It was the afternoon of September 20, 2023. Three people sat down at a table at The Oberoi in Delhi. The hotel was booked in the name of Dr. Anand Burman, the chairman of Dabur, who had flown into India just for that meeting. Across him was Dr. Rashmi Saluja, then the Executive Chairperson of Religare Enterprises. Along with Burman was Arjun Lamba, a representative of the Burman Group. That the meeting happened is not in dispute. Mobile tower records, hotel invoices, and WhatsApp messages all confirmed it.

At 3:38 PM on April 25, India demanded more power than it ever had in history. The grid handled 256 GW in a single instant. We had enough power to meet all that demand, about a fifth of which came from solar plants. The system had worked. 🧵👇 But the very same evening, once peak demand had subsided, the system failed. Seven hours after setting its record, India's power system came 4.2 GW short. The night before, at 10:34 PM, the grid fell 5.4 GW short. We couldn't find the power to feed the equivalent of 27 lakh rural homes.

In 2007, Sri Lanka wanted to build a port in Hambantota. It asked India to help finance it, but we realized the project was commercially unviable and said no. Sri Lanka then asked the US, and they also said no. 🧵👇 Colombo turned to China, which agreed to lend $307 million at 6.3% fixed interest. This was a normal commercial rate when Sri Lanka's own treasury bills were paying 12-14%. A decade later, Hambanota would become the most famous case of what commentators called "debt-trap diplomacy".

We've been covering the wires and cables industry for three quarters now. Throughout, the story has consistently been in favour of the industry. Record revenues, strong demand, big plans. Meanwhile, the industry is moving away from unbranded, informal products.🧵👇 This quarter isn't different. But current growth has given way to some problems, the kind lesser companies would love to have. Revenue grew 20-30% across the board. But the amount of wire and cable that actually shipped barely budged. One company managed just 2% more volume than last year.

Every quarter, we return to the same questions about Indian IT. For most of the last year, the answers were some version of “unclear”. Q4 answers are getting sharper as some companies are speaking more plainly about what’s actually happening to their business.🧵👇 TCS’ Q4 revenue came in at $7.6 billion, ~₹71,000 crore, topping FY26 revenue to $30 billion. That’s actually 0.5% less than last year. The full-year operating margin of 25% is the highest TCS has posted in four years. Their AI revenue has reached an annualized run rate of $2.3 billion.

The IEA just released its Gas Market Report. It's a picture of chaos. Before the West Asian war, the world expected a massive LNG wave. That story is now effectively dead. So what happened, and how long until it recovers? 🧵👇 To understand how wrong things have gone, you need to see how right they were going in. Three years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent prices sky-rocketing, the world's gas markets were finally recovering. Supply was catching up. Prices were settling.

Every April, the IMF releases its World Economic Outlook, basically a report card on the global economy. This year's edition is different. Most of the report is about war, whose incidence has risen sharply over four decades. The IMF is not known for dramatic language. This is as dramatic as it gets. 🧵👇 Two of the three chapters are entirely about the military turn in global politics. Chapter 2 studies what rearming costs an economy. Chapter 3 studies what actual war costs. Together they form an escalating argument, spending, fighting, recovering, with each stage more damaging and harder to reverse than the one before.

Iran's entire defence budget is $10 billion, or ₹84,000 crore. The United States' defence budget is $850 billion, or ₹71 lakh crore. Yet in the war currently being fought in the Gulf, Iran has the better economics.🧵👇 A ₹29 lakh drone with a moped engine is draining the world's most expensive air defence system faster than any factory can replenish it. Cheap drones have broken the economics of modern warfare, and this has something important to say about India's ₹2 lakh crore defence procurement.

For over six decades, India's passenger trains ran on the same basic idea. A powerful locomotive up front, pulling a long string of passive coaches behind it. As of March 2018, 49,033 conventional coaches were still in service. Then, in January 2018, the ICF flagged off its last one.🧵👇 Since 1955, the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai and its sister factories have built over 75,000 coaches of all types. For most of that history, the dominant design was the conventional ICF coach. What replaced them, and why, is a story that goes beyond a simple paint upgrade.

The Indian Railways runs thousands of passenger, freight, and express trains on a shared, tightly coordinated network. For most of this network's history, what kept those trains apart was signals along the track and the locomotive pilot's instinct. Manual judgement left room for errors. Let's find out how India is changing this. 🧵👇 The single biggest safety risk on this network has been something called SPAD: Signal Passed At Danger. That's when a driver misses or misjudges a red signal, and the train enters a section it shouldn't be in. Training helps, but it can't eliminate the problem.

In India, the unemployment rate for illiterates is 3%. For graduates aged 15 to 24, it's 40%. The more educated you are in this country, the more likely you are to be jobless. Not because education is worthless, but because it creates aspirations the economy struggles to absorb. 🧵👇 An illiterate worker takes whatever survival work is available. A graduate holds out for something better. And that something better, for millions, may never arrive.

India's defence exports hit a record ₹38,424 crore in FY26, up 62.66% from the previous year. Ten years ago, defence was not a private-market story in the way it is now. The domestic industrial ecosystem was narrow, state-heavy, and deeply dependent on imports. How did we get here?
Let's find out. 🧵👇 To be clear, the dependence hasn't fully vanished. MP-IDSA noted last year, drawing on SIPRI data, that India was still the world's largest arms importer in 2019-2023, with around 9.8% of global imports. But something important has changed. Defence production has risen from ₹46,429 crore in 2014-15 to ₹1.50 lakh crore in 2024-25. In FY25 alone, the Ministry of Defence signed 193 contracts worth ₹2.09 lakh crore, of which ₹1.69 lakh crore went to domestic industry.

Since the Hormuz crisis began, polymer prices surged over 40% in weeks. Naphtha nearly doubled. Indian PVC prices jumped 78% in a single month. Asian plastic factories are going dark. American ones are running at maximum capacity. And somewhere in all this, we realised we don't actually understand what plastic is.🧵👇 We kept using terms like polymer, naphtha, PVC, polyethylene, without really knowing what each meant. Every explanation starts with crude oil. But that's like explaining what a cake is by starting with the wheat farm. It tells you where the ingredients come from, not what the thing actually is.

The GST was designed with a brilliant built-in trick. Every buyer has a financial reason to demand a proper invoice from their seller, because that invoice is how they claim tax credit. So buyers police sellers automatically, and the system enforces itself. Except it doesn't, not really. 🧵👇 According to a recent paper by economists Arbind Modi and Ajay Shah, a series of design choices around credits and refunds have quietly broken the compliance chain the GST depends on. What was meant to tax consumption has drifted into taxing production instead.

India runs one of the most unusual policy experiments in the world. Since 2014, any sufficiently large Indian company is legally required to spend a fixed share of its profits on social causes. Not just disclose it. Actually spend. No other major economy on earth does this.🧵👇 Other countries have tried softer versions. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires companies to publish detailed data about their environmental and social footprint, but doesn't require them to open their wallets. India's Section 135 of the Companies Act does precisely that.

If you have a piped gas connection at home but you're still holding on to an LPG cylinder as backup, the government has news: surrender it within 90 days, or lose your cooking fuel supply entirely.

Here's what's happening, and why.🧵👇 The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has invoked the Essential Commodities Act to force a shift. Oil marketing companies will digitally map addresses and automatically block LPG cylinder bookings for any household where piped natural gas (PNG) is available.

India just committed ₹4,000 crore to a business most people have never thought about: dredging.

The Dredging Corporation of India wants to more than double its revenue to ₹3,000 crore over five years. It is buying 11 new dredgers. All to do one thing. 🧵👇 Clear sand, silt, and rock from the bottom of harbours, rivers, and shipping channels so that large ships can pass through.

Government estimates suggest India will need roughly 3 billion cubic metres of dredging over the next decade. Every major port depends on it to stay open.

This month, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño Watch. Formal signal that conditions are becoming favourable for El Niño to develop. La Niña, which gave India above-normal monsoon in 2025, is fading. By August, there's 62% probability El Niño conditions will be underway. Let's find out what this means. El Niño is far from distant weather phenomenon for India. It disrupts Southwest Monsoon winds that Indian rains depend on. That increases occurrence of heatwaves, depresses agricultural output, lifts food prices, strains power grid. Its impact on Indian economy is almost decisively negative.

Every few months, RBI's Monetary Policy Committee meets to answer one question, is inflation too high, too low, or just right? Since 2016, the answer revolves around one number, 4% inflation, give or take 2 percentage points either side. But how did we get here? For much of last year, inflation was under 2%, just outside RBI's tolerance band of 4% ± 2%. If inflation falls too fast, people aren't buying things enough. RBI even cut rates last year to spur consumer demand.

Raajmarg Infra Investment Trust wants to raise ₹6,000 crore by selling you the right to collect tolls on five highway stretches across 260 kilometres. This becomes only the 7th InvIT to hit public markets since 2014, but most investors still don't understand what they're actually buying. Let's find out in this thread below. InvITs are REITs' less-famous cousins. Same trust structure, but instead of office buildings and rent cheques, you're paying for infrastructure assets and their cash flows. Highways, power lines, telecom fibre.

NSE IX just launched Global Access, letting Indians buy US stocks like Apple and NVIDIA directly through GIFT City. It works under RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS). But the real story isn't the product. It's what happens to your order once it reaches the US. That market looks nothing like India's. Let's take a look in this thread. Indians have been buying US stocks for years through apps. But those apps were wrappers. The actual trading was handled by American firms like Viewtrade. Your money left India under LRS, landed with a US broker, and no Indian securities regulator was in the middle