Category Economy and Infrastructure

Legacy

When Legacy Becomes a Commercial Externality, Who Pays to Preserve It?

TK Arun As Annapurna Bhandar of Chandini Chowk faces closure, can Indian cities take a cue from Paris or San Francisco to protect legacy shops? When a sudden rent increase forces a thriving commercial establishment — that has a century-old…

Oman

PM Modi in Oman: Advancing a Historic Maritime Relationship

Anil Trigunayat Trade and economic cooperation have been the fulcrum of the relationship, with bilateral trade already exceeding $10 billion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the Sultanate of Oman at the invitation of HM Sultan Haitham bin Tarik from…

SIM

SIM-Binding: A Tool for Security That Demands a Foundation of Trust

There has been a sharp pushback against the government’s directive to all mobile phone makers and importers to preload, within 90 days, the government app, Sanchar Sathi, on phones freshly sold in the country. In the case of another related security-oriented mandate that seeks all messaging and communications apps to stay bound all the time to a particular SIM issued to the user, the response has been more mixed: while cellular operators think this is a good idea, the Broadband India Forum, which represents the interests of stakeholders in cyber business, has sought more time and consultations.

India–Brazil: Biofuels and Sustainable Aviation Fuel Cooperation

India–Brazil: Biofuels and Sustainable Aviation Fuel Cooperation

India and Brazil are natural partners in the low-carbon bioenergy transition. Brazil has decades of experience in large-scale biofuel deployment, most famously its sugarcane-based ethanol program and a mature flex-fuel vehicle market, while India has moved aggressively in recent years to scale ethanol blending and to develop policy frameworks for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The two countries formalized energy and biofuel cooperation through a series of memoranda and joint statements: New Delhi's Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and its Brazilian counterparts highlighted SAF and biofuel collaboration in a joint statement on 21 September 2024, and broader bioenergy MOUs and bilateral instruments between India and Brazil date back several years and were reiterated during high-level exchanges in 2024–2025.

Tourism

India–Maldives: Sustainable Tourism Cooperation (2025)

The Republic of Maldives, located on the Indian subcontinent, consists of 1,190 coral islands grouped into 26 natural atolls. Following the Maldives' independence in 1965, India was one of the first countries to recognise and establish diplomatic relations with them. India and the Maldives have had long-standing ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, and economic links. Physical proximity, cultural links, and development collaboration have all contributed to the two countries' close, friendly, and diverse relationship.

In Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as the Maldives, where tourism is the principal source of foreign exchange profits and government revenue, the business is growing.

Energy

India’s Renewable Energy Push Needs Storage to Last

India continues to add renewable power generation capacity without any coherent strategy for its full utilisation, often ordering RE generation to back down to maintain grid stability. A vital deficit is a policy for storing renewable power, which is intermittent and missing from action for much of the day, forcing reliance on thermal power as India's mainstay.

Trump

Trump, AI and the Global Growth Test of 2026

Earlier this month, Sam Altman of OpenAI declared Code Red at the company: the latest version of its chatbot was underperforming Google’s latest offering, Gemini 3. That panic had one simple explanation: he believes artificial intelligence (AI) to be yet another technology service in which the winner takes all.

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