Episodes
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It’s been a month since India’s nationwide shift to E20 petrol—20% ethanol-blended petrol. Vehicle owners have come forward to complain about falling mileage, damage to their vehicles, voided warranties, and the absence of insurance coverage.
The change has sparked outrage, and nothing is being done to placate the country’s many millions of angry drivers.
India’s move to E20 fuel took place much faster than originally planned. This pace may have been inspired by a previous success, when the government had to address worsening air pollution in the 2010s.
At the time, regulators were able to skip a step to implement more stringent vehicle emissions standards. Even though there was some opposition from automakers, the change was largely unchallenged, and the public was onboard.
The context is different this time around, and the confidence exuded by the government is misplaced.
The Ken’s Suprita Anupam explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.
Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/from-bs6-to-e20-india-learnt-the-wrong-lessons-heres-how-to-course-correct/
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Dialysis is a tough business, and not because of any serious lack of demand. Over 280,000 patients were undergoing regular dialysis in 2024, a number that’s projected to go up to 520,000 by 2029. Add in less frequent or one-time treatments, and the number of patients who need the procedure every year breaches one million.
It is the economics that is the tricky bit. High procurement costs, tricky consumable-stock management, and very low margins—in fact, nowhere on the planet can one run a small dialysis business sustainably.
And India, with the lowest dialysis price point in the world, is the toughest market to crack.
Which perhaps explains why IPO-bound kidneycare chain Nephroplus’ founder Vikram Vuppala built the kidneycare chain the way he did. It is already India’s—and Asia’s—largest dialysis service provider. And it is expanding, both inside and outside the country’s borders, for which it wants to put the Rs 353 crore it plans to raise from its IPO to good use.
In this edition of Make India Competitive Again, The Ken’s Sudeshna Ray explains how testing itself in a market like India, and building expertise in a “full-stack” model, has been key to its success overseas.
Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/ipo-bound-nephroplus-built-resilience-in-india-its-now-using-it-to-win-overseas/
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Missing episodes?
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India’s stock market seldom tends to influence the workings of its federal bureaucracy. But for the country’s telecom mandarins, who have just floated a new draft national policy for the sector, the investor response to one listed company could be the canary in the coal mine.
At Rs 9,800 crore, the market value of Tejas Networks, a Tata-owned maker of telecom equipment, is now half the peak it reached 10 months ago. What’s odd is that Tejas Networks is now worth only a little more than its revenue. At the heart of investor frustration, and perhaps even fear, is the big pile of payments the company is yet to receive from its customers, including the government (the owner of telco BSNL).
It’s striking, then, that the draft telecom policy includes a plan to handhold 500 startups and MSMEs working on emerging telecom technologies. But what’s truly conspicuous in the policy is what’s not in it.
The Ken’s Seema Singh explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Seetharaman G.
Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/tejas-networks-diving-share-price-is-a-mayday-signal-is-dots-antenna-working/
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Software needs to be free to access, modify, and redistribute to be called open source. Anything less can’t carry the label.
This matters right now because generative-AI company Sarvam will open-source its models built for the IndiaAI Mission, the government’s initiative to foster artificial intelligence development within the country. That means it will release its weights, or parameters that make AI models “smart”.
By referencing Chinese releases like Deepseek and Alibaba Group’s Qwen, open-source software isn’t just a nice thing to have, there are elements of soft power as well. AI models that are available for anyone to tinker with can win developer mindshare and become more prominent in tech stacks around the world. This makes it harder for closed systems to defend their territory.
But the people behind IndiaAI have little to say about software licensing even though there’s a need to define those norms, especially given the vast capital that’s being poured into the national programme.
The Ken’s Sumit Chakraborty explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Brady Ng.
Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/free-code-can-build-indias-ai-fortune/
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The audio edition of The Ken’s Make India Competitive Again newsletter, spearheaded by Seetharaman G. Every Wednesday, our editors and reporters read the latest edition and chronicle what India is doing, will do, and should do—to not just survive but thrive in the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump.
