the risk: one breach, or one coerced consent, can now expose an entire financial profile instead of one institution's slice of it.
July 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
RBI's Data Governance Draft Falls Hardest on India's Smallest NBFCs
RBI's new draft data governance rules ask a five-branch NBFC to install the same senior data officer as a nationalised bank. The mandate lands on lenders whose loans are a sixth the market's average size.
July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Services Boom Just Became Its Growth Problem
India's composite PMI just hit a four-year low, but split the number in two and manufacturing barely moved. Services, the sector that has carried Indian growth since the pandemic, did nearly all the falling.
July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The US Tariff on India Did Not Change Its Number, Only Its Legal Basis
Washington let a temporary 10 percent tariff on India expire and replaced it with a permanent one at the same rate, built on a forced labor finding instead of the trade deficit.
July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Fastest Growing Household Loans Are Not for Homes
Household debt is climbing, but the RBI's own numbers show gold loans and small fintech loans are doing the growing, not mortgages. Housing debt is shrinking as a share of the total and getting safer, while the loans replacing it default at far higher rates.
July 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Why AI Hit the Customer Service Job First, Not the Engineering One
Uber cut customer-service jobs and blamed AI for the first time. The tier it cut is the one anchoring India's BPO export industry, not the engineering exports that kept growing.
July 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Bank Recovery Agent Complaints Doubled Even Under RBI's Fair Practices Code
Banks drew more than double the recovery-agent complaints in FY26 than in FY25, even though RBI's rules have banned the underlying conduct since 2015. The lending boom behind the numbers is the real story.
July 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Adani and GMR Could Soon Compete With the Airlines They Host
India may let its biggest airport operators launch airlines to challenge the IndiGo-Air India duopoly. The same operators already set the landing fees and gates every rival carrier depends on.
July 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Pharma Stocks Crashed Over a Tariff That Waits Three Years
Washington's new tariff on Indian generics does not reach full strength until August 2029. The three-year delay reveals how dependent American pharmacies already are on Indian-made pills.
July 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Indian Banks Recovered Just 4.5 Percent of Rs 1.42 Lakh Crore Reported Stolen
Banks recovered just 4.5 percent of the Rs 1.42 lakh crore they reported losing to fraud in five years. A fifth of that headline figure turns out to be old cases relabeled, not new losses, and the money that is left behaves nothing like an ordinary bad loan.
July 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Electronics Industry Only Adds 18 to 20 Percent in Value
Production sextupled and exports grew eightfold in a decade, and the flagship PLI scheme beat its own targets. The government's own estimate says only 18 to 20 percent of what India's electronics industry makes is actually added in India.
July 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
IndiGo's Record CFM Order Is a Hedge Against Its Own Grounded Jets
IndiGo just placed CFM's largest engine order ever. Dozens of its Pratt & Whitney-powered jets are still sitting grounded, and the timing is the real story.
July 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's UPI Runs in 12 Countries and Barely Moves Money Abroad
The government just told Parliament that UPI is now live for payments in 12 countries, up from one in 2021. Cross-border transaction value in FY25 came to Rs 258.53 crore, against a domestic system moving Rs 314.23 lakh crore a year.
July 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Solar Cell Mandate Rested on Just Nine Manufacturing Lines
MNRE has extended a solar-cell sourcing exemption to December, weeks after starting to enforce it. The domestic cell base behind the rule covers a sliver of what the market needs.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Singapore and Tanzania Are Driving India's Export Growth Faster Than the US or EU
New Delhi has spent 2026 closing a two-decade-old trade deal with the EU and framing an interim one with the US. The export growth that actually shows up in the numbers is coming from Singapore, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, South Africa and China instead.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
One RBI Rule Change Is Pushing Indian Banks Back to Corporate Loans
India's top private banks are growing corporate loans well ahead of retail this quarter, reversing years of retail-led credit growth. A 2023 RBI rule on unsecured lending explains why banks turned back to companies.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
PNB Tripled Its Profit as Lending Income Grew Just 2 Percent and Bad-Loan Charges Doubled
Punjab National Bank's profit almost tripled in the June quarter. The number that is supposed to drive it, its core lending income, grew by just 2 percent, and its bad-loan provisions doubled.
July 19, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India's Space Budget Grew While Its Private Regulator's Budget Shrank
Skyroot's Vikram-1 reached orbit on money raised from venture investors, not the state. The one budget line built to attract that private capital was the one the government just cut.
July 18, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
RBI's Plastic Currency Push Is a Second Attempt, Not a First
A global tender for polymer banknote material revives a plan RBI shelved a decade ago after plastic Rs 10 notes ran into trouble at ATMs. This time the specification arrives wrapped in security clauses aimed at China and Pakistan.
July 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Startup Funding Rose 12 Percent as Deal Count Fell 43 Percent
A single week's funding total nearly quadrupled and AI took most of it. Zoom out to the first half of 2026, and the number of companies getting funded at all is shrinking fast.
July 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Financial Inclusion Index Is Rising on Usage, Not Quality
RBI's Financial Inclusion Index hit a record 70.0 for the year to March 2026, and RBI's own statement credits the gain to Usage alone. The Quality leg, the one it just named a five-year strategic priority, drew no such credit.
July 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Sharpest Tariff Tool Only Works on Countries Without a Deal
Six government working groups are shortlisting up to 100 products to replace with local output. New trade deals with the UK, EFTA and Australia have just locked in tariff cuts across most of India's tariff book, in categories the list is chasing.
July 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Is Reviving the UPI Fee It Killed to Beat Credit Cards
India zeroed out the UPI merchant fee in 2020 to beat credit cards, then only ever subsidized the smallest transactions. Now it wants large merchants, who never got the subsidy, to start paying again.
July 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's Current Account Surplus Did Not Survive May
RBI's headline print shows a two-month current account surplus, but May 2026 alone was already back in deficit, and the merchandise trade gap has widened in every window measured since. The financing cushion built to absorb it is thinner than it was three years ago.
July 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Kept Its Rare Earths in the Ground and Bought Magnets From China
India holds millions of tonnes of an internationally significant rare earth resource and still leaned on China for up to 90 percent of its magnet imports. Beijing's export curbs are now testing what that choice costs.
July 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
HP Rigged the Government Marketplace Built to Stop Bid-Rigging
CCI fined HP India Rs 138.85 crore for rigging bids on GeM, the marketplace it partnered with CCI to keep clean. The case came to light only because HP turned on itself.
July 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why Buying IDBI Bank Requires Breaking RBI's Ownership Cap
Fairfax's bid for IDBI Bank is priced at $5.5 billion, but the number that decides it is 26: the share of voting rights no bank shareholder may hold without a special RBI exemption.
July 15, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
How Naya Safar Cuts Truck Prices But Not Truck Debt
Naya Safar waives the tax and discounts the price on a new truck or bus. The loan needed to cover the rest is still the owner's own problem to finance.
July 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
China's Slowing Factories Are Exporting Deflation to India
China's Q2 growth miss looks like a China story. The mechanism behind it is an India story: Chinese factories still discounting finished goods even as factory-gate prices turn positive, and the spillover landing as underpriced steel in Indian ports.
July 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Renewable Build Is Concentrating in Fewer Indian Hands
Shell built an Indian clean-power platform, then sold it to Aditya Birla for barely more than it paid four years ago. The winners are not foreign capital chasing India's energy transition, but a shrinking list of Indian conglomerates.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Insulated Its Oil From Hormuz, Not Its Trade
Trump wants to toll every cargo ship through the Strait of Hormuz, not just tankers. India already rerouted its crude away from the strait. Its LPG and its trade with four Gulf economies have no such detour.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Just Started Measuring Half the Economy Every Month
MoSPI launched a monthly gauge today for the 54% of GDP that never had one. The index that has run India's growth conversation for decades covers under a fifth of the economy, and is itself mostly one sector.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Most of India's Crude Oil No Longer Sails Through Hormuz
India's oil supply has been leaving the Gulf for years. By June 2026, Russia alone supplied more of India's crude than the entire Middle East did three years earlier.
July 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's Sailors Still Face a War Its Oil Trade Has Mostly Escaped
India has rerouted roughly 70% of its crude imports away from the Strait of Hormuz. Its sailors, about one in eight of the world's seafaring workforce, are still crewing ships through the war zone regardless of whose cargo is on board.
July 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
HDFC Bank Shed 3,343 Jobs Even as Its Loan Book Kept Growing
HDFC Bank's branches, loan book and profit all grew in the year to March 2026. Its headcount fell, for the first time in five years of disclosed filings.
July 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Is Spending Far More on Data Centres Than the Market Is Worth
Government and industry trackers count tens of billions already committed to India's data centres. KPMG's own model values the market they are meant to serve at under $7 billion five years out.
July 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's First Retail Survey Counts Enterprises, Not Sales
MoSPI's new ASISSE survey samples GST filers to count enterprises, not the sales they ring up. Even that count folds into a GDP line still bundled with hotels and transport.
July 11, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
Cognizant's US Business Runs on the Visas Washington Is Now Investigating
A new federal task force is investigating fraud in the H-1B and PERM visa programs, and its inspector general named Cognizant specifically. The company's own filings show why it has more riding on that inquiry than the assumption that Indian IT firms would sit this crackdown out.
July 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
TCS Hired 9,279 Workers as Elara Securities Cut Its Target 17 Percent
TCS's Q1 FY27 results split analysts down the middle: one broker cut its price target, another raised it. The company's own hiring, its fastest pace in four years, says more about AI and Indian IT jobs than either note.
July 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
India's Food Prices Have Already Cleared the RBI's Inflation Target
India's food prices are already above the Reserve Bank's 4% inflation target, and the RBI's own forecast shows it. The monsoon risk behind that number is still getting worse, not better.
July 10, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Russia's Share of India's Oil Imports Hit a Record as the Discount Vanished
Russia's share of India's crude imports broke 50 percent in June, a record, just as the price discount that first justified the switch narrowed to almost nothing. A war that shut the Strait of Hormuz explains why.
July 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Credit Card Delinquency Rate Is Falling Because the Risk Moved Elsewhere
Credit card delinquency, the number everyone watches for consumer stress, keeps improving. That is because the riskiest borrowers can no longer get a card at all, so they get a personal loan instead, and the loan book is absorbing the strain the card book used to show.
July 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Economy Uses 41 Percent Less Oil for Every Dollar of GDP Than in 1991
India's crude oil import dependency has climbed past 88 percent, the highest on record. But the economy now burns 41 percent less oil per dollar of GDP than in 1991, which is why the 2026 oil shock is landing differently than the one that broke the balance of payments three decades ago.
July 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Growth Forecast Implies an Inflation Rate Near 1 Percent
MoSPI's own FY26 growth arithmetic implies economy-wide prices rose by about one percentage point this year. Wholesale prices alone rose almost ten times that in May 2026.
July 9, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Gold Loan Boom Grew Slower Than the Price of the Gold Behind It
NBFC gold loans surged 69.9 percent in the RBI's May 2026 data. The metal backing them had already risen 81 percent in price, and a capital rule NBFCs never lost made gold their cheapest retail loan to write.
July 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
The H-1B Crackdown Will Hit Indian Engineers, Not Indian IT Companies
Washington's new H-1B fee and wage rule look aimed at India's outsourcing giants. The giants already walked away from the visa; the bill falls on individual engineers instead.
July 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why India's Durables Credit Grew 42 Percent When Prices Barely Moved
Personal loan growth hit 15.4 percent and NBFC lending against durables jumped 42 percent, even as official electronics and appliance prices barely moved. The real price shock, from a global chip shortage, is only now reaching the showroom.
July 8, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Real Investment Pipeline Shrank the Year Its FDI Ranking Rose
UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2026 has India climbing the FDI rankings on a 44 percent inflow surge. One Alphabet project explains most of it, and the country's real investment pipeline was shrinking underneath.
July 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
The Real Divide in Indian Banking Isn't Public Versus Private
Kotak Mahindra Bank's growth gap between loans and deposits is now nearly as wide as Punjab National Bank's, a state-run lender. Ownership isn't what is splitting Indian banks apart this quarter.
July 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why the Missing Link's Rockfall Mesh Was Ten Times Too Short
MSRDC built the Missing Link specifically to remove the Mumbai-Pune Expressway's most landslide-exposed stretch. Nine weeks after it opened, a landslide hit it anyway, and the rockfall mesh meant to stop it covered a tenth of the slope above it.
July 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India Raised the Rural Job Guarantee and Cut the Centre's Share of the Bill
VB-G RAM G promises more days of guaranteed work and a higher minimum wage than MGNREGA ever did. To fund it, the law hands states a share of a bill Delhi used to cover alone.
July 6, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
One New Smelter Will Outproduce All of Hindalco's Aluminium Capacity
Adani and Abu Dhabi's IHC are building an Odisha smelter bigger than Hindalco's entire output, the clearest sign yet that India's two-player aluminium market is ending.
July 6, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Delhi and Goa Already Sit Above the Income Line India Has Missed for 19 Years
The World Bank has kept India in its lower-middle-income group for 19 straight fiscal-year reviews. Convert what Delhi and Goa actually produce per head into the same dollars, and both already clear the line the whole country has not.
July 6, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India Diversified Its LNG Buyers But Kept Rationing Gas Anyway
India's emergency gas rationing order outlasted its own fix: allocations were back near normal by April, but the order itself stayed live until the Strait of Hormuz reopened in July.
July 5, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Provident Fund Default Just Flipped from Save to Skip
The EPF Scheme 2026 kept the mandatory contribution rate exactly where it was. What it changed is how much of a worker's wage that mandate actually covers.
July 5, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Own Test Data Backs the E20 Mileage Complaints It Calls a Myth
The government's June 2026 rebuttal calls E20 mileage and engine damage complaints unsubstantiated. Its own certifying committee already measured a real, if smaller, loss from the very same fuel.
July 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Small-Town Flight Scheme Has Already Grounded Half Its Routes
India just extended UDAN, its regional flight subsidy, for ten more years at Rs 28,840 crore. Its own numbers show nearly half the routes launched since 2016 have already shut down, and the single biggest subsidy check went to the airline that already dominates the sky.
July 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
Why Bank of Baroda's NMC Settlement Costs a Full Quarter's Profit
Bank of Baroda's $600 million NMC Health settlement is larger than the profit it earned last quarter. Court evidence about how fast its compliance alerts were cleared explains why the bill got this big.
July 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
India's Trade Deals Adopt Every WTO Digital Rule but One
India's newest free trade agreements copy most of the WTO's digital trade rulebook. Not one of them commits India to keep electronic transmissions duty free, the single clause its own trading partners already extend to each other.
July 3, 2026 · 5 min read
Business
India's Own Data Show Half of Japan's First Investment Pledge Arrived
Japan has promised India ever-larger investment sums since 2014, and Tokyo says most of the newest pledge already arrived. India's own official data show a thinner story.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Business
India's Four-FTA Sprint Took Two Decades to Build
Four trade deals look like they landed in one summer. Most of the negotiating happened years earlier.
July 2, 2026 · 8 min read