Architects of Advantage: CEO Leadership for a Fracturing World

The sessions at this year's IMA CEO Roundtable in Jodhpur covered a wide range of themes, from macroeconomics and geopolitics to credit and capital markets, critical minerals and the emerging shape of India's AI economy. This conclusions paper is the original, full-length record of those discussions, capturing each session in complete analytical detail rather than in summary form.

Each session has been written up in depth, tracing the speaker's full argument, the evidence and data points underpinning it, and its practical implications for business leaders. The intent is to preserve the substance and nuance of the room, so that readers who were not present can engage with the discussions as they actually unfolded, not as a condensed version of them.

This paper is the primary and complete record, and we hope it serves as a lasting and useful reference for the conversations that shaped this year's roundtable.

. Markets, Regulation and the Rules of the Growth Game Ananth Narayan, Former Whole Time Member, SEBI

. India's capital markets have absorbed an extraordinary volume of domestic savings over the past five years. Mutual fund flows have set new records, there has been a tripling of unique equity investors, and primary issuance hit an all-time high in FY25. Capital-market expansion, however, is not the same thing as balance. Drawing directly on his experience at the SEBI, Ananth Narayan examined three tightly-interconnected dimensions: the growing tilt in India's capital markets, the inherent tension at the heart of regulatory design, and the rising standards of conduct that Boards and independent directors are held to.

Equity–Debt Asymmetries

The scale of domestic flows into equity over the past 5 years is without precedent. From 40 mn unique equity investors in March 2020, the number crossed 140 mn in October 2025. Total domestic demand for equity in FY25 (from mutual funds, pension and provident funds, insurance companies and direct retail) reached approximately $100 bn, twice the previous record. Even after accounting for FPI outflows of approximately $15 bn, net demand stood at close to $90 bn. Supply, itself at a record $55 bn, could not keep pace; a shortfall of approximately $35 bn was bridged by promoters progressively reducing stakes in their own companies. All of this made pockets of overvaluation inevitable.

In India, total credit to non-government entities as a share of equity market capitalisation stands at 65%, the lowest ratio of any major economy. The equivalent figure is 95% in the US, between 125% and 195% in Japan, South Korea and Germany, and 135-145% for the world as a whole. India, in other words, may have the largest equity market, relative to the size of its credit market, anywhere in the world.

Taxation as the Distorting Variable

Most discretionary savers face a marginal income tax rate approaching 40%. Applied to a fixed deposit return of 7%, that leaves post-tax yields close to 4%, below the prevailing rate of inflation. Investing in fixed income, under the existing tax rules, is wealth-eroding. Long-term equity capital gains, taxed at 12.5%, offer at least the possibility of inflation-beating returns. The result of this asymmetric tax treatment of different assets is a compulsion to invest in stocks. Similar distortions apply to foreign portfolio investors, who face a withholding tax regime that is unique among major economies. India is one of the only markets that insists on taxing foreign investors at source rather than in their country of residence, creating frictions that even double-taxation treaties cannot fully resolve. This has a major bearing for sovereign wealth funds and pension funds.

This impacts more than just individual portfolio decisions. Sustained domestic demand, often detached from market fundamentals, has kept valuations at levels that deter fresh inflows from abroad. Foreign investors acknowledge the quality of specific companies, but cannot justify the entry multiples. Instead, many bank on earning strong exit returns on positions taken years ago. Interestingly, some South Korean companies have obtained IPO valuations for their Indian subsidiaries at 7-8x their home-market equivalent – the result of an equity market that is priced primarily in line with captive domestic flows. Essentially, then, India is more a seller's market for exits than a destination for fresh capital. This gives rise to second-order effects: when markets reward modest earnings growth with exceptional multiples, the incentive to invest in research or greenfield ventures diminishes. India's private sector R&D spend, for example, is just 0.65% of GDP.

The Regulator's Dilemma: Type One and Type Two Errors

SEBI must balance two potential types of institutional failure. A Type One error – falsely identifying a problem that doesn’t exist – penalises legal behaviour, destroys trust in the market and undermines capital formation. Typically, it results in regulation so prescriptive and punitive that it forecloses legitimate activity, burdening the compliant to the same degree as the abusive. A Type Two error is the inverse of this, failing to pick up on legitimate concerns.

The misuse of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) – a Type Two error – illustrates how difficult it is to achieve robust calibration. AIFs, designed to channel patient capital into unlisted securities and pre-IPO ventures, were being structured to circumvent regulations that would have applied to the same parties, had they been acting directly. For example, foreign entities that were barred by FDI rules from certain sectors routed capital through domestic AIFs (with domestic managers), achieving indirectly what they could not do by direct investment. NBFCs that were carrying non-performing real estate assets used AIFs to mask impairment, placing a first-loss tranche into a structure of their own construction, drawing in external capital as a senior tranche, routing the combined pool back to the original borrower and recording what would otherwise have been a haircut as a full loan repayment. SEBI identified over $12 bn of such transactions within an AIF investment universe valued at approximately $48 bn.

Rather than adding prescriptive layers, SEBI worked with the Venture Capital Association to develop a principles-based self-certification framework. This included a checklist of do's and don'ts that AIF managers would sign to confirm they were not using structures to circumvent direct regulation. Anyone who was in compliance would have no difficulty signing; anyone who was not had provided SEBI with an evidentiary basis for further inquiry. This worked precisely because regulators often lag the innovation cycle and rely heavily on consultation processes. When egregious practices go unreported by those who know about them, the regulatory response, when it eventually arrives, cannot be calibrated finely enough to spare the compliant from the same burden as the guilty. Industry needs to function as trusted advisors to regulatory bodies, not merely as advocacy interests seeking reduced compliance costs. That relationship takes time to build, but it is the only mechanism through which both Type One and Type Two errors can be reduced at the same time.

Boards: Evidence, Conduct and Standards

On board governance, a topic that attracts strong but frequently uninformed opinion, industry often misconstrues SEBI’s standards of enforcement. The regulator does not pursue independent directors on the basis of outcomes alone. Before taking any action, it seeks evidence of specific acts of omission or commission. For example, in the case of a large listed housing finance company, SEBI had reason to believe that nearly half of a $1.9 bn balance sheet had been siphoned to the promoter group. Despite the scale of the problem, SEBI did not charge any of the independent directors, because the record showed that the audit committee had taken cognisance of anomalies flagged by the auditor, asked questions, minuted those questions, commissioned a forensic review and issued explicit instructions against the relevant lending practice. Ultimately, though, the company’s management chose to ignore those instructions.

In another instance, an auditor raised concerns about asset valuations and the nature and scale of accounts receivable – precisely the sort of red flag that an audit committee is meant to examine. Recordings of the meeting indicated that the presentation to the audit committee was completed in just ten minutes, with not one question asked on any of the flagged items, despite the committee having two chartered accountants and a former banker on board. Such absence of scrutiny, Mr Narayan argues, constitutes an act of omission, and is thus legitimate grounds for SEBI to act.

To better safeguard themselves, every Board member should follow two simple steps:

Ensure robust discussion on substantive items, and carefully minute such discussions. Even if a director raises concerns verbally, but leaves no trace of this in the record, they have no defence against later allegations that no concerns were raised.

For any decision that might seem ‘borderline’, apply a simple test: if the decision would be defensible in the business press the following morning, sign it; if it would not, do not. The risk is that any Board approval that fails this test is one that some future set of facts could make impossible to explain.

Market structure, regulatory design and Board conduct are connected by a single thread. At the end of the day, the health of India's capital markets cannot be delegated entirely to either the regulator or the market. Tax policy shapes the incentive environment in which capital allocates. Meanwhile, regulation determines whether legitimate activity is facilitated or foreclosed, while Board conduct determines whether governance systems function as oversight, or instead, as mere ratification. Any gaps that are arise are not principally a technical problem, but a problem of institutional culture.

. India's AI Mission: Where the Real Decisions Lie Bishakha Bhattacharya , Global Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Wipro & Dhawal Gupta, Director of Government Affairs, Microsoft India & South Asia

. The world’s first power plant was established in New York about 144 years ago, yet a reliable supply of electricity remains a distant dream for about 700 mn people worldwide. Generative AI has achieved comparable proliferation in a fraction of this time, leaving governments and businesses very little runway to decide how to respond. India's answer has been a mission-mode effort spanning compute access, skilling and sovereign innovation, built on the premise that neither the government nor the industry can move fast enough alone. Bishakha Bhattacharya and Dhawal Gupta discussed the India AI Mission's compute, skilling and sovereign innovation pillars, and what each means for businesses today.

The Architecture Behind the Acronym

The AI Mission is built on the back of several pillars, each addressing a distinct constraint on adoption. Compute sits at the centre of the issue with about 40,000 GPUs currently available to industry through government channels, priced under a dollar per GPU-hour, though utilisation remains low. The second pillar is focused on skilling through dedicated undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programs in addition to lateral upskilling. The third targets sovereign capability with curated datasets and innovation challenges meant to help Indian companies build their own, smaller models instead of depending entirely on foreign models.

Function Specific Skilling

Capital allocated to AI programs has a higher chance of success when it is function specific. Microsoft's own scaling effort trained more than 200,000 employees on a personal basis: legal, HR and cybersecurity teams each received varied depth and content, calibrated to what their function requires. It is also useful to distinguish between users who need tool-specific training and deployers/validators who need governance literacy to monitor and validate system performance on an ongoing basis. Additionally, teams need to be trained not to trust AI output by default and to gauge whether a use case justifies its resource cost in compute, energy and organisational attention before scaling.

Control Over Residency

Data localisation debates often fixate on where the data physically resides. A more important aspect is control: whether an organisation can continue to access and act on its data regardless of a vendor's infrastructure location or a shift in geopolitical circumstance. Vendor commitments help. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to processing and retaining Microsoft 365 Copilot data within India. However, a contractual assurance does not eliminate the trust deficit created when a vendor restricts or withdraws access to a service for reasons unconnected to the customer relationship. For organisations, the choice of vendor should be judged on contractual and technical control over the data, over jurisdictional residency.

Regulation's Slow Turn Toward Principle

India's regulatory posture on AI has evolved in stages. An earlier attempt at a broader Digital India Act was shelved over concerns that cross-sectoral legislation might become a barrier to innovation. That caution is now giving way to a more principles-based approach, with the government signalling that sectoral rules have been tested long enough to justify a broader framework, though the European Union's risk-based model was flagged as a poor template for India. Agentic systems raise the stakes, especially where they execute chains of micro-decisions without a human in the loop. Evidence of how a decision was reached and the ability to explain, trace and retract it has to be built in from the outset. A government advisory issued earlier this year ruled out cloud deployment for the most sensitive government data categories, and confined sensitive workloads to sovereign qualified infrastructure. A key operating principle for organisations therefore should be to evaluate holistically before scaling, and to treat governance evidence as a deliverable rather than a byproduct.

What Lies Ahead for the Services Model

The original rationale for outsourcing was that companies prefer to concentrate on their core business and use external providers for non-core work. This continues to hold true in an AI world. India's advantages – deep domain knowledge, skilled talent at scale and experience integrating complex, legacy heavy organisations – can feed into new service lines around model selection, governance layer design, data modernisation and ongoing validation. AI will, however, continue to displace jobs and reassign them to those already equipped to use the technology.

The AI mission is building infrastructure, and setting pricing and direction signals. However, it does not aim to assist in deciding which vendor to trust, which use case to fund or when to pause before scaling an autonomous system. Those decisions sit with the companies deploying the technology, well beyond anything a government program can underwrite on their behalf.

. Fireside Chat: Building Antara: Care, Capital and Culture Rajit Mehta , CEO & MD, Antara Senior Care

. India's corner-office generation is approaching a transition it has spent little time preparing for. The infrastructure that quietly supports a working life – drivers, personal assistants and a circle of colleagues – disappears at retirement, often within months, leaving a gap that money cannot fill. Senior living is a system of care, community and design that has to be planned for a decade before it is needed, not assembled in a crisis.

The Planning Gap

Most senior executives are too consumed by the demands of active careers to think about what might follow. As a result, planning for old age is often deferred until a health event or a bereavement forces the question, by which point the range of good options has narrowed considerably. This is really a 10-15 year runway problem: those still fit and active today have the time to choose where and how they will live, but only if such decisions are handled in the present and not deferred to the future.

From Personal Insight to Structural Response

Antara's foundations rest on two observations. The first is that Indian retirement has traditionally subordinated the ageing parent's life to the working children's, producing a slow loss of relevance and purpose that breeds isolation. The second is that ageing is not linear: the gap between a person at 55 and the same person at 65 can be vast, often driven by medical events. Consequently, Antara has built three tiers of offering: independent residences for seniors who are active but want a secure, service-rich community; care homes for those needing daily assistance or recovery support after a medical episode; and dementia-specific centres for advanced cognitive care. In parallel, Antara looks to address, proactively rather than episodically, the five main conditions that define most seniors’ daily lives: joint pain, gut disorders, hypertension, diabetes and general frailty.

Infrastructure as a Clinical Decision

The physical design of an Antara community caters to specific failure points in old age. Sensory lighting reduces the night-time falls that occur most often on the way to the washroom. Washrooms are positioned near lifts, because incontinence is common. Grab bars, antifungal paint and the absence of sharp edges are all standard features. All of this is paired with healthcare facilities that blend conventional medicine with Ayurveda, homeopathy and nutrition, on the premise that most seniors present with more than one condition simultaneously, rather than a single, treatable ailment. On-campus doctors, 24-hour nursing and a standing ambulance embed functioning primary-care into daily life.

The Response Architecture

Antara’s service model is built around rapid response time. Welfare checks get triggered when a resident isn’t seen for 12 hours. In an emergency, first-responder teams are at your door within two-and-a-half minutes, compared to the 25-30 minutes it typically takes to reach a hospital. Deliveries are intercepted at the gate rather than left at a resident's door, and staff are trained under a certified geriatric-care program to recognise behavioural changes in residents, who may be showing early signs of withdrawing, or silently struggling. Throughout, the design intent is to compress the gap between an incident occurring and help arriving, on the understanding that in a genuine emergency, minutes determine outcomes.

Community as the Actual Product

While Antara’s real estate holdings are its visible aspects, its real strength is the community it has built over time. Across its Dehradun, Noida and Gurgaon facilities, it has achieved full operational stability within a year of a project opening. However, the social fabric – shared meals, informal support networks, residents checking in on each other – takes 18-24 months to take shape. A recurring pattern has been friends and former colleagues buying units together, in groups of 7-10, to seed their own community within a larger one. A newer format, developed with Max Estate, places senior living towers alongside conventional residential towers on a shared campus. This addresses a growing need: many prospective residents are looking for proximity to younger generations without necessarily wanting to share amenities with them.

What Cannot be Retrofitted or Automated

Looking to the future, it is clear that technology, including AI, will have a role in scheduling, maintaining records and ensuring operational efficiency. However, the human element – physical presence, judgement calls, an empathetic response to a resident in distress – cannot be substituted. At another level, there are concerns about how India will manage its aging population. Services such as medical response or community programming can, in principle, be extended into an existing residential society, but the physical retrofit that senior living demands cannot be layered onto buildings not designed for it. Additionally, in markets such as Mumbai, high land costs and an established nursing-home culture make Antara’s integrated model harder to replicate, particularly at a certain price point.

The broader takeaway is that senior living, done properly, is an infrastructure and community system that must be designed in advance. It cannot be bought retroactively once frailty sets in. The choice facing today's executives is not whether to plan for this stage of life, but whether to make that choice while they still have the years, and the health, to make it well.

. The Decade Ahead: Where India's Strategic Opportunity Actually Lies Adit Jain, Chairman and Editorial Director, IMA India

. The rules-based international order constructed after WWII is giving way to a world of negotiated access to markets, technology, energy and security in which no single power sets the terms. What matters most for businesses today is knowing which risks dominate, and repositioning accordingly before the ‘music’ stops.

Cycle Risk as the CEO's Central Task

Risk comes in two forms, and each requires a different response. In an upturn, the dominant risk is underinvestment. Capacity takes 18-36 months to build, and businesses that fail to commit early will cede market share to competitors who do. Everything downstream, be it talent, distribution or channel relationships, follows from lost market share – which is really the hardest consequence to reverse. In a downturn, the dominant risk is overextension. The instinct to slash costs uniformly, particularly when driven by an HQ mandate disconnected from local market conditions, removes the wrong people and creates precisely the environment that sends high performers elsewhere.

Goldman Sachs offers the most striking example of how to steady the ship during a downturn. Leading up to the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, the bank's leadership stayed ahead of the pack by listening carefully for signs of ebbing investor excitement. It moved decisively to liquidate bond positions before the rest of the market grasped what was happening. Being first, being smart and being willing to ignore the conventional wisdom proved to be three decisive variables. However, it is important to remember that the right strategy in one cycle is consistently the wrong strategy in another, and companies that navigate successfully are those that shed the previous guidelines early enough to write a new one.

From Rules to Free-Fall: The New Order

The next business cycle will not be shaped by demand conditions or interest rates. Instead, armed conflict, sanctions, tariffs, energy-supply disruptions and political misalignment will be the dominant variables to consider over the next 3-5 years. The geopolitical system is moving from a stable, American-anchored framework to one of managed disorder. Conflicts persist in Ukraine, West Asia and the Taiwan Strait, but so far, the major powers involved continue to pull back before the situation goes entirely out of hand.

A ‘managed disorder’ scenario is the central forecast today, and it runs through 2029 at a minimum. No fundamental realignment is possible before a change in the American administration, and even the November midterms will not materially shift the US foreign policy equation. The White House retains full authority over trade enforcement, sanctions, immigration regulation and the bulk of what constitutes foreign policy regardless of how the Congressional elections go.

Gulf Endgames and the Energy Variable

In the Gulf, there are four possible scenarios that might play out: armed containment, which remains the most probable; a negotiated security bargain, in which nuclear and maritime arrangements are restored to minimum predictability; wider regional escalation; and internal regime stress. The regime change scenario is more plausible in Bahrain (a Sunni monarchy governing a majority Shia population) than in Iran, where American pressure has done what it consistently does: shore up the regime by giving the population something to rally against.

In this managed disorder scenario, oil will hold in the $70–90 range with elevated volatility. Escalation, particularly a Hormuz disruption, could push prices toward $110–130; a 5% supply shortfall would produce a price response far exceeding 5% because of how thin the market's elasticity runs under conditions of physical scarcity. Shipping insurance, route-length premiums and trade cost inflation will have a compounding effect on prices.

China: Stabilisation, Excess Capacity and Taiwan

The base case for China is one of gradual stabilisation. While property prices will remain stressed, and construction activity will be constrained, at a broad level, the system will hold. A more immediate concern is excess capacity. With domestic demand having collapsed in the property bust, Chinese manufacturers are dumping chemicals, ships, cars and electronics across the globe. In turn, this has triggered retaliatory tariffs that will lead to further, worldwide supply chain reorganisation. India's manufacturing sector, particularly the mid-sized MSME exporters in fabricated components and industrial goods, has begun to see the first real inbound interest from American companies looking to reduce their China and Vietnam exposure. However, this presents a narrow window of opportunity, and one that will reward companies that have quietly built up capacity, rather than those scrambling to develop it overnight.

A potential Taiwan crisis might begin with a naval blockade, sealing the island off and disrupting semiconductor supply chains that underpin global manufacturing. This would force the question of whether America will deploy the Seventh Fleet. China's exposure to the US treasury market is a vulnerability, but at the same time, China has a choke-hold over pharmaceutical precursor supplies. Its capacity to redirect bulk drug exports would produce immediate and severe disruption. China has chosen, so far, not to use these instruments, because the act of restraint is itself a form of leverage.

India's Horizon: Rupee, Inflation and Corporate Exposure

For Indian businesses, a managed disorder scenario will mean persistent imported inflation, interest rate pressures and annual rupee depreciation of ~4%. The exchange rate is likely to drift towards 112/$ by 2029 in the base case, and closer to 123/$ under an escalatory scenario. Yet, unlike in the past, today it is capital outflows, not the current account deficit, that is driving down the rupee. Notably, this has turned India's overall balance of payments position negative after a long gap. The rupee, in other words, is now being weakened by the exit of patient capital, which no longer finds the Indian market as attractive as it once did.

India’s deepening relationship with the UAE provides oil supply assurance rather than any price advantage. Its strategic value lies both in the assurance of supply, and in its signalling to Riyadh. Russia remains India's primary military partner by default. The $30 bn debt owed to Russia for oil imports cannot be settled in dollars under the current sanctions, which in turn is forcing a renminbi-mediated workaround that carries its own political and financial costs. Against this backdrop, India will look to recalibrate its economic relationship with China for strategic reasons, including by permitting certain Chinese manufacturing investments. Its dependency on China for its pharmaceutical supply chains, in particular, makes continued estrangement unsustainable.

Geopolitical instability is not a new phenomenon in terms of corporate planning, but it has become the primary variable rather than a side issue. CXOs who continue to plan around demand, interest rates and capacity alone will find themselves consistently surprised by the sequence in which events unfold. Those who instead build geopolitical risk assessment into cycle analysis as a first-order input will be better positioned to make early calls, whether on fresh investments, cost cutting, or measures to protect market share.

. Credit as the Fuel Question: Can India Finance Its Own Growth? Rajeswari Sengupta, Associate Professor of Economics, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

. India's growth ambitions have run well ahead of the financial conditions required to sustain them. Rajeswari Sengupta examined India’s current credit landscape against the arithmetic of building a $30 tn economy by 2047, a goal that implies sustained 8% annual GDP growth for two decades. Meanwhile, commercial credit is currently expanding at 11%, well short of the 18% the GDP target demands. The credit system, as currently structured, is not right-sized for India’s growth ambitions.

The Investment Deficit

Private corporate investment has been stagnant at ~12% of GDP for the last 13 years. Capacity utilisation across industry sits at 74–76%, while new investment cycles have historically required sustained utilisation above 80% to materialise at scale. Today, it is not so much that the economy is being denied credit as much as it is not demanding it . Since the twin balance sheets crisis, corporate leverage has declined steadily, with many profitable firms preferring financial investments over productive expansion. Until demand signals become durable and utilisation climbs, the credit required for an investment revival will remain latent.

Post-pandemic, consumption has been K-shaped: demand for luxury goods, premium vehicles and high-end real estate has held up, particularly amongst higher income groups, while mass market consumption in FMCG, textiles, gems and jewellery has stagnated. The segments producing for the middle of the market are the same MSMEs progressively squeezed from bank lending. They also typically lie below the rating thresholds at which the corporate bond market will engage them.

The Supply Side: A Transition Without Depth

Banks, which provided 70% of all commercial credit in 2015, now account for 53%. NBFCs and the corporate bond market have absorbed some of the slack, their combined share rising from 30% in 2015 to 47% in 2025. In principle, this diversification is healthy: market-based intermediation is a better assessor of credit risk than institutional balance sheets constrained by deposit funding. In practice, the transition has not deepened the market where it most needs to.

Although its share of total credit has doubled from 12% to 25% over the last decade, the corporate bond market remains severely compressed. Government borrowing dominates the overall debt market, accounting for 70% of all outstanding debt instruments, leaving only 30% accessible to the corporate sector. Within that 30%, more than 90% of bond issuances carry AA ratings or above. The median rating on a bank's loan book is BBB. As banks retreat and the bond market expands, MSMEs and lower-rated manufacturers find both these financing channels narrowing simultaneously. Non-financial corporates, the firms that create investment, jobs and productive capacity, access only 25% of bond financing; the rest flows to NBFCs, predominantly government-owned PSUs.

NBFCs have upped their share of total credit from 16% in 2015 to 21% in 2025. They can lend below AA where banks will not, but more than two-thirds of NBFC credit flows to the retail sector, not to businesses. Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) represent a more promising development, growing at 25-30% annually between FY21 and FY25. They can deploy into the A to BB range that the banking system and bond market both effectively exclude. However, they face a regulatory obstacle: the RBI and SEBI remain locked in a jurisdictional dispute over which regulator governs the AIF space, generating compliance uncertainty that raises the cost of operating precisely where the market most obviously needs to scale.

The Employment Root

India's labour force participation rate stands at 40-41%, against a global average of 60% and China's 70%. Female labour force participation is abysmally low at 11%. Within the 15-25 age-group, unemployment exceeds 45%. In the post-pandemic period, 80 mn workers have returned to agriculture, reversing the sort of transformation that a modernising economy requires. Agriculture still employs roughly 42% of the workforce, despite being one of the least productive sectors.

Net household financial savings have fallen from over 7% of GDP in 2015 to ~5% in 2025, a 50-year low, while household debt has risen to 41% of GDP. Rather than being a portfolio-allocation issue, this decline reflects stagnant income growth. Real wages have stalled and borrowing increasingly finances consumption. Half of all retail credit extended by banks – mainly credit card debt, personal loans and EMI financed consumption with no underlying assets – is unsecured. In a mainly domestically-financed economy, where 95% of credit originates from within, the reservoir from which lendable funds are drawn is thinning precisely when investment needs to accelerate.

The Foreign Capital Impasse

The arithmetic makes external financing unavoidable. Raising investment from its current 30% of GDP to the 36-40% required for sustained 8% growth demands roughly $240 bn in additional annual savings that domestic households cannot supply at present income levels. FDI as a share of GDP peaked at 3.8% in 2008 but then declined to below 1% in 2025. The anticipated benefit from China+1 supply chain diversification has largely not accrued to India; Vietnam's FDI-to-GDP ratio stands at 5%. Foreign portfolio investors have been withdrawing from Indian equity markets as valuations corrected from levels that corporate earnings could not justify.

External commercial borrowings (ECBs) offer a partial answer. Borrowing in dollars, however, requires the ability to hedge currency exposure on the balance sheet and the regulatory actions of 2023–24 (requiring disclosure of underlying exposures) removed speculative participation, which would have provided market depth. The exchange-traded currency derivatives market is underdeveloped. Indian firms wishing to borrow externally carry significant unhedged currency exposure and the rupee has continued to depreciate regardless of periodic RBI assurances. For mid-sized companies already shut out of the bond market and the banking system, the option of building multinational corporate structures to access overseas capital markets is therefore limited.

The Infrastructure Gap and the Bond Market Imperative

Bank balance sheets are unsuited to finance long-term infrastructure as the average deposit maturity runs to 3-4 years while the average infrastructure project takes 10-15 years to mature. After a decade of NPA stress concentrated in project lending, no bank is today willing to take significant infrastructure exposure at scale. The government has stepped in at the construction stage, building roads and monetising completed assets through REITs and InvITs to good effect. But roads are not the entirety of India's infrastructure need. Ports, airports and railways have received less attention and investment. Closing those gaps requires long-term pools of capital that only a deep and broad bond market can supply. However, India's corporate bond market stands at $645 bn (16-18% of GDP), far smaller than China’s (37% of GDP) or those in the US and UK (over 50%).

The Demographic Window

India has a working age population of 1.1 bn and a median workforce age of 29. These are, however, finite-duration assets. Over the next two decades, the population will age, the dependency ratio will shift and the labour supply dividend that currently distinguishes India from developed economies will narrow. It is essential that young workers find productive employment, that household incomes rise, savings accumulate and credit channels those savings into investment at scale. The capacity to act on the credit gap and the window to translate demographic advantage into productive capital are not separately timed; they are the same window.

. Beyond ESG: Building Compassion into Business Design Parag Agarwal , Advisor to Chairman, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories & Co-founder, India Animal Fund

. The domain of ESG has widened steadily over the past decade, absorbing climate, governance, supply chain ethics and social equity into the corporate vocabulary. However, the welfare of animals, embedded throughout food, pharmaceutical and materials supply-chains, remains on the sidelines. This must change, if ESG is to be as all-encompassing as its proponents would hope.

The Scale of the Blind Spot

More than 1.5 billion animals play a part in India's modern supply chains. Across categories, invasive and largely unnatural means are being deployed to maximise output from them. This has consequences that extend well beyond the animals themselves, into the aggregate environmental burden, and in terms of liquid waste, solid waste and methane emissions. Animal welfare is routinely siloed-off as an ‘ethical’ concern, which is precisely why it struggles to gain traction in corporate sustainability agendas. Approximately 15-22% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originate from animal agriculture. A significant share of the antibiotics that reach humans through animal products feed directly into the antimicrobial resistance crisis.

Narratives that Must Shift

The tendency to reduce animal welfare to a question of personal diets, or to relegate it to a charitable concern, has kept it from entering the mainstream institutional discourse. The issue demands a fundamental reframing, and requires moving away from personal dietary choices and isolated charitable efforts towards a systemic understanding of how animals are treated and why this matters. The consequences, for public health, climate change and food security, are far too broad to be carried just by select NGOs. The historical arc, from the abolition of slavery through women's suffrage to LGBTQ recognition, suggests that the gradual expansion of moral consideration is more a matter of direction than ideology.

The Institutional Architecture

India Karuna Collaborative (‘karuna’ means ‘compassion’) brings together over 50 organisations working across nutrition, alternative protein, ethical supply chain certification and policy engagement. More than 100 corporate leaders have signed a founding pledge affirming that animals are sentient beings, that human, animal and planetary wellbeing are interconnected, and committing themselves to act within their individual capacity. The pledge is deliberately non-prescriptive. The breadth of signatories, spanning religious affiliations, varied dietary practices and linked to different industries, is a design choice: no movement that demands ideological or demographic uniformity will achieve the scale that change of this order requires.

The Directional Implication

Animal welfare is moving from the periphery of ESG to a more central role, carried by the same forces that normalised climate disclosure a decade ago: consumer consciousness, supply chain scrutiny and the gradual build-up of regulatory expectations. The systems that govern how animals are treated are, after all, human constructs and they are capable of being redesigned. Organisations that begin that working in this direction are bound to be better placed than those that wait for the mandate to find them.

. India's Growth Story: What the Numbers Actually Say Ajay Shah, Co-founder, XKDR Forum

. A precise reading of India's macroeconomy requires both the right framework and the right data. Ajay Shah presented an inputs-outputs-outcomes framework grounded in three independent investment datasets, granular household survey data, and a forensic analysis of the macro policy environment. His findings paint a picture of an economy that is increasingly supported by exports, but one whose investment cycle has not fully recovered.

The Investment Reckoning

India's national accounts data indicate relatively steady consumption and government expenditure but modest net exports. Fluctuations in GDP growth appear to be almost entirely led by private investment. In this regard, the CMIE Capex database, which aggregates the value of every private sector project under active implementation at any point in time, shows a collapse that began in 2011 and ran for nearly a decade. A turning point arrived in 2020-21, and by mid-2026, the pipeline had recovered to ~$840 bn in real terms, roughly where it stood in 2013. A more recent plateau – visible in the last few quarters – is mainly the result of global trade disruption.

Net fixed assets (NFA) from audited company filings confirm this finding: between 1991 and 2011, aggregate NFA across the Indian corporate sector peaked at 30% YoY growth; nothing since has come close. Net FDI, in real dollar terms, has been largely flat for the last fourteen years, though 2022-23 saw a sharp contraction that has not yet been reversed in any meaningful sense.

The Export Exception

Against this backdrop, one clear positive stands out. Excluding petroleum products and gold, which track commodity prices and capital flows rather than manufacturing capability, India now exports goods and services of about $66 bn a month. (By comparison, back in 1993, $1 bn a month in merchandise exports was viewed as a benchmark.) Another useful measure to track is the ratio of Chinese-to-Indian-goods-exports into the United States. In 2007, Chinese goods reaching American shores were 10 times larger by value than Indian goods. By December 2025, that ratio had narrowed to 2.5. This shift reflects the cumulative effect of Indian firms learning to compete internationally, accelerated by a shift in US trade policy, which has raised the cost base of Chinese supply chains. India has gained ground, but given the scale of global supply chain reorientation under way, it could have gained more.

Labour, Income and Sentiment

The labour market is where these two trends (rising exports, tepid investment) should converge, but so far, the outcomes are mixed. CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids survey, which meets 170,000 households three times a year, recorded 439 mn people in employment as of June 2026. In a country of 1.4 bn, that signals a huge deficit in participation. Amongst college graduates, 49% were in paid work on any given day in 2025, and female labour force participation remained consistently low.

Household consumption continues to grow steadily. Median expenditure, going by the CMIE Consumer Pyramids panel data, stood at Rs 17,316 a month in 2025, growing at ~4% a year since 2014. The median is a more reliable measure than per-capita GDP because at the upper end, respondents do not open their door; and at the lower end, pavement dwellers and nomadic communities lie outside the survey's reach. What the median captures is the vast middle. In this regard, a 4% real CAGR in median household expenditure, set against a 49% employment rate for college graduates, points to an economy where the gains are becoming increasingly concentrated. Consumer sentiment, tracked daily by CMIE, corroborates this story. Having recovered fully from the pandemic collapse, the index held broadly stable through 2025. However, urban confidence has been on a declining path since early 2026, a signal worth monitoring.

The Incomplete Framework

To a degree, slowing or stagnant investment into India is a function of incomplete economic reforms. Every developed economy operates on a common macroeconomic framework, built around a freely floating exchange rate, an open capital account and inflation targeting. Together, they remove the greatest sources of planning uncertainty for firms and enable the cross-border activity on which growth depends. India achieved the third of these goals back in 2015, when, for the first time, the RBI was given a clear mandate of maintaining inflation in the band 2-6%. The outcome is visible: the era of 7% average inflation is plainly over.

However, the other two elements remain incomplete. Annualised $/Rs volatility in July 2026 stood at 6.8%, well below the ~9% recorded during the only period the RBI genuinely allowed the market to set the price. (The rupee depreciated from Rs 83 to about Rs 96 against the dollar between mid-2023 and mid-2026, restoring India's real effective exchange rate competitiveness against China to roughly its 2013 level. There is no principled case for resisting it.) On capital account openness, the Chinn-Ito dataset places India at the 40 th percentile globally, lower in relative terms than its position in 1970. The friction this imposes on cross-border activity is effectively a tax on the very forces of globalisation that are driving India's strong export performance.

Translating this to Enterprise-Level Strategy

The best-performing businesses tend to be those most deeply connected to the world and least dependent on the Indian state. A strong outward orientation correlates with every dimension of firm quality: access to capital, competitive exposure, depth of knowledge. In India, the average performers tend to be mainly domestic in orientation; the ‘good’ ones export; but the best ones undertake outbound FDI and embed themselves in global value chains. Firms should actively seek opportunities where the state’s role is limited. This is because, in areas where the government effectively serves as a central planner, global competitiveness is harder to achieve.

Looking ahead, three global megatrends will define business opportunities in the next decade:

A defence spending surge following the structural shift in European security

The clean energy transition, which will retire fossil fuels at scale within a generation

The AI investment cycle.

Wright's Law, which holds that productivity rises with cumulative experience in a single domain, argues for depth over diversification. Firms that compound expertise over long periods build advantages that lateral moves tend to erode. On a different note, Indian firms tend to concentrate decision-making too heavily at the apex. In a complex environment, the information needed to navigate any given shock lives at the margins of an organisation, not at its centre. Distributing analytical authority, through boards that function as genuine checks on management and leadership teams with real latitude, builds the organisational resilience that strategy requires. The best way to get ahead will be for businesses to think deeply about where they are going rather than simply how fast they are running.

. Fireside Chat: Building India: How Infrastructure and Energy Capital Actually Flows Sanjiv Aggarwal, Managing Director, National Investment and Infrastructure Fund

. India’s infrastructure financing needs outstrip what the government’s balance sheet can support on its own. Moreover, public capital deployed into long-term projects carries an implicit cost. The question of how to assemble commercially-governed, long-term capital for infrastructure, at a scale that matches India’s investment needs, was the subject of a session with Sanjiv Aggarwal, Managing Director of the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), which examined both, the structural logic of the NIIF and the realities of deploying capital in the Indian environment.

The Architecture of Blended Capital

NIIF was established in 2015 as an independent fund manager with the Government of India contributing 49% and the balance 51% being raised from international as well as domestic institutional investors. This structure served two purposes simultaneously. First, it aimed to catalyse international institutional capital into India. Second, it created a governance mechanism grounded in market return expectations rather than public mandate.

Today, NIIF’s major investors include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Ontario Teachers, AustralianSuper, Temasek, PSP, CPPIB, , the US Development Finance Corporation, HDFC Group, ICICI Bank and Kotak. A 10-member Board governs the organisation; the Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs chairs it as one of the two government nominees. The Investment Committee is composed of senior NIIF employees and operates independently. Crucially, NIIF is a commercially mandated investor. Given that 51% of its contribution comes from foreign capital, NIIF must meet international benchmarks for equity returns or forfeit the ability to raise subsequent funds.

NIIF’s overall AUM is approaching $8 bn. Its flagship infrastructure strategy accounts for approximately $4.5-5.5 bn; fund-of-funds for $1.5–1.7 bn; and a climate-focused private equity strategy for some $600–700 mn. Its climate pool goes into technology and manufacturing along the energy transition value chain (with current investment in EVs, bus manufacturing and commercial last-mile mobility), as private equity positions rather than as hard infrastructure assets.

The Dollar Return Standard: Capital on International Terms

NIIF adheres to a strict governance constraint: funds must target dollar returns commensurate to international investor expectations in order to attract them as investors. None of these are captive providers of capital to India; rather, they allocate across geographies and fund managers on the basis of risk-adjusted return. India must compete on those terms, or it will not receive the required capital.

Construction Risk as a Return Engine

NIIF bridges the gap between operating asset yields and IRR requirements in infrastructure by deliberately absorbing construction risk. By bidding for greenfield infrastructure projects, managing the complexity of the construction phases, and then selling the completed, operating asset to a buyer with a lower cost of equity, NIIF captures the yield compression between entry and exit. This is a strategy that NIIF describes as ‘value add’ – adding return through the acceptance and management of construction-phase risk.

This model demands discipline across three stages: winning bids at the right price, ensuring that the construction work adheres to budgets and schedules, and securing the right buyer for the completed asset at the right valuation. NIIF’s track record on its renewable energy exits, and three road projects demonstrates that the model works.

Execution Risk and the Cost of Complexity

India’s infrastructure investment environment is characterised by a persistent gap between the risks that developers absorb and the returns that the market awards for absorbing them. Arguably, India does not adequately price the execution risks inherent in infrastructure development. Competitive bidding drives returns to levels that presuppose unrealistic execution ability.

An example of this can be found in Andhra Pradesh, a change of government resulted in the freezing of power purchase agreements (PPAs), leaving contracted solar investments with no revenue stream until the matter was resolved through litigation some years later.

The reality is that infrastructure investments in India are executed at the state level, and the operating environment varies sharply by state and by administration. India’s infrastructure market will attract the scale of international long-term capital it requires only when the returns on offer more accurately reflect the risks on the ground.

. The Next Supply-Chain Shock: The Critical Minerals Chokepoint Rajat Verma, Founder, Lohum

. The periodic table has not changed in over a century. However, the economic and geopolitical architecture constructed on top of it have changed. So has the degree to which a small set of critical elements is processed in a single country. This extreme concentration constitutes a dependency for virtually every frontier industry in the world. Critical minerals lie at the very centre of India's industrial and strategic calculus, and the country's exposure is both more acute and more deeply embedded in corporate supply chains than most businesses recognise.

The Invisible Substrate

Critical minerals are the substrate on which all frontier sectors depend. A data centre requires tens of thousands of tons of copper alongside a range of less familiar elements to deliver the computing capacity that underpins AI. A commercial satellite cannot reach low-Earth orbit without such materials. Pacemakers and orthopaedic implants depend on tantalum, cobalt, chromium and platinum group metals. From defence systems and renewable energy infrastructure to semiconductor fabrication, electric mobility and healthcare devices, every category of industrial activity traces, within a few steps of the supply chain, to critical minerals. America has drawn down 14 years of critical mineral stockpiles through its recent defence deployments in West Asia; China, which supplies the overwhelming majority of those inputs, is not positioned to replenish them willingly. Have organisations mapped out where their dependencies lie?

China's Engineered Dominance

The degree to which critical mineral supply chains converge on a single country, and the deliberate, multi-decade effort that produced that convergence, is what generates business risk. China's position in critical minerals is not the product of geographic fortune. As far back as 1950, it declared that mining was a core vector of national power. China commissioned its first lithium plant in 1958 and its first battery-grade lithium refinery in 1992. In the 1960s, it maintained over 110,000 geologists. In comparison, the Geological Survey of India employs just 6,000 geologists today. China has built 400 distinct rare earth products to 1,000 specifications, against 5-8 products across most Western countries. Its share of the global rare earth industry has gone from 50% as recently as 2015 to 94% today. Critically, this dominance is insulated by intellectual property as much as by capacity: approximately 80% of the roughly 25,000 rare earth patents filed globally in the past decade belong to Chinese institutions. Strikingly, these patents have been filed across countries – South Korea, Japan, Germany and the US – that have historically led in industrial innovation. A shutdown of Chinese critical mineral exports would affect an estimated $6.5 tn of global economic output, and China has already begun exercising that leverage by restricting rare earth exports for defence applications.

India's Squandered Parity

India established its first rare earth processing operation in 1952, a year before China established its own. The starting line was, in effect, identical. Today, India holds a double-digit share of global critical mineral resources by geological endowment; its processing capacity represents just 0.6% of global output. The country has been exporting raw rare earth concentrates to Japan for decades and importing back the finished magnets, an arrangement that captures neither the value nor the strategic utility of the underlying asset. This gap arose from the failure to think through the full value chain, from ore to processing to advanced materials to downstream industries, in the way China did systematically across seven decades. The result is that India enters the critical minerals era as a resource-rich, process-poor nation that is, in certain product categories, entirely dependent on the country whose strategic interests are most divergent from its own.

The Compounding Problem of Process Knowledge

Catching up in the domain of critical-mineral refinement will require India to either develop or import vast amounts of process knowledge. Copper beneficiation, for instance, involves some 30-40 sequential steps. Rare earth separation requires closer to a thousand, distributed across hundreds of interconnected facilities, with each step demanding precise chemical, metallurgical and material science interventions to advance purity from trace concentrations in raw ore to 99.9% in the refined product. This process knowledge compounds through experience; it cannot simply be willed into reality. In a tier-three Chinese processing city, the factory floor may employ 20 workers while the R&D department houses 300 — an inversion of priorities that reflects decades of deliberate capability investment rather than scale alone. China also updates its process technology on roughly a six-month cycle, which means the cost and quality advantages it holds are not static targets. For India, the implication is that acquiring Chinese-made processing equipment (a common instinct) does not acquire the embedded knowledge that makes that equipment competitive. The muscle memory ought to be built.

A Differentiated Strategic Path

The math makes it implausible for India to replicate China’s strategy. A single Chinese facility may produce 50,000 tons of magnets annually; India's national capacity target is 7,200 tons. A more viable path is differentiation: identifying the segments where Chinese dominance is most tenuous, and where India might compete on technology rather than scale. Of the highest-value, commercially realised applications in the rare earth sector – those defined by commercialisation rather than by papers published – approximately 81% do not belong to China. The high-complexity, high-margin frontier is relatively open.

The levers India can credibly pull are R&D investment, pursued with genuine long-term orientation rather than near-term process returns; circular economy development, which retains mineral value already within national boundaries and could address up to 20% of national need; and diplomatic investments in resource-holding countries, primarily in Africa, South America and Australia, where access to assets must be earned through capital commitment. On the policy side, the National Critical Minerals Mission has committed several trillion rupees, in mission mode, across five ministries. However, its stockpiling budget of Rs 5 bn is a fraction of America's $12 bn, and remains a key constraint on the sector's ability to operate with a price floor.

Most organisations may not have direct critical mineral exposure – most will have it at an N–2 or N–3 level, such as in the supply chains of their suppliers, or the suppliers of their suppliers. Yet, whether it is electricity reaching an office; the computing equipment used within it; or raw materials sourced several tiers below the visible supply chain, the dependency runs deeper than most firms would recognise. The work of carefully mapping all of this is, though, a growing operational imperative.

. A World in Transition: India's Strategic Position and What It Means for Business Suhasini Haidar, Diplomatic Editor, The Hindu

. Six years of consecutive global shocks have fundamentally changed the operating reality for most businesses. Consequently, after sitting at the margins of corporate planning for decades, geopolitical risk now lies at its centre. To prepare for the decade ahead, organisations must rebuild their planning architecture around disruption as a permanent operating condition. They will need to adjust supply chains, energy sourcing, scenario horizons and regional relationships accordingly, rather than waiting for a ‘solution’ that may be unavailable to them.

Six Shocks: The Accumulation

The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, was, at the time, wrongly viewed as a one-off crisis. For most of the world outside Europe, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 appeared to be a bounded regional conflict. The October 7 th attacks and the invasion of Gaza in 2023 arrived at a moment of accumulated fatigue. Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in 2025 reconfigured trade relationships that had been stable for decades. The US-Israel strikes on Iran earlier this year, followed by Iranian retaliation against Gulf states, have changed the energy and security calculus of the entire region. For India, these global shocks were overlaid with some of its own: China’s aggression along the LaC in 2020, and last year’s Pahalgam/Operation Sindhoor crisis.

In 2024, the world recorded 61 active conflicts involving states across 36 countries, the highest figure since 1946. The IMF's World Uncertainty Index, World Sentiment Index and World Trade Uncertainty Index each touched historic extremes in January 2026. The discomfort that business leaders are experiencing today thus reflects an accumulation of disruption, not merely a phase that will resolve when the current cycle ends.

Conflict Without Rules or Resolution

The changing nature of conflict compounds the sort of operational challenges businesses face. Wars are now initiated without causal action of the kind that international law has historically recognised. The US Secretary of State acknowledged, at the time of the Iran strikes, that Iran posed no direct threat to the US; the justification rested on a conditional scenario about what might follow if a third party attacked Iran first. Today’s wars also have no definitive ending. There is no surrender of arms, no unambiguous moment of resolution. For organisations used to planning around predictable timelines, this is a new source of uncertainty.

New means of warfare are also widening the affected surface area. AI-enabled targeting has been used against civilian infrastructure. Nuclear facilities have been struck during the Ukraine conflict, raising fears of wider repercussions. The information battlespace has become a fourth theatre in its own right. This became clear when Iran fabricated footage in the early months of the conflict, circulated it widely and achieved real persuasive effect. Resources – whether water, critical minerals or energy corridors – have become tangible instruments of war.

In this environment, India finds itself managing multiple challenges at once, from continent-sized border issues to maritime exposure and energy dependencies that run through the Gulf. None of these map cleanly onto the Western alliance architecture through which most of these conflicts are being mediated.

India's Concentrated Exposure

The Hormuz blockade has given India a clear inventory of its vulnerabilities. The country imports 85% of its oil, 50% of its LNG and 100% of its potash via supply chains routed through or adjacent to the Gulf. 50% of India's remittances originate from the approximately 10 mn Indian nationals living and working in the region. IMF projections made in March 2026, before the conflict's duration was apparent, estimated a GDP decline of ~0.3% if the blockade ended by April; if it continued to December, that figure would be closer to 2.5%. The distributional impact is more troubling still. Agricultural households, already contending with fertiliser shortages, record temperatures and a deficient monsoon, face a projected income decline of 27%.

Shipping is one dimension that has received less attention than it should. 15% of the global merchant navy's workforce is Indian. Scarred by the experiences of the last few months, many shipping firms will refuse to return to the Strait of Hormuz at pre-conflict routing volumes without a credible, institutionalised security mechanism being put in place. The Iran-Oman framework for joint management of the Strait, referenced in the US-Iran MoU, represents the basis for such an architecture. Whether the MoU holds is uncertain; that some such mechanism is a precondition for normal traffic resuming is not.

Five Drivers

Five sets of dynamics will drive geopolitics in the medium-term:

The US-China relationship , specifically its AI governance dimension. Both countries are building bilateral frameworks that would effectively lock other nations out of frontier research. India has the required talent pool, but has not retained enough of it at the research level to negotiate from strength.

Shifting political sentiment across the Arab world. The response to Gaza has been more sustained, and more politically consequential, than most governments anticipated, and the Arab people are far less comfortable than before with the old alliances. India's positions at the UN are being read in this new light.

Volatile unilateral sanctions , which differ in character from UN-mandated instruments. India’s oil-sourcing experience of the last two years, swinging between Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan crude as US policy repeatedly changed direction, captures the cost of this volatility. There is no reason to assume the next two years will be any different.

The formation of regional blocs. Every major trade region is deepening internal integration. The EU-Mercosur agreement, the first struck between two blocs rather than two countries, illustrates where global trade is headed. By comparison, India's inter-regional trade sits below 5%, against a global norm of 40-60% for comparable regions. This creates risks that will only grow in the years to come.

Connectivity. As global supply chains fragment into regional ones, connectivity has become both, more important and less reliable. Every corridor India has planned over the last decade, from Chabahar to IMEC, now carries higher execution risk than when it was conceived.

The Neighbourhood as Imperative

India’s immediate neighbourhood is arguably the single most important strategic investment it can make. Yet, for the last 15 years, India has been doing so at a declining rate. In 2008, it outranked China on trade, investment, tourism and educational flows with most of its South Asian neighbours. By 2018, that relationship had reversed in every category, except in terms of trade volumes with Bhutan and Nepal. Nor were China's gains purely a function of higher expenditure. They were also a function of India making itself progressively harder to access through visa regimes, constrained student intake and a security-first framing of neighbourhood relationships that crowds out economic integration.

The case for a strategic rethink is clear. South Asia shares a single air shed, from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean. Any serious approach to air quality improvement therefore requires coordinated action across the region, because, for instance, Bhutan and the Maldives absorb polluted air from Indian and Pakistani industry that they have no means to address independently. Food security, climate adaptation and labour market management all have efficient regional solutions. In this context, India's limited trade with its neighbours is a gap that will become increasingly costly as the world splinters into blocs.

Looking ahead, the near-abroad will either serve as a platform from which India can build durable regional influence, or as a source of periodic disruptions that interrupt whatever momentum it manages to build. A Pahalgam, a border escalation, a political crisis in Colombo or Dhaka: each of these events, in recent years, has cost India more in diplomatic capital and regional standing than what previous efforts yielded.

. Why Your Organisation Will Resist the Transformation You Want Biju Dominic, Chief Evangelist at Fractal Analytics

. Modern organisations invest heavily in analytics, formal controls and leadership frameworks, aiming to improve decision-making and execution. The reality is that they often fall short of target. Breakdowns occur most often in environments rich in data and experience, where intent is clearly articulated. These failures endure despite improvements in data quality, systems and managerial capability. The blame for this falls chiefly on organisational models that assume that data directly shapes decisions, even though, in practice, behaviour is driven largely by forces operating beyond conscious awareness.

Why Data Rarely Shapes Decisions as Intended

Targets, dashboards, incentives, safety protocols and engagement metrics are all designed on the assumption that information influences behaviour in a predictable manner. The persistence of decision failures, however, suggests a recurring gap between knowledge and behaviour. Across contexts, individuals often understand what the data indicates and recognise the consequences of ignoring it, but their behaviour may diverge from what the facts might suggest. For instance, despite providing continuous feedback on steps walked, sleep duration and other health indicators, wearable health technologies have had only limited impact on user behaviour.

The evidence cuts across domains:

Click-through rates have collapsed from 44% in 1994 to 2.4% in 2023, despite decades of investment in digital analytics and hyper personalisation.

New product failure rates are steady at ~90%, unchanged over three decades.

The Covid-19 vaccine is a definitive case: a global system achieved delivery to every healthcare centre within months but could not get people to take it.

Awareness, Intent and the Execution Gap

These gaps persist because approaches to behaviour in management, marketing and policy remain rooted in classical economic and psychological models, which treat individuals as rational and consciously deliberative. Training programs, communication campaigns and research instruments are all designed on this premise. Consistently-high (75-90%) failure rates for change initiatives suggest that these models systematically overestimate the role of conscious reasoning in shaping behaviour. Antibiotics, for instance, represent some of the most significant breakthroughs in modern medicine, but non-adherence and self-medication demonstrate that the constraint lies in how behaviour is governed in practice, and not in some sort of ‘knowledge deficit’.

The same gap appears in cybersecurity. Organisations invest heavily in training employees not to hand over credentials, yet digital fraud now surpasses drug trafficking as the world's leading crime income. The constraint is the architecture of the situation overwhelming conscious resistance and not intelligence.

Biological Constraints on Decision Making

Human decision-making is constrained by biology in ways that organisational models rarely factor in. The brain continuously processes vast amounts of information, while conscious decision-making operates within a narrow bandwidth. Of the millions of bits of information processed each second, only a tiny fraction reaches conscious awareness. As a result, decisions are frequently taken before conscious reasoning enters the frame. In fast-moving contexts such as driving, sports or everyday consumer choice, decisions are made in milliseconds. Even decisions perceived as complex are often resolved within seconds, usually unfolding outside of any conscious ‘control’. These biological constraints become visible in everyday risk behaviour. Large, fast-moving objects such as trains were invented only recently in relation to eons of human evolution. The human brain has not (yet) adapted to accurately process such threats – which helps explain continued risk-taking at railway crossings or in accident-prone road segments.

The 2010 Air India Express crash at Mangalore illustrates the diagnostic precision neuroscience makes possible. A captain with over 10,000 flying hours and 17 prior landings at the airport ignored nine automated warnings to abort. An analysis framed as ‘pilot error’ produces no usable solution. A biological framing identifies sleep inertia: adenosine-based deep sleep suppresses neural responsiveness for a defined window after waking, regardless of experience. The SOP for handover at table-top airports was subsequently changed from 13 to 40 minutes before landing. The diagnosis of cause determined the design of the fix.

Context, Cues and the Moment of Action

If decisions are shaped largely outside conscious awareness, influence must operate where action occurs rather than where intentions are formed. In retail environments, product choices are often made in seconds (and unconsciously), leaving little room for deliberation. Communication or training delivered far from the moment of decision, therefore, has limited effect. Office layouts, canteen design, workflows, signages and physical movement patterns all exert greater influence over behaviour than any stated/written policies. The flipside is that modest contextual changes can result in profound behaviour changes, without the need for conscious engagement. Some examples of how the environment is the intervention include:

Railway visual markers that align with motion-detection systems dramatically reduce fatalities.

Highway line-spacing that compresses visually creates an illusion of speed and triggers braking.

Motivation, Anticipation and Organisational Culture

Neurologically, engagement is driven less by the reward itself and more by the anticipation of what might happen. Dopamine surges most strongly under conditions of uncertainty and variable outcomes, which helps explain compulsive smartphone checking and responsiveness to intermittent digital cues. An unexpected reward produces approximately 400% higher dopamine release than an equivalent predictable one. If intermittent recognition is neurologically far more potent than the salary cycle, the question is why reward structures remain anchored to the calendar.

A 1999 Kerala High Court ruling prohibiting smoking in public spaces changed the social environment in which the habit operated. Behaviour that information campaigns had failed to shift for decades responded rapidly when the context shifted. For organisations, this has clear motivational consequences:

Predictable annual appraisals dull engagement rather than strengthen it.

Variable and intermittent reinforcement sustains behavioural momentum.

Curiosity-driven learning outperforms linear content delivery.

Immediate recognition outperforms distant promise.

Implications for Leadership in a Data-Rich World

As organisations increasingly deploy AI, these behavioural constraints will become increasingly consequential. Leaders therefore need to design environments, systems and cues that work with human biology rather than against it. In 1900, David Hilbert presented 23 unsolved problems to the global mathematics community; the intellectual output of the following century was shaped by those questions. Leaders face an analogous transition: the age in which authority derived from having answers has run its course. What organisations need now are questions compelling enough to direct collective energy, questions that make not-knowing feel purposeful and make learning an outcome rather than a directive. In an environment where AI processes information at scale, the capacity to ask the right question is a scarce and increasingly consequential resource.