What we found instead was a much bigger question about how Indians are practising religion today.

Tanvi Dessai sat down with Prashant Sachan, Founder and CEO of AppsForBharat, to talk about everything from online pujas and temple access to why younger Indians may not be less religious at all. Somewhere in that conversation, one thing became clear: faith is not disappearing from modern life. It is finding new ways to fit into it.

The Bite:

There is a particular kind of relationship Indians have with faith that does not disappear just because life gets busier.

You can move cities, work late, live abroad, spend half your day staring at a screen and still have a mother reminding you to visit the temple before something important. You still know which puja is done for what, which day belongs to which god, which temple the family wants to visit once a year. The routine may get inconsistent, but the instinct stays.

For a long time, that instinct depended heavily on being physically present. You travelled, waited in line, found the right priest, carried the offering, did the ritual, brought the prasad home. If you could not make the trip, you simply missed it or asked someone else to do it for you.

Except people are no longer willing to leave it at that.

If the intent is there but the trip is not possible, they are finding another way to participate. The same generation that orders groceries in ten minutes and books flights from bed is beginning to expect access to faith with the same ease. Not because the temple has become less important, but because the journey to it is becoming negotiable.

Except physical pilgrimage is getting busier at the same time.

India recorded about 1.28 billion domestic tourist visits in 2014. By 2024, that had climbed to roughly 2.95 billion. Individual destinations, though, make the shift easier to see.

Uttar Pradesh recorded about 48 crore tourist visits in 2023 and nearly 65 crore in 2024. Ayodhya alone went from around 5.76 crore visitors in 2023 to 16.44 crore in 2024 after the Ram Mandir opened. Varanasi rose from roughly 10.19 crore to 11.01 crore, while Mathura went from about 7.79 crore to 9.01 crore.

Vaishno Devi gives us a longer view. The shrine received 78.03 lakh yatris in 2014 and 94.84 lakh in 2024. It had actually crossed one crore pilgrims in 2011 and 2012, so the journey has not been a neat straight line. But the recovery was quick. Vaishno Devi went from 55.88 lakh yatris in 2021 to more than 91 lakh in 2022, and has stayed around the 95 lakh mark since.

People are searching for these places more too.

MakeMyTrip found that searches for spiritual destinations from tier-2 and tier-3 cities rose 97% over two years. And this was not being driven by one destination alone. Ayodhya saw the sharpest jump, but interest was also rising rapidly across Ujjain, Kedarnath, Badrinath, Mathura and several other pilgrimage centres.

This looks less like people losing interest in pilgrimage and more like people finding more ways to fit it into modern life.

Part of that growth is practical. Religious travel is easier than it used to be. Roads have improved, flights have expanded, hotels can be booked in minutes, trains can be tracked on a phone and UPI has removed the need to carry cash for every small payment.

The government has spent years building around pilgrimage too. Under the PRASHAD scheme, 46 projects worth ₹1,621.14 crore had been sanctioned across 29 sites by August 2024. The programme has funded tourist facilities, sanitation and better access around religious destinations.

Still, there is only so much infrastructure can solve.

A family in Bengaluru can want to visit Tirupati, Ujjain, Kashi and Ayodhya without being able to turn every religious occasion into a three-day trip. There is leave to arrange, tickets to book, elderly parents to manage, children to bring along, hotels to find and queues that can stretch for hours once you finally arrive.

The desire can be frequent even when the journey cannot be.

Prashant Sachan, founder of AppsForBharat, describes the shift this way:

“Every behaviour that is important to human beings now has a digital footprint. Devotion is an important part of people’s lives too.”

And people had started building that digital footprint long before devotional apps arrived.

Around 2000, websites such as EPrarthana and Saranam were already helping NRIs pay for pujas at temples in India. A priest would perform the ritual here while the devotee sat somewhere else in the world. Prasad would later be mailed to them.

EPrarthana claimed access to around 1,250 Indian temples at the time. Siddhivinayak in Mumbai had also gone online around 1998. By 2000, its website had reportedly received one crore hits, with traffic climbing to as many as 60,000 visitors a day during Ganesh festival.

For someone living a few kilometres from a temple, this could feel like a novelty. For someone living in Chicago, it solved a fairly real problem.

This remained relatively niche, useful mostly for the diaspora or people who could not travel. Covid widened the audience.

When temples shut their doors in 2020, the rituals did not stop. Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams began offering online participation in Kalyanotsavam and later experimented with other virtual sevas. Siddhivinayak introduced pujas over video calls. State temple boards livestreamed aartis. Religious institutions that had spent years using the internet mostly for information suddenly had to use it for participation.

And unlike lockdown sourdough, some of that behaviour survived.

AppsForBharat’s Sri Mandir is one of the clearest examples of how quickly it scaled. By mid-2025, the app had crossed 40 million downloads and was serving roughly 3.5 million monthly active users. Over the previous 12 months, 1.2 million devotees had completed about 5.2 million pujas and offerings across more than 70 temples through the platform.

That works out to roughly 4.3 pujas or offerings per participating devotee in a year.

A physical pilgrimage might happen once a year, or once every few years, but religious occasions come around much more often, whether it is a birthday, anniversary, festival, exam result, new job, wedding or health scare. For many Indian households, there is almost always a reason to do one more puja.

A phone makes it easier to act on those moments without turning every one of them into a train journey.

The category now stretches beyond one app. Vama had partnered with more than 250 temples and built a network of over 300 astrologers by 2025. Utsav says it works with more than 80 temples, while DevDham offers livestreams, pujas and donations across thousands of temples.

But a digital puja is surprisingly physical behind the scenes.

If someone in Mumbai books a chadhava in Varanasi, somebody still has to source the offering, coordinate with the temple or priest, perform the ritual, record proof and sometimes ship prasad back to the devotee.

And unlike ordering food or booking a cab, there is another complication: how do you know it actually happened?

If your biryani never arrives, you know immediately. If you pay for a puja in another city, verification is harder. Was your name included? Did the offering reach the temple you selected? Was the ritual performed by the promised priest?

Platforms have responded with videos, photographs, temple partnerships and physical prasad. The technology may make the transaction easier, but trust still has to be built the old-fashioned way: by showing people exactly who is doing what on their behalf.

Distance makes that service especially useful for Indians living abroad.

Sri Mandir had around 7 lakh registered international users by mid-2025, and overseas users were spending far more than users in India. The company reported average revenue per user of roughly ₹600 to ₹800 domestically, compared with about ₹7,000 abroad.

Someone living in Noida can still plan a weekend trip to Haridwar. Someone living in New Jersey cannot casually turn up in Ujjain for a family puja.

For the person in New Jersey, digital access is solving a very different problem.

The neighbouring world of astrology shows how large this behaviour can become once people are comfortable paying online for spiritual guidance.

Astrotalk reported operating revenue of ₹1,176 crore in FY25, up 81% from ₹651 crore the previous year, and had more than 20,000 active astrologers. Its ecommerce arm also generated more than ₹140 crore in revenue in 2025 from products such as rudraksha, gemstones, bracelets, idols and ritual items.

The flow now goes both ways. Temples are using digital platforms to reach devotees, while businesses that began with digital spiritual services are moving into physical religious products.

And plenty of companies outside faith-tech have found themselves participating too.

Quick-commerce platforms now build festival storefronts filled with diyas, flowers, incense, idols and puja kits. YouTube carries live temple feeds. Donations happen through QR codes. Google Maps gets you to the shrine. UPI pays the priest.

Even a fairly traditional temple visit today can have several digital moments before you actually stand in front of the deity.

There is a much larger physical economy sitting underneath all of this. Sachan puts it like this:

“Temple ecosystems were essentially centres of commerce. There are many lives dependent on enabling these rituals.”

Priests are only one part of it. There are flower sellers, prasad shops, drivers, hotels, restaurants, guides and dozens of small businesses that depend on people travelling to religious towns.

Moving parts of devotion online does not automatically remove that economy. In some cases, it can create another way into it. Someone booking an offering remotely still needs somebody at the other end to prepare and perform it. Someone discovering a temple through an app may eventually decide to visit it physically.

And physical pilgrimage is hardly disappearing.

Ayodhya received more than 16 crore visitors in 2024. Vaishno Devi drew nearly 95 lakh yatris. Maha Kumbh 2025 recorded more than 65 crore visits. Families are still taking leave, boarding trains and waiting for hours to stand in front of a deity for a few moments.

That experience is difficult to replicate on a phone.

Modern life did not push faith out. It simply gave people more ways to stay connected to it, including on the same screen where the rest of their lives now happen.

Faith in India was never really waiting to be disrupted. It was waiting for better access.

The temple visit still matters. The ritual still matters. The belief still matters. But now, there are more ways to stay connected in between.

We’ll be back next week with another story hiding in plain sight.

Until then, keep the coffee strong and the curiosity stronger.

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This time, Tanvi Raut Dessai sits down with Prashant Sachan to explore a question that sounds almost contradictory: can faith, something so personal and deeply rooted in physical rituals, actually move online?

They talk about how Sri Mandir is trying to make pujas, prasad and temple access available through a phone, and what it takes to convince devotees, priests and temples that an app can be trusted with something as intimate as prayer.

This week’s Market Bites comes with a little something extra.

We’re collaborating with to bring you this edition, combining our usual bite-sized take on the markets with Million’s perspective on money and investing.

Same Market Bites. Just with a new friend at the table. ☕

The Bite:

Anthropic has done something that would have sounded pretty unlikely even a year ago.

The AI company behind Claude has reportedly crossed $65 billion in annualised revenue run rate, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI, meanwhile, is running at roughly $40 billion.

For context, Anthropic was at roughly $1 billion at the beginning of 2025. By August that year, it had crossed $5 billion. It ended 2025 at around $9 billion. Then things went slightly bonkers. Revenue run rate touched $14 billion in February 2026, crossed $30 billion in April, $47 billion in May, and is now above $65 billion.

Before we go any further, a small clarification. Anthropic has not actually collected $65 billion over the past year.

A revenue run rate takes the company’s current pace of revenue and stretches it across 12 months. So if Anthropic is currently making roughly $5.4 billion a month, that translates into an annualised pace of around $65 billion. It is useful for a company growing this quickly, but it is still a snapshot rather than audited annual revenue.

Still, Anthropic moving ahead of OpenAI is remarkable because the two companies entered the AI boom from very different positions.

OpenAI had ChatGPT.

By early 2023, people who had never heard the phrase “large language model” were asking ChatGPT to write emails, solve maths problems and explain their Excel sheets. OpenAI had the consumer brand, the traffic and one of the most recognisable technology products in the world.

Anthropic never really matched that consumer reach.

Instead, it built its business around people who could spend much more money than an individual ChatGPT subscriber: developers and companies.

That strategy is starting to show up very clearly in the numbers.

Anthropic said it had more than 300,000 business customers by August 2025. More importantly, the amount individual companies were spending kept climbing. In February 2026, more than 500 customers were spending over $1 million a year with Anthropic on an annualised basis. Less than two months later, that number had doubled to more than 1,000.

Think about the difference in economics.

A regular consumer might pay around $20 every month for an AI subscription. A large company can give the same AI to thousands of employees, use its API inside its own software and allow automated AI agents to run throughout the day.

One company can therefore be worth millions of dollars in annual revenue. And Anthropic found one particularly effective way of getting inside these companies: coding.

Claude Code became publicly available in May 2025. Six months later, it was already doing more than $1 billion in annualised revenue. By February 2026, that had jumped beyond $2.5 billion, with enterprise customers contributing more than half of Claude Code’s revenue. Business subscriptions had quadrupled since the beginning of the year.

Coding also happens to be almost perfectly suited to the economics of AI.

You may open a consumer chatbot a few times during the day, ask five questions and leave. A software developer can have an AI agent reading thousands of lines of code, debugging a problem, writing tests, editing multiple files and checking its own work. And it can keep doing this for hours.

Which means more tokens processed, more usage and more revenue for the model provider. Anthropic’s own research now says Claude usage is increasingly shifting away from simple back-and-forth conversations towards long-running agentic tasks, partly because of products such as Claude Code and Cowork.

Anthropic has also made Claude relatively easy for big companies to buy.

A company already running its technology on Amazon Web Services does not necessarily want to sign up for an entirely new AI infrastructure stack. So Anthropic made Claude available through Amazon Bedrock. It is also available through Google’s Vertex AI and Microsoft’s Azure Foundry.

Anthropic says Claude is the only frontier model currently available across all three major cloud platforms.

That gives Anthropic three enormous distribution channels without having to convince every company to completely change the way it buys technology.

And the strategy is moving beyond Silicon Valley.

In India, Anthropic says its revenue run rate has doubled since October 2025. Air India is using Claude Code for software development, while CRED says the tool helped it deliver features twice as quickly and improve test coverage.

There is now another layer being added to this distribution machine.

In March, Anthropic launched a partner programme for consulting and IT services companies. By June, more than 40,000 firms had applied and over 10,000 consultants had received Claude certifications. It has also struck agreements with companies such as DXC, which plans to train tens of thousands of engineers to deploy Claude inside banks, airlines, insurers and other large organisations.

Basically, Anthropic isn’t only selling an AI model anymore. It is building an ecosystem of cloud providers, developers, consultants and enterprise IT teams that can sell and deploy Claude for it.

OpenAI has noticed the same opportunity.

Its enterprise business now generates more than 40% of revenue, and the company expects business and consumer revenue to reach roughly equal levels by the end of 2026. Its APIs are processing more than 15 billion tokens every minute, while Codex has grown into one of its fastest-growing enterprise products. OpenAI has also expanded Codex and its models through AWS and partnerships with large technology companies.

Anthropic hasn’t discovered some market OpenAI forgot existed. It simply leaned into it earlier and harder.

There is also an uncomfortable part of these numbers that shouldn’t be ignored. The company raised $30 billion in February at a $380 billion valuation. Three months later, it raised another $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. It has struck massive computing agreements involving Amazon’s Trainium chips, Google’s TPUs and Nvidia GPUs.

That tells us how unusual the AI business currently is. A company can generate tens of billions of dollars in annualised revenue and still require tens of billions more in fresh capital to keep serving customers and building better models.

These rankings can change remarkably quickly. OpenAI still has enormous consumer distribution, its own rapidly growing enterprise operation and Codex competing directly with Claude Code.

But Anthropic’s rise does tell us something about where the money in AI is moving.

Where does India Stand?

India is already seeing that demand build up.

Sify Infinit Spaces, the data-centre arm of Sify Technologies, has received SEBI approval for a ₹3,700 crore IPO. Yotta Data Services is also reportedly looking to raise up to ₹8,000 crore through an IPO to fund its AI infrastructure expansion.

So while companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are fighting the visible AI race, there is another race happening underneath it: who builds the infrastructure all of this AI will run on?

Because the AI opportunity may not sit only with the companies building the models. It could also sit with the companies building the servers, data centres and computing infrastructure behind them.

The first phase of generative AI was largely about getting hundreds of millions of people to talk to a chatbot. The next phase is increasingly about getting AI to do work inside companies.

Anthropic positioned Claude heavily around that shift. And once companies started putting these systems into actual workflows, their spending rose much faster than anyone expected.

Even Anthropic appears to have underestimated it.

At the end of 2025, the company was reportedly aiming for around $20 billion to $26 billion in annualised revenue by the end of 2026.

It is August. And it is already at $65 billion.

This article is based on publicly available company disclosures and credible media reports. Revenue run-rate figures are annualised estimates and should not be treated as audited full-year revenue. Customer counts, product growth and usage metrics cited from Anthropic and its partners are company-reported and may not be independently verified.

If you made it this far, hopefully the next time someone says ChatGPT is winning the AI race, you’ll ask: winning which race exactly?

We’ll be back in your inbox next week with another business rabbit hole worth going down.

Got a story you’d like us to unpack? Send it our way. If we brew it, there might just be a little Filter Coffee surprise waiting for you.

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India’s Voice AI business is having its biggest funding year yet. Tracxn currently counts 31 Voice AI companies in the country, with 20 of them having raised institutional capital. Together, these companies have attracted around $449 million.

In 2026 alone, funding had reached around $329 million across five rounds by August, compared with $12.9 million during the same period last year. That works out to a 2,442% increase. A large part of this jump comes from Sarvam, which accounts for $350 million of the sector’s $449 million in total funding.

But funding isn’t the only sign of growth. Eight Indian Voice AI startups were founded in 2023, the highest for any year in the past decade. Three more appeared in 2024 and another five in 2025. The ecosystem now includes companies such as Sarvam, SquadStack, Gnani.ai, GreyLabs and Ringg AI. Seven of these companies have already reached Series A or beyond, while investors such as Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Peak XV and Elevation Capital are backing companies in the space.

The sudden interest makes more sense when you look at what Voice AI has become. For years, talking to a machine meant listening to an IVR menu, pressing a number and hoping you eventually reached a human. Generative AI has changed what that machine can do.

A voice agent can now listen to what you say, understand the context, respond almost immediately and carry a conversation instead of following a rigid menu. Connect that agent to a company’s software and it can potentially qualify a sales lead, remind you about an EMI, confirm an appointment, answer a customer query or record why a payment has been delayed.

For businesses, that turns Voice AI into something much more useful than another AI demo. It becomes a way of automating work that already costs them money. Bolna has estimated that a human caller can effectively cost a company around ₹6-7 per minute once salary, recruitment, training, management and employee attrition are included. Its Voice AI calls, on the other hand, can cost roughly ₹2.5 per minute at scale.

The savings can become significant when millions of minutes are involved. A business handling 1 million minutes of calls a month could save around ₹35-45 lakh if its cost per minute falls from ₹6-7 to ₹2.5. That is what turns Voice AI from an interesting technology into a serious business proposition.

And this is where India becomes particularly interesting. The country spent decades building one of the world’s largest BPO industries by using relatively affordable human talent to handle customer support, sales and other business processes. Voice AI companies are now trying to automate parts of the same work.

Businesses are also becoming more comfortable paying for AI. What started as small experiments is now turning into larger contracts. In sectors such as banking, financial services, insurance and healthcare, some enterprise AI projects that began as $20,000-30,000 pilots are reportedly growing into annual contracts worth $100,000-500,000. That gives investors something much more tangible to bet on than the promise of what AI might eventually do.

Gnani.ai shows how quickly Voice AI is scaling. The Bengaluru company handles more than 30 million spoken interactions every day across 12+ languages and works with over 200 enterprises across banking, insurance, telecom, automotive and government. According to the company, its recurring revenue has been growing 2-3x annually, and it added around 120 customers over the past year. Gnani has raised $21.9 million so far.

There is another reason India is particularly suited for Voice AI: language. Conversations here rarely stay within one language. A customer might start in Hindi, use English banking terms and switch to Marathi while explaining a problem. Someone else might speak Tamil mixed with English while standing next to traffic on a weak phone connection.

India has 22 scheduled languages, hundreds of dialects and enormous variation in accents. An AI agent needs to understand all of this quickly enough to keep the conversation natural. For businesses trying to use Voice AI across the country, solving this problem determines how many customers the technology can actually serve.

That is what Indian startups are building for. Navana.ai, for example, develops voice agents across 22 languages and has worked with IISc Bengaluru on RESPIN, an open-source speech dataset containing more than 10,000 hours of audio across nine languages and 38 dialects. Gnani.ai has built its own speech and language models, while Sarvam is developing speech technology specifically for Indian languages.

So making an AI voice sound Indian is only part of the challenge. The bigger task is making sure it understands the Indian speaking back.

And understanding you is only one step. Think about what needs to happen when a bank’s AI agent calls someone about an overdue payment. The system needs to recognise who is speaking, understand the response, decide what it is allowed to say, record the outcome, update the bank’s software and sometimes transfer the conversation to a human. That requires speech recognition, language models, text-to-speech technology, telephony infrastructure and enterprise software to work together in real time.

This is where the actual competition between Voice AI startups may eventually happen. Powerful AI models are becoming easier to access through APIs, which means simply having a good model may not remain a meaningful advantage. A startup that understands Indian speech better, owns useful conversational data, integrates deeply with a bank or insurer and reliably completes an entire workflow could be much harder to replace.

There are limits to how far this automation can go. Voice agents can misunderstand people, hallucinate answers or struggle with unusual situations. Privacy and consent also become more important when conversations involve financial or personal information. Companies in regulated sectors will therefore need strict controls around what an AI agent can say, what information it can access and when a human needs to take over.

The bigger question, then, is not whether machines will replace every call-centre employee. They probably will not. What matters is how quickly the boundary between work done by people and work done by software is beginning to move. India built a huge services industry around people answering phones. Voice AI is now testing how much of that conversation can be handled by software instead.

If you made it this far, hopefully the next automated call you receive will make you wonder whether there is actually a person on the other end.

We’ll be back in your inbox next week with another business rabbit hole worth going down.

Got a story you’d like us to unpack? Send it our way. If we brew it, there might just be a little Filter Coffee surprise waiting for you.

See you on the next brew.

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Chai in hand, responsibilities politely ignored? Perfect.

If you’re going to scroll anyway, might as well make it productive.

Watch how a Bengaluru company is trying to give India its own place on the global performance motorcycle map. Electric, fast, and very homegrown.

Tanvi Dessai went inside Ultraviolette to see how they’re pulling it off.

Watch here:

The Bite:

There was a time when climbing Mount Everest was the kind of achievement people spent years preparing for. It was expensive, dangerous and largely reserved for some of the world’s most experienced mountaineers. Reaching the summit was never guaranteed, no matter how much preparation went into it.

Everest is still dangerous, of course.

So what changed?

Well, today, an entire ecosystem has been built around the person trying to climb it. Everest is no longer just the world’s highest mountain. Every spring, it also turns into one of the biggest seasonal businesses in the Himalayas.

Hundreds of climbers arrive in Nepal willing to spend anywhere between ₹35 lakh and ₹1 crore for a shot at the summit. This money, beyond the expedition company, travels through an enormous network of Sherpas, airlines, hotels, helicopter operators, insurers, oxygen suppliers, doctors, satellite communication providers and local businesses long before the climber gets anywhere close to the summit.

And business has never been better. The 2026 spring climbing season became the busiest in Everest’s history. Nepal issued a record 495 permits to climb the mountain, while Everest recorded 1,008 successful summit ascents during the season, also a record.

The summit tally includes Sherpas and guides, some of whom climb multiple times while supporting different teams. All those permits brought Nepal more than NPR 1 billion, or roughly ₹65 to ₹70 crore, from Everest alone.

And Everest isn’t the only mountain Nepal can make money from. The country is home to eight of the world’s 14 peaks above 8,000 metres, more than any other country. But the money is surprisingly concentrated at the very top.

During the 2026 spring season, Nepal collected around NPR 1.26 billion in climbing royalties across 31 mountains. Everest alone contributed more than NPR 1 billion of that. By comparison, Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain, generated around NPR 54 million, while Makalu, the fifth-highest, brought in roughly NPR 32 million. Put simply, Everest accounted for roughly 85% of Nepal’s spring mountaineering royalty revenue.

That’s a sizeable amount for selling permission to climb a mountain, but it is only the first cheque in a much longer chain of payments.

Consider what happens when someone books an Everest expedition. Depending on the operator and level of support, the bill can range from around $40,000 to well above $100,000, roughly ₹35 lakh to ₹85 lakh. Luxury expeditions can cross ₹1 crore. Only a fraction of that goes to the Nepalese government as permit fees. To understand where the rest goes, you have to follow the climber all the way from Kathmandu to 8,849 metres.

The spending starts almost immediately after they land. Climbers stay in Kathmandu hotels, eat at restaurants and buy or rent equipment before flying to Lukla, the tiny Himalayan airport that serves as the gateway to the Everest region. Trekking agencies arrange permits and logistics, while travel companies and local transport operators handle everything required to get people and equipment moving. So even before anyone starts climbing, one Everest attempt has already generated business for several industries.

Then the climber enters the Khumbu region and an even more local economy takes over. Porters carry luggage across mountain trails and suspension bridges. Yak owners transport food, fuel and equipment. Tea houses accommodate climbers for days as they slowly acclimatise to thinner air. Guides, cooks and support workers keep expeditions moving. For many businesses along this route, the trekking and climbing seasons are not supplementary income. They are the business.

And reaching Base Camp is actually where the complicated part begins because running an expedition higher up Everest is essentially an extreme logistics operation.

Think about Camp IV. It sits nearly 8,000 metres above sea level in the “death zone”, where oxygen levels are so low that the human body cannot survive indefinitely. Most climbers spend only a few hours there before beginning their final summit attempt. Yet somebody still has to put a tent there. Somebody has to carry the oxygen, sleeping bags, food, fuel, medical supplies and other equipment needed to keep climbers alive for those few hours.

Almost everything required at these camps has to travel through some of the world’s most dangerous terrain. Establishing them can require weeks of planning and repeated journeys by highly trained Sherpas carrying heavy loads through icefalls and steep ridges. Everest may look like an adventure business from the outside, but behind the photographs is one of the toughest supply chains you could possibly design.

And much of that supply chain depends on Sherpas.

Calling them simply “mountain guides” doesn’t quite explain their role in this economy. Sherpas fix ropes, establish camps, transport supplies, carry oxygen cylinders and guide clients through dangerous sections of the mountain. Some make multiple summit attempts during the same season while supporting different expeditions.

Experienced high-altitude Sherpas can earn between $5,000 and $10,000 or more during a climbing season, making it one of the better-paying professions in Nepal.

Their expertise has also become an export of its own. Experienced Nepalese mountaineers now work on expeditions in Antarctica, Alaska, South America and other extreme environments. In a strange way, Nepal isn’t only selling access to its mountains. It has also developed a workforce with skills valuable on mountains around the world.

Then there is oxygen. For most commercial climbers, attempting Everest at nearly 9,000 metres without supplemental oxygen would be extraordinarily difficult. A climber may use five to eight cylinders during an expedition, with each cylinder costing hundreds of dollars even before transport is considered.

And getting oxygen to Everest isn’t like ordering a cylinder on Blinkit. It needs to be manufactured, filled, tested, transported across countries, moved through Nepal and eventually carried by people to camps thousands of metres above Base Camp. Multiply that by hundreds of climbers and their guides every season, and oxygen alone becomes a specialised international supply chain.

But what happens when something goes wrong? With so much money riding on an expedition this risky, insurance becomes a big part of the equation.

Your regular holiday travel policy usually isn’t enough. Many policies exclude high-altitude mountaineering beyond specific limits, which means Everest climbers need specialist adventure insurance covering extreme altitude, emergency treatment, evacuation and, depending on the policy, accidental death and repatriation.

The really interesting part is what happens after the policy is sold. A helicopter evacuation in the Himalayas can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 or more, and insurers often end up footing that bill. So insurance doesn’t merely compensate climbers after an accident. It effectively helps finance a significant part of Nepal’s mountain rescue ecosystem, connecting climbers with helicopter companies, hospitals, rescue coordinators and medical providers.

Technology has found its way into this ecosystem too. Satellite internet connects Base Camp with the outside world. Weather forecasting companies help expedition leaders identify the narrow windows when conditions might allow a summit attempt. GPS devices and satellite communicators help teams track climbers, while wearable devices can monitor health data at extreme altitude.

Each technological improvement can make expeditions safer or easier to manage, but it also creates another business serving people willing to spend heavily on reaching the top.

And that brings us to perhaps the biggest change in the Everest economy: the customer.

Everest was once overwhelmingly the domain of highly experienced mountaineers willing to accept enormous uncertainty and relatively basic conditions. Today, part of the market looks increasingly like premium adventure tourism. Some expedition packages cost more than $150,000 and offer private Sherpa support, additional oxygen, heated dining tents, satellite internet, dedicated weather forecasting and enhanced medical backup.

Nobody has made Everest easy. The altitude remains the same, the weather remains unpredictable and the mountain can still be deadly. What companies have done is make everything surrounding the climb more sophisticated, comfortable and manageable for people who can afford it.

That demand gave Nepal something businesses dream about: pricing power. The government has increased the cost of Everest permits over time, yet climbers continue to come. Most tourist destinations risk losing customers when prices rise. Everest has an unusual advantage because there isn’t another Everest down the road offering a cheaper package.

Nepal is home to eight of the world’s fourteen mountains above 8,000 metres, including the highest one. It is selling access to geography, and geography is rather difficult to copy.

That doesn’t mean the model can grow forever without consequences. More climbers concentrated into narrow weather windows can create dangerous queues near the summit. Climate change is making glaciers and icefalls more unstable, potentially increasing operating and insurance costs.

That leaves Nepal with a tricky equation. More climbers mean more permits, more jobs and more money flowing into the Himalayan economy. But more climbers also mean greater pressure on routes, Sherpas, rescue systems and the mountain itself. Nepal cannot simply keep adding people to Everest and expect the economics to work forever.

And that is what makes this business so unusual. Over decades, Nepal has built an entire commercial ecosystem around access to that geography, turning a few weeks of climbing every spring into income for guides, hotels, airlines, helicopter companies, insurers, equipment suppliers and entire mountain communities.

But Everest also comes with a constraint most businesses don’t have. You can build another hotel, buy another helicopter or hire another guide. You cannot build another Everest.

For Nepal, the next phase of the mountaineering economy will therefore be less about getting more people onto the mountain and more about making every climbing season safer, better managed and more valuable.

A small note before we go.

The inspiration for this story came while reading about the passing of Nims Dai and his fellow mountaineers. Reading about their lives sent us down a rabbit hole into the mountaineering economy, particularly the world around Mount Everest.

That got us curious. What actually happens when someone decides to climb Everest? Who gets them there? How does oxygen reach 8,000 metres? Who pays when a rescue is needed? And how many people and businesses depend on that one decision to climb?

One question led to another, and eventually to the story you just read.

May Nims Dai and his fellow mountaineers rest in peace 🤍

Hope you enjoyed this slightly different rabbit hole. We’ll be back next week with another one.

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Every year, nearly 65 million two-wheelers are sold worldwide.

Yet when people think of performance motorcycles, they think of Italy, Germany or Japan. Rarely India. And almost never electric.

Ultraviolette wants to change that.

From developing a performance electric motorcycle in Bengaluru to pushing its machines through some extraordinary tests, the company is trying to prove that India can build world-class performance bikes.

Tanvi Dessai visited Ultraviolette’s headquarters in Bengaluru to see how the company designs, tests and builds its motorcycles, and what it takes to create a global performance brand from India.

Full story here:

The Bite:

For years, eating out in India has come with an unspoken assumption. If a restaurant is famous, packed every weekend, or has been around for decades, it must be doing something right. Most of us judge a place by the food on the table, not by what happens inside the kitchen.

That assumption has taken a hit over the past few weeks.

The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suspended the food business licences of several well-known restaurants, clubs, bakeries and hotels after surprise inspections uncovered serious food safety violations.

The list includes familiar names like K Rustom & Co., Noor Mohammadi Hotel, Parsi Dairy, Cricket Club of India, Willingdon Sports Club, Juhu Gymkhana and several others. These aren’t new restaurants trying to make a name for themselves. Some have been serving customers for generations and are part of Mumbai’s food culture.

But how did so many established restaurants end up on the same list?

The answer isn’t that these restaurants suddenly became unhygienic. It’s that the regulator suddenly became far more active.

The crackdown began after IAS officer Tukaram Mundhe took charge as Maharashtra’s FDA Commissioner in May this year. Since then, the department has rolled out a statewide enforcement drive under the theme “Safe Food, Safe Medicines, Safe Maharashtra.”

Instead of waiting for complaints, inspection teams have been carrying out surprise visits across restaurants, clubs, bakeries, cloud kitchens, food manufacturers and several other food businesses. Whenever inspectors found violations serious enough to pose a public health risk, licences were suspended until the businesses fixed the issues and passed another inspection.

And these weren’t minor paperwork lapses.

Inspection reports described live rats and cockroach infestations inside kitchens, clogged drains, dirty preparation areas, rusted equipment, expired ingredients, leaking refrigeration units dripping onto stored food, reused frying oil, poor temperature control, missing staff health records and failures to properly separate vegetarian and non vegetarian food preparation.

In some cases, businesses were also found operating without valid food safety documentation or with incomplete compliance records.

If you’re wondering how this could happen when India already has food safety laws, you’re asking the right question.

The interesting part is that none of these rules are new. India’s Food Safety and Standards Act has been in force since 2006, and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) already has detailed regulations covering everything from kitchen hygiene and food storage to pest control and employee health.

A law only influences behaviour if people believe it will actually be enforced. If inspections are infrequent and penalties are rare, compliance slowly becomes something businesses deal with only when required. Maharashtra’s latest campaign suggests the FDA wants to flip that thinking. Instead of assuming restaurants are compliant unless someone complains, it is actively checking whether they are.

Not surprisingly, that has made many restaurant owners uneasy.

Industry associations aren’t opposing food safety rules. In fact, most agree that hygiene standards should be high. Their concern is how the crackdown is being carried out. Traditionally, inspectors would point out deficiencies, issue improvement notices and give businesses time to fix the problems before taking stronger action.

This time, several establishments found their licences suspended immediately. From a restaurant’s perspective, even a temporary closure can be expensive because rent, salaries, electricity bills and supplier payments continue even when customers stop coming in.

The FDA sees it differently.

Food safety isn’t like most other regulations because customers never get to inspect the kitchen before placing an order. They trust that the food being served is safe. If inspectors find conditions that could put public health at risk, allowing a restaurant to continue operating while it gradually fixes the problem defeats the purpose of the law.

That naturally leads to another question. If India already has food safety regulations, why do these kinds of violations keep surfacing?

One part of the answer is scale.

According to FSSAI, India has millions of registered food businesses. That includes multinational restaurant chains, luxury hotels, neighbourhood eateries, roadside stalls, cloud kitchens, sweet shops and food manufacturers. Monitoring such a massive ecosystem is a challenge in itself.

On top of that, while FSSAI sets national standards, day-to-day enforcement is largely handled by state food safety departments. That means inspection frequency, manpower and enforcement priorities can vary significantly from one state to another. As a result, some businesses may rarely see an inspector, while others are checked much more frequently.

This is where Singapore offers an interesting comparison.

Singapore is often held up as one of the world’s best examples of food safety, not because its laws are dramatically stricter, but because its enforcement is remarkably consistent.

Restaurants undergo regular inspections, food handlers receive mandatory hygiene training and hygiene grades are displayed publicly for customers to see. Businesses operate knowing that inspections are a routine part of running a restaurant, not an occasional event. That expectation alone encourages better compliance.

India, of course, operates on a completely different scale. Singapore is a city-state with around 6 million people. India has over 1.4 billion people, millions of food businesses and a massive informal food economy. Enforcing the same standards across such a vast and diverse ecosystem is far more challenging. Even so, Maharashtra’s recent crackdown suggests the conversation may finally be shifting from writing food safety rules to enforcing them more consistently.

Whenever that happens, the effects rarely stop with regulators and restaurants.

Restaurants may have to spend more on staff training, pest control, better storage systems and compliance. Cloud kitchens, which have grown rapidly through food delivery platforms, could find themselves under closer scrutiny than ever before.

At the same time, companies offering food safety audits, hygiene certification, kitchen monitoring and compliance software could see demand grow. If inspection reports also become more transparent, consumers may eventually start comparing hygiene records the same way they compare ratings and reviews today.

The crackdown also highlights an uncomfortable reality. Enforcing food safety is one thing. Ensuring every business can afford to stay compliant is another. Large restaurant chains have dedicated compliance teams and deeper pockets. A neighbourhood restaurant or a small cloud kitchen usually doesn’t. If inspections become more frequent across the country, compliance could become a much larger operating cost than it is today.

But perhaps the biggest change has already happened.

For the first time in a long while, people are talking about what happens inside restaurant kitchens instead of just what’s being served on the plate. Restaurants have always competed on taste, price, ambience and service. Hygiene was largely taken for granted. The recent inspections have changed that conversation. Customers are asking more questions, regulators are conducting more surprise checks and restaurant owners know they are being watched much more closely.

Whether Maharashtra’s campaign becomes a template for the rest of India remains to be seen. One state’s enforcement drive won’t transform the country’s food safety system overnight. But it does show what can happen when regulators begin using powers that have existed for years.

If you made it this far, we hope we've given you something new to chew on... besides your lunch.

We’ll be back in your inbox next week with another story worth brewing over.

Until then, eat well, stay curious... and don't let a five-star rating be the only thing you trust.

Got a story you’d like us to unpack? Send it our way. If we brew it, we’ll send a little Filter Coffee surprise your way.

That’s all for this week. See you on the next brew.

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If the movie starts on time, the popcorn is decent and the AC works, that’s usually enough. We book the nearest show, find our seats and spend the next three hours watching the film. Very few people have ever chosen a movie based on the projector inside the theatre.

That’s why the buzz around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey feels so unusual. Instead of talking only about the story or the performances, people across the world have been obsessing over one thing: IMAX 70mm.

Social media is filled with posts explaining which theatres have it, why it looks different, and whether it’s worth travelling to another city or even another country just to watch the film.

Some fans planned trips months in advance. Others queued online the moment tickets went on sale. A few tickets even ended up being resold for more than $1,000.

For a technology that has existed for decades, why has everyone suddenly started talking about it now?

The answer begins with understanding what IMAX 70mm actually is. Most films today are shot using digital cameras and projected digitally in theatres. IMAX 70mm is very different. It uses 70mm film, which is physically much larger than the film formats used in traditional cinemas.

A larger film frame captures far more visual information, resulting in sharper images, richer colours and a level of detail that becomes especially noticeable on giant screens. On top of that, IMAX’s film runs horizontally through the camera instead of vertically, exposing a much larger image area for every frame. The result is an image that feels bigger, brighter and more immersive than what most audiences are used to.

That doesn’t mean every IMAX theatre is the same. This is where many people get confused. Thousands of theatres around the world use the IMAX brand, but only a tiny number can actually project 70mm IMAX film.

Most modern IMAX theatres use digital projectors. They still offer a larger screen, better sound and a premium experience compared to regular cinemas, but they’re not the same as watching a film on an original IMAX 70mm projector.

Most people would’ve never bothered learning the difference. Christopher Nolan is probably the biggest reason they do today.

Unlike most directors, Nolan has never treated IMAX as just another screening option. Since The Dark Knight, he has pushed studios and exhibitors to embrace the format. With Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer, he kept expanding the amount of footage shot using IMAX cameras. For The Odyssey, he went a step further. The film became the first feature ever shot entirely using IMAX film cameras.

That wasn’t easy because IMAX film cameras have traditionally been enormous, noisy and difficult to use, especially when recording dialogue. To make The Odyssey possible, Nolan and IMAX worked together to develop a new generation of cameras that could overcome those limitations. In other words, the technology itself evolved because one filmmaker insisted on pushing it further. That is an unusual relationship between a director and a technology company.

The result speaks for itself. The Odyssey has become the biggest IMAX success in the company’s history. During its opening weekend, IMAX generated about $52 million in global ticket sales, making it the company’s biggest global opening ever in comparable markets, Christopher Nolan’s biggest IMAX opening and Universal Pictures’ biggest IMAX release. Even more remarkable is that IMAX contributed roughly 20% of the film’s worldwide opening weekend box office.

Think about that number for a moment.

IMAX screens make up only a small fraction of cinema screens worldwide, yet they generated one-fifth of the movie’s global revenue during its opening weekend. That tells us audiences weren’t simply choosing the nearest theatre. A significant number were actively choosing the premium experience, even if it meant paying higher prices.

Scarcity made that demand even stronger.

Only 41 theatres across the world were capable of projecting The Odyssey in true IMAX 70mm film, and 26 of those are located in the United States. For millions of moviegoers, watching the film exactly as Nolan intended simply wasn’t possible in their own city. That limited supply created something cinemas rarely experience: exclusivity.

Fans travelled hundreds of kilometres to reach one of those theatres. Hotels and flights were planned around movie timings. Online communities shared detailed guides on the best seats and the best locations. Some tickets appeared on resale platforms at extraordinary prices, with reports of listings crossing $1,000. That’s the kind of behaviour we usually associate with Coldplay concerts, Taylor Swift tours or the IPL final, not a movie screening.

It also highlights a basic economic principle. Scarcity creates value. When only a handful of people can access a product, the experience itself becomes more desirable. Luxury brands have relied on this idea for decades. Surprisingly, cinema has now found a way to use the same strategy.

This isn’t just Christopher Nolan’s success story. It’s also IMAX’s.

For years, IMAX positioned itself as a premium movie format. But premium only works if people believe the upgrade is worth paying for. Nolan helped create that belief. Every blockbuster he released reminded audiences that some films are simply better on the biggest screen available. Over time, he trained moviegoers to think differently. Instead of asking, “Should I watch this film?”, they began asking, “Where should I watch it?”

This subtle shift changed the economics of the entire industry.

Earlier, theatres mainly competed against one another. Today, their biggest competitor is your living room. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ have made entertainment cheaper, more convenient and available whenever you want. If audiences can watch thousands of films from their sofa, cinemas need a much stronger reason to convince people to step outside.

That’s exactly why premium cinema has become one of the industry’s biggest bets.

Around the world, exhibitors are investing in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, 4DX, ScreenX, laser projection and luxury recliner auditoriums. None of these technologies make the movie itself better. They make the experience of watching it better. The business model has shifted from selling access to a film to selling an experience that streaming simply cannot replicate.

India is moving in the same direction. PVR INOX has steadily expanded its premium formats, adding more IMAX, IMAX with Laser, 4DX, ScreenX and ICE theatres across major cities. Premium tickets often cost several times more than regular ones, yet audiences continue to fill those seats for the biggest releases.

India has over 30 IMAX theatres, but none of its commercial theatres can screen movies in true IMAX 70mm. The country’s only operational IMAX 15/70 projector is at Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, where it is used for educational documentaries rather than commercial films.

That means Indian audiences watched The Odyssey through digital IMAX systems rather than the original film format that generated so much global excitement.

Yet the bigger trend remains the same. Indian moviegoers are increasingly willing to pay for experiences that feel special. We already see this outside cinema. People spend thousands of rupees for concerts, sporting events and immersive entertainment because they offer something impossible to recreate at home. Premium cinema is slowly entering that category.

That could have long-term implications for exhibitors. Instead of building more standard screens, cinema chains may increasingly invest in fewer but higher-value auditoriums that generate better revenue per seat.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from The Odyssey has nothing to do with Greek mythology.

It has shown that in the streaming era, the movie is no longer the only thing audiences are paying for. The experience of watching it has become just as important. Christopher Nolan didn’t invent IMAX, and he certainly didn’t invent 70mm film. But he has done something arguably more valuable. He convinced millions of people to care about a cinema screen.

For an industry that has spent years worrying about whether people would stop coming to theatres altogether, that may be one of the most important business stories of the decade.

While researching this story, we stumbled upon a few IMAX and The Odyssey memes that were too good not to share. Here are some of our favourites.

That’s it from us this week. If you enjoyed this, forward it to someone who still thinks IMAX is just a bigger screen.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

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Let’s dive in!

Every few years, robots would dance, jump or do backflips, headlines would declare that the future had arrived, and then the excitement would quietly disappear. This time, however, the conversation feels different. NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Tesla, Figure AI and China’s biggest tech companies are all racing to build general-purpose robots, even Goldman Sachs has raised its estimate for the global humanoid robot market in 2035 from $6 billion to $38 billion within just one year.

Suddenly, everyone is calling this robotics’ “ChatGPT moment.” But is this really the breakthrough the industry has waited decades for, or are we watching another hype cycle unfold?

Let’s find out…

The biggest breakthrough is not that robots have suddenly become smarter. It is that artificial intelligence has finally become useful enough to solve one of robotics’ oldest problems. Robots were incredibly good at doing exactly one thing. A robotic arm in a car factory could weld thousands of identical parts with extraordinary precision, but ask it to pick up a different object or adapt to a new situation, and it would simply fail.

Every new task required engineers to manually program every movement and every decision. That made robots highly efficient, but also highly inflexible.

Artificial intelligence has gone through a similar journey. Before ChatGPT, AI systems were usually built for one specific purpose. One model detected fraud. Another translated languages. A third recommended movies.

Then large language models arrived and showed that one foundation model could perform hundreds of different tasks with minimal additional training. That shift transformed AI from a collection of specialised tools into a general-purpose technology.

Robotics is now trying to make the same leap.

Instead of building separate software for every individual task, companies are training large foundation models that combine vision, language and action. These systems allow robots to understand spoken instructions, recognise objects around them, reason about what they see and decide what physical action to take next.

In simple terms, instead of telling a robot exactly how to move its arm to pick up a mug, you can simply say, “Bring me the blue mug from the table,” and the robot figures out the sequence on its own. That may sound like a small improvement, but it fundamentally changes how robots can be deployed.

Artificial intelligence alone, however, does not explain the sudden surge in optimism. Three separate trends are finally moving in the same direction. The first is better AI reasoning. The second is rapidly falling hardware costs. The third is cloud computing, which allows robots to access powerful AI models without carrying expensive computing hardware inside every machine.

Earlier robotics cycles failed because one or two of these technologies improved while the others lagged behind. This time, all three are advancing together.

The economics are changing just as quickly. Goldman Sachs recently noted that manufacturing costs for humanoid robots have fallen much faster than expected, with some estimates suggesting hardware costs having declined by around 40% in recent years. That may not sound dramatic until you realise that almost every technology follows the same rule.

Once costs fall rapidly, adoption usually accelerates. Solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles all followed this pattern. Robots appear to be entering a similar phase.

The business model is also evolving.

Traditionally, companies had to spend huge amounts upfront to buy industrial robots, making automation affordable only for the largest manufacturers. Today, many robotics companies are moving towards Robotics-as-a-Service. Instead of purchasing a robot outright, businesses pay a monthly subscription, much like they pay for cloud software. This reduces the initial investment while allowing robotics companies to continuously improve their machines using data collected from every deployment.

Every robot working inside a warehouse or factory generates new information about how to navigate, handle objects and recover from mistakes. That information flows back into the shared AI model, making the next robot slightly better than the last. It creates a feedback loop that did not exist before.

This is also why investors are suddenly paying much closer attention. Robotics funding has accelerated globally as companies begin moving beyond laboratory demonstrations into commercial pilots. Manufacturing plants, warehouses, logistics centres and inspection facilities have become the first testing grounds because they are structured environments where tasks are repetitive and predictable. A robot does not need to understand every situation in the world to create value. It simply needs to perform a useful task reliably enough that a business saves money or increases productivity.

That brings us to an important reality check. The robots you see folding laundry on YouTube are not about to replace humans in every household. Homes remain one of the hardest environments for robots because every room is different, objects are constantly moved around and unexpected situations happen every day.

Factories are far easier because layouts rarely change and workflows are carefully designed. This is why most commercial deployments today are happening inside industrial facilities rather than living rooms.

There is another challenge that receives far less attention than flashy robot videos. ChatGPT learned from enormous amounts of internet data generated over decades by billions of people writing articles, books, emails and websites. Robots cannot learn from text alone because they interact with the physical world. They need millions of examples of humans opening doors, lifting boxes, sorting objects, using tools and performing countless everyday actions.

Collecting this data is expensive, slow and difficult. Some companies now use remote-controlled robots operated by humans, while others rely on advanced simulations. Neither approach is perfect. In many ways, physical-world data has become the new oil of the robotics industry.

China currently appears to have the strongest head start. It already dominates electronics manufacturing, battery production and large parts of the global supply chain. The Chinese government has also identified robotics as a strategic industry and is investing heavily across manufacturing, research and deployment.

Many analysts believe China is trying to repeat the strategy that helped it become the world’s largest electric vehicle producer. If successful, it could also become the world’s largest producer of humanoid robots.

That does not mean India has missed the opportunity. In fact, India’s position may be stronger than many people realise. According to the International Federation of Robotics, India installed a record 9,120 industrial robots in 2024, a 7% increase from the previous year, making it the world’s sixth-largest installer.

The automotive sector accounted for 45% of installations, while adoption is gradually broadening into other manufacturing segments. On the funding side, Indian robotics startups raised $42.1 million in the first half of 2026, nearly double the $22.7 million raised in H1 2025.

That increase in two years signals growing investor confidence, even though the ecosystem is still small compared with the US or China.

India’s biggest advantage may not be building the world’s most advanced humanoid robot. It may be building them more affordably. Lower engineering costs, faster prototyping, a growing manufacturing base and government incentives such as the Production-Linked Incentive scheme could help Indian startups develop practical industrial robots for factories, warehouses, healthcare and logistics.

Just as India skipped large parts of traditional banking infrastructure and became a global leader in digital payments through UPI, it has an opportunity to adopt advanced robotics while much of its manufacturing capacity is still being built.

So, is this really robotics’ ChatGPT moment? The answer is yes, but with an important qualification. ChatGPT reached millions of users almost overnight because software can be distributed instantly across the internet.

Robots cannot.

Every machine has to be manufactured, tested, transported and deployed in the physical world. Adoption will therefore be much slower than generative AI. However, the underlying shift appears just as significant. Artificial intelligence has finally given robots the ability to adapt instead of simply obeying pre-programmed instructions, while falling hardware costs and new business models are making commercial deployment economically viable.

That does not guarantee success. The industry still needs better hardware, more real-world data, stronger supply chains and years of testing before humanoid robots become commonplace.

But for the first time in decades, the biggest bottleneck is no longer whether robots can become useful. It is whether companies can build and deploy them quickly enough. That is a very different problem to have, and perhaps the clearest sign yet that this robotics cycle is being driven by economics and technology together, rather than by imagination alone.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

Now go, touch some grass! If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

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Despite rising tariff uncertainty in its biggest export market, slowing global demand and growing competition from countries like Ecuador and Indonesia, India exported a record 19.72 lakh metric tonnes of seafood worth ₹73,890 crore ($8.46 billion) during FY26. It is the highest annual seafood export the country has ever recorded, both by quantity and by value.

See… a record export number usually means things are going right. But this one came after a difficult reset. The bigger story here is about how one of India’s largest agricultural export industries quietly reinvented itself when one of its biggest customers started buying less.

That customer is the United States. For years, America has been the backbone of India’s seafood exports, especially shrimp. Indian seafood processors built factories around American demand, farmers expanded shrimp cultivation because US buyers paid premium prices, and exporters became heavily dependent on a single market.

In many years, the US accounted for nearly 40-50% of India’s shrimp exports. That dependence worked well until trade policies began changing. Tariff uncertainty, anti-dumping duties and other trade restrictions made Indian shrimp less competitive in the American market, forcing exporters to rethink a business model that had remained largely unchanged for years.

The numbers from FY26 show this shift.

India exported 2.79 lakh tonnes of seafood to the US worth ₹20,263 crore, making America the country’s largest seafood buyer in value terms. But exports to the US fell 19.5% in volume, 14.2% in dollar value and 10.8% in rupee value compared to the previous year. For an industry where the US had long been the most reliable customer, such a decline could have easily translated into a difficult year for exporters. Instead, India ended up setting a new export record.

The reason is simple. Exporters did not wait for the US market to recover. They went looking for new buyers.

China emerged as India’s largest seafood destination by quantity, importing 4.90 lakh tonnes of seafood during FY26. Exports also increased to markets such as Vietnam, Belgium and Japan.

According to Mint, shrimp exports to Vietnam jumped 50%, while exports to Belgium surged 69% over the previous year. China and Japan also absorbed a larger share of Indian shipments. This diversification helped offset weaker demand from the US and reduced India’s dependence on a single export market.

In fact, the US now accounts for roughly 33% of India’s shrimp exports, down from the 38% to 49% range seen over much of the past decade.

Interestingly, Vietnam and Belgium are not necessarily consuming all the shrimp they import from India. Both countries are major seafood processing and distribution hubs. Shrimp arriving there is often processed further or routed into wider European and global supply chains before reaching consumers.

In other words, India has not just found new customers. It has also become part of more diversified international trade networks, reducing the risk that comes from relying too heavily on one country.

The biggest reason this industry matters is because it is far more concentrated than most people realise. Seafood exports are not driven equally by dozens of products. They are overwhelmingly driven by shrimp.

During FY26, India exported 7.93 lakh tonnes of frozen shrimp worth ₹49,038 crore. That single product accounted for 40.2% of the country’s seafood export volume but contributed an even larger 66.5% of total export earnings in dollar terms.

Put simply, every ₹100 India earned from seafood exports included nearly ₹67 coming from shrimp alone. That makes shrimp not just another export commodity, but the financial engine of India’s marine exports.

The dominance of shrimp becomes even clearer when compared with other seafood categories. Frozen fish generated exports worth ₹5,658 crore, almost one-ninth of shrimp exports. Dried seafood products earned ₹5,079 crore, although this segment registered an impressive 78% growth in rupee terms during the year.

Frozen squid exports touched ₹4,494 crore, while chilled seafood contributed ₹622 crore. These products are growing steadily, but none currently come close to matching shrimp’s contribution to India’s export basket.

Behind these export numbers lies a massive domestic industry. Andhra Pradesh has emerged as the centre of India’s shrimp economy, contributing roughly two-thirds of the country’s shrimp exports.

Thousands of aquaculture farms across the state’s coastal districts produce species such as Litopenaeus vannamei, commonly known as Vannamei shrimp, which has become the preferred variety because it grows quickly, survives better under farming conditions and offers higher yields. Over the past decade, improvements in hatcheries, feed quality and farming practices have helped India become one of the world’s largest shrimp exporters.

However, producing shrimp is no longer enough. The next challenge is proving that it has been produced safely.

Importing countries, especially in Europe and North America, are placing greater emphasis on food safety, traceability and sustainability. Buyers increasingly want to know where seafood was farmed, how it was processed, whether antibiotics were used responsibly and whether environmental standards were followed.

A single shipment failing residue tests can result in stricter inspections for future consignments, delays at ports and damage to the reputation of an entire exporting region. In global seafood trade, quality assurance has become just as important as production.

Recognising this shift, India has been strengthening its seafood certification and traceability systems. The government and the Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) are working towards digital traceability frameworks that can track seafood from farm to export.

While these systems help exporters meet international regulations, they also improve buyer confidence and make Indian seafood more competitive against rival suppliers such as Ecuador, Indonesia and Vietnam. In the coming years, technology may become as important to seafood exports as fishing boats or aquaculture ponds.

Tariffs have also changed how exporters think about risk. For decades, success meant selling as much shrimp as possible to the United States because it offered stable demand and attractive prices. The events of the past year have shown why depending too heavily on one market can become dangerous. Diversifying across multiple countries may not always deliver the highest margins, but it creates resilience. If one market slows because of tariffs, regulations or changing consumer demand, exporters have alternatives.

This becomes especially relevant as India and the US continue discussions on a broader bilateral trade agreement. A more predictable tariff framework could improve competitiveness for Indian seafood exporters in the American market. At the same time, few exporters are likely to return to the old strategy of depending overwhelmingly on a single buyer. The experience of FY26 has shown that expanding into multiple markets provides greater long-term stability than relying on one destination, however large it may be.

The government’s ambition now stretches well beyond this year’s record. India has set a target of increasing seafood exports to $30 billion over the next few years, more than three times the current level. Achieving that goal will require more than producing additional shrimp. It will demand higher-value processed products, stronger cold-chain infrastructure, better branding, faster compliance with international food safety standards and continued expansion into new markets.

India’s record seafood exports therefore represent much more than a successful financial year. They show how an industry built around one product and one dominant customer managed to adapt when global trade conditions changed.

Shrimp may still be carrying India’s seafood exports on its back, but the industry’s future will depend on something much bigger than shrimp alone. It will depend on how quickly India can build a more diversified, technology-driven and globally trusted seafood supply chain, one that can withstand tariffs, changing regulations and shifting demand without losing momentum.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

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It’s a fascinating conversation about content, creators, AI, regional languages, and building products for the next wave of Indian internet users.

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The Bite:

Entertainment used to ask for three hours.

Then Netflix brought it down to about 45 minutes.

Instagram reduced it to 30 seconds.

Now, a new industry believes even that is too long.

Companies across India are spending millions to make shows that last barely one or two minutes per episode. Amazon MX Player has launched Fatafat. Balaji Telefilms has launched Kutingg. Zee has backed Bullet. ShareChat’s founders have launched QuickTV. Even MS Dhoni has invested in Kuku TV.

It sounds almost absurd until you realise this isn’t a crazy experiment. China has already turned micro-dramas into an industry worth more than $7 billion, with hundreds of millions of viewers watching bite-sized soap operas on their phones every day.

So why are investors, media companies and celebrities suddenly betting on stories that are shorter than a YouTube video? More importantly, why are millions of people happily paying to watch them?

Micro-dramas are daily soaps redesigned for the scrolling generation. Each episode is usually 1 to 3 minutes long, shot vertically for the phone and packed with one sharp emotional hook.

Someone is betrayed, someone is secretly rich, someone gets insulted at a party, someone returns for revenge, or someone discovers that the man she married is not just a cold husband but also a billionaire, mafia boss, prince, vampire or some other high-voltage red flag.

The format may look silly from a distance, but the business behind it is anything but. India’s micro-drama market has already crossed $300 million in 2025, according to Lumikai’s State of India Interactive Media Report, and is projected to reach $4.5 billion by 2030.

The same report says the category has already seen 450 million downloads and 100 million monthly active users, meaning this is no longer just a weird corner of the internet. It is becoming a mainstream consumer habit.

The reason this adds up is simple. India has spent the last decade getting comfortable with short-form video. TikTok did it first, then Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Moj and Josh took over the muscle memory. People learnt to watch vertically, swipe quickly and consume entertainment in small bursts. But Reels and Shorts are mostly disconnected videos.

One clip has a dance, the next has a food hack, and the one after that has someone shouting about personal finance from a car. Micro-dramas take that same short-video behaviour and add a proper story to it. They give viewers the feeling of watching a serial without demanding the time commitment of television or OTT.

That is why the format is especially interesting for India. We have a massive smartphone base, cheap data, strong regional-language consumption and millions of people who may not want to sit through a 40-minute episode after a long day.

Traditional TV was a family screen. OTT became a personal, slightly premium screen. Now, micro-dramas are trying to become the most private screen of all. They live inside the phone, inside the user’s idle time and inside the guilty pleasure zone where people watch content they may not proudly recommend on LinkedIn.

The psychology is the real product here. Micro-dramas are built around cliffhangers, and cliffhangers work because the brain hates unfinished stories. When an episode stops just as the heroine is about to reveal her identity or the villain is about to get exposed, the viewer feels a tiny mental itch. That is close to what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect, where unfinished tasks or unresolved situations stay active in memory.

Simply put, the brain keeps asking, “Then what happened?” Micro-drama platforms convert that question into the next tap, the next episode and eventually the next payment. This is storytelling engineered like a vending machine.

There is also the emotional payoff. Most micro-dramas do not waste time building nuance because nuance is expensive in a 90-second episode. They go straight for humiliation, desire, revenge, regret, status and rescue. These are old emotions, but the format compresses them brutally.

In a normal TV serial, a character may suffer for 20 episodes before getting justice. In a micro-drama, insult, suffering, revelation and revenge can happen before your tea gets cold. That speed is why people call the format addictive, and it is also why viewers keep coming back. It offers the emotional satisfaction of a soap opera without the waiting time.

This is also why the audience is broader than people assume. Ampere Analysis, which surveyed more than 100,000 consumers globally, found that more than one in ten internet users had watched drama episodes under 10 minutes on social media, while people aged 18 to 34 were 21% more likely than average to watch them.

China has already shown what happens when this format scales. Micro-dramas began taking shape there around 2018, grew during the pandemic and became a serious industry within just a few years. A report presented at the 2025 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit put China’s micro-drama user base at 662 million, with market revenue crossing 50 billion yuan, or about $7.23 billion.

Micro-dramas have reportedly overtaken China’s domestic box office, meaning these tiny phone-first serials now generate more revenue than traditional cinema.

China’s success came from a production model built for speed and scale. Micro-dramas are typically shot in days or weeks, not months, and cost a fraction of traditional web series because they rely on simpler production, fewer locations and vertical filming. Most platforms monetise the format by offering the first few episodes for free before charging small in-app payments or subscriptions to continue the story.

That model is now spreading far beyond China. Apps like ReelShort, DramaBox and GoodShort have expanded into markets including the US, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia. According to Sensor Tower, short-drama apps generated around $700 million in global in-app revenue in Q1 2025, nearly four times higher than a year earlier, showing just how quickly the format is gaining traction.

Hollywood, which once dismissed phone-first entertainment after Quibi’s failure, is now taking micro-dramas seriously. Unlike Quibi, which tried to create a new viewing habit, micro-dramas build on one that already exists. That has prompted companies like Fox, Peacock, Lionsgate and Hallmark to explore the format, attracted by the format’s lower production costs, faster turnaround and the ability to quickly test what audiences actually want.

India’s version may not look exactly like China’s, but the ingredients are already here. We have grown up on emotional TV serials, embraced serialized audio through platforms like Pocket FM and Kuku FM, and made short-form video a part of everyday life. Micro-dramas simply bring these habits together in one format, which explains why the industry is attracting so much attention.

The funding story is already visible. Flick TV raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, while Chai Bisket raised money for Chai Shots from investors including Info Edge Ventures and General Catalyst. Balaji Telefilms is using its entertainment expertise to test micro-dramas through Kutingg, while Zee has backed Bullet to build a micro-drama app within the Zee5 ecosystem.

Amazon MX Player has entered the space with Fatafat, and ShareChat’s QuickTV brings an existing digital audience advantage. Startups see a new consumer behaviour, while established media companies see a way to reuse their storytelling expertise before someone else captures that audience.

The economics are equally compelling. Unlike traditional OTT shows, which can cost several crores and take months to produce, micro-dramas are far cheaper and faster to make, thanks to simpler production, fewer locations and shorter shoots. That allows platforms to release more titles, experiment with different genres and quickly learn what audiences actually want. In entertainment, where most content fails, making failure cheaper is a significant advantage.

The monetisation model is also different from traditional OTT. Some Indian platforms are experimenting with low-value recharges, monthly plans and ad-supported unlocks because India is a highly price-sensitive market. Many users may hesitate to pay ₹499 a month for an OTT subscription, but they may be willing to spend ₹10, ₹29 or ₹49 to continue a story that has already hooked them.

Advertising could become another major revenue stream. Since users often watch multiple short episodes in one sitting, platforms can naturally insert more ads than traditional OTT services. Brands can also integrate products directly into storylines, making micro-dramas attractive as more than just a subscription business, especially in a price-sensitive market like India.

The biggest challenge, however, is content quality. If every show follows the same billionaire romance or revenge formula, audiences will eventually lose interest. China has already experienced this with a flood of low-quality titles. To sustain growth, Indian platforms will need stronger writing, more original stories and deeper regional storytelling rather than relying on repetitive hooks.

AI could accelerate this industry even further. Companies in China are already using AI for actors, dubbing and production, while AI-first startups like Israel’s Shortical have attracted major funding, signalling growing investor interest. For India, AI could lower production costs and make regional adaptation easier, but it also raises questions around originality, copyright and content quality.

India’s opportunity extends far beyond Hindi. Regional languages could ultimately shape the category, with platforms already building content for Telugu, Hindi and other local audiences. Since entertainment preferences vary widely across states, the winners will be those that create stories rooted in local cultures, emotions and everyday experiences rather than simply copying successful formulas.

Micro-dramas could also create new opportunities for actors, writers, production houses and regional creators by lowering the cost of making and distributing content. China has already shown how the format can support an entire content ecosystem. The challenge for India will be ensuring platforms invest in quality storytelling rather than chasing cheap, repetitive content.

Whether micro-dramas become India’s next major entertainment category or just another passing trend will depend on that balance. The market has already crossed $300 million and is projected to reach $4.5 billion by 2030, while China’s $7 billion-plus industry shows how large the opportunity can become. The demand is clearly there. The bigger question is whether the industry can keep viewers hooked with better stories, not just shorter ones.

One thing, however, is already becoming clear. Entertainment is steadily shifting from scheduled viewing on television to on-demand consumption on smartphones. Micro-dramas are not replacing films or OTT platforms. They are filling the small pockets of time that traditional formats never truly owned.

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And honestly, the timing is interesting.

The heat from the ethanol-blended petrol debate has barely faded, and there is already another fuel the government wants to mix into India’s tanks. People were already unhappy about ethanol.

Many motorists blamed ethanol-blended petrol for lower mileage, while mechanics and automobile enthusiasts raised concerns about moisture absorption, corrosion and long-term wear on fuel-system components.

Yet despite the criticism, the government never backed down. In fact, it doubled down.

But why is India betting on a fuel that almost nobody else is using?

To understand that, we need to start with a problem that has haunted Indian policymakers for decades.

India runs on imported oil.

The country imports more than 85% of its crude oil requirements. Every time oil prices spike because of wars, sanctions, shipping disruptions or geopolitical tensions, India feels the pain almost immediately. The bill shows up everywhere, from inflation and government finances to transport costs and household budgets.

For years, India’s answer was ethanol.

Back in 2014, ethanol made up barely 1.5% of India’s petrol mix. The government then launched an aggressive biofuel push, offering incentives to distilleries, guaranteed procurement by oil companies and clear blending targets. The strategy worked remarkably well.

By 2025, India had achieved 20% ethanol blending in petrol, years ahead of its original target. But success created a new problem.

Ethanol works well with petrol because petrol engines use spark ignition. In simple terms, a petrol engine mixes fuel and air, compresses it, and then a spark plug creates a tiny spark that ignites the mixture. Ethanol’s high octane rating helps it withstand compression without igniting prematurely, which is why it can work reasonably well in petrol engines.

Diesel engines, however, are a completely different beast.

Unlike petrol engines, diesel engines do not use spark plugs at all. Instead, they compress air so intensely that temperatures inside the engine rise dramatically. When diesel fuel is injected into this superheated air, it ignites on its own. Think of it like lighting a match by squeezing it hard enough instead of using a lighter.

For this process to work efficiently, diesel needs a property called a high cetane number, which measures how easily a fuel ignites under compression. The higher the cetane number, the quicker and cleaner the ignition.

Ethanol struggles here. It has a low cetane number, absorbs moisture easily and does not naturally mix well with diesel. That is one reason why years of attempts to blend ethanol with diesel never really took off, despite ethanol’s success in petrol. Diesel engines simply need a different kind of fuel chemistry.

That is where isobutanol enters the picture.

Chemically, isobutanol belongs to the same alcohol family as ethanol. But it behaves very differently. Ethanol has two carbon atoms. Isobutanol has four.

That may sound like a tiny chemistry lesson nobody asked for, but those two extra carbon atoms change a lot.

Isobutanol contains more energy per litre than ethanol, absorbs less moisture from the atmosphere, is less corrosive and mixes more easily with diesel. It can often work better with existing storage tanks, pipelines and fuel infrastructure than ethanol.

But this does not mean isobutanol is a perfect replacement for diesel. Far from it.

Like ethanol, isobutanol also has a significantly lower cetane number than conventional diesel. And diesel engines depend on quick, clean ignition under compression. If the cetane number is too low, engines can face ignition delays, knocking, rough combustion or efficiency losses. So even if isobutanol blends better with diesel than ethanol does, it may still need cetane improvers or other additives to make the final fuel behave more like regular diesel.

That is why policymakers see potential, but engineers still have questions.

India consumes far more diesel than petrol. Trucks, buses, tractors, construction equipment, generators, mining vehicles and large sections of the logistics industry all run on diesel.

Government officials have repeatedly pointed out that diesel consumption is nearly twice petrol consumption. Which means even a modest blending mandate could theoretically have a bigger impact on energy security than the ethanol-petrol programme.

But energy security is not the only reason India is interested. Over the past decade, India built enormous ethanol production capacity to support the E20 programme. Distilleries expanded rapidly. Sugar mills invested heavily. New plants came online across the country.

Now that E20 has largely been achieved, policymakers face an uncomfortable question.

What happens next?

The infrastructure built for ethanol still needs demand.

That is partly why India is simultaneously discussing E22, E25, E27 and E30 petrol blends, encouraging flex-fuel vehicles and exploring isobutanol production. All these initiatives create new markets for an ecosystem that has already received billions of rupees in investment. Unlike ethanol, there is no global blueprint for isobutanol-diesel blending.

Unlike ethanol, isobutanol has no global blueprint. No country has commercialised isobutanol-diesel blending at a national scale. And production remains its biggest hurdle.

Making ethanol is relatively straightforward. Humans have been fermenting sugars into ethanol for thousands of years.

Making isobutanol is much harder.

Isobutanol can be produced through fermentation routes linked to ethanol and similar feedstocks, but it is not as simple as producing regular ethanol. Most industrial pathways rely on specially engineered microorganisms or additional processing steps. The problem is that isobutanol itself becomes toxic to the microbes producing it. As concentrations increase, the organisms start dying. This makes large-scale production more complex and expensive than conventional ethanol manufacturing.

Then there are engine questions.

While early tests have been encouraging, they are still early tests. ARAI’s preliminary studies suggest that a 5% blend can reduce emissions while causing only a small decline in fuel efficiency. Stability tests have also shown promising results, with blends remaining stable for more than 40 days without separation. But India’s diesel fleet is vast, diverse and often very old. What works in controlled testing may not translate seamlessly to millions of vehicles operating across different engines, climates, fuel stations and road conditions.

That is why the current phase matters so much. The ongoing trials are trying to answer: Can a fuel that looks promising in a laboratory survive the messy realities of India’s roads, trucks, tractors, climate, logistics networks and fuel stations?

If the answer is yes, India could create an entirely new category of biofuel policy, one that tackles the country’s biggest fuel segment rather than just petrol.

If the answer is no, it will become another reminder that energy transitions are rarely as simple as swapping one molecule for another.

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Tanvi Raut Dessai and the This is Business team recently headed to Cherrapunji to visit a company doing something quite unusual, making gin using rainwater collected in one of the wettest places on Earth.

At first, it sounds very unusual. But it quickly turns into a story about local ingredients, entrepreneurship, and how businesses are finding unique ways to build products rooted in place.

🎥 Watch the full story here 👇

Everyone seems to agree that the world should use less palm oil.

Environmental groups have campaigned against it for years. Consumers increasingly associate it with deforestation and disappearing rainforests. Governments are introducing sustainability regulations. Companies proudly advertise “palm oil free” labels on packaging. If you spend enough time online, you might even get the impression that palm oil is an ingredient on its way out.

And yet, the exact opposite is happening.

Palm oil has become one of the most important agricultural commodities in the world. Global production has risen from about 15 million tonnes in 1995 to more than 80 million tonnes today. The world now consumes more palm oil than any other vegetable oil.

Around 3 billion people use products containing palm oil, often without even realizing it. Every year, the average person consumes roughly 8 kg of palm oil through food, cosmetics, detergents, personal care products, and increasingly, fuel.

This creates one of the strangest contradictions in the global economy. Almost everyone talks about reducing dependence on palm oil, yet nearly every major force in the system keeps making palm oil more important.

To understand why, it helps to start with a simple question.

Why did palm oil become so dominant in the first place?

Well.. because palm oil solved a series of economic and industrial problems better than almost any other ingredient on Earth.

Palm oil comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree, originally native to West Africa. For thousands of years, it was used as a traditional cooking oil across parts of the continent. But its transformation into a global commodity happened much later. During the colonial period, European companies realized that palm oil could be used in soap, candles, lubricants, and eventually food products. As industrialization accelerated, demand exploded.

The real turning point came during the 1990s. For decades, food manufacturers had relied heavily on partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. These oils were cheap, versatile, and useful for producing products like biscuits, cakes, margarine, snacks, and frozen foods.

Then scientists discovered that the trans fats created during hydrogenation were strongly linked to heart disease. Regulators started cracking down, health organizations warned consumers, and food companies suddenly needed a replacement.

Palm oil arrived at exactly the right moment.

Unlike sunflower oil, soybean oil, or mustard oil, palm oil is naturally semi-solid at room temperature. It provides structure to cookies, pastries, chocolates, spreads, and ice cream without requiring hydrogenation. It remains stable at high temperatures, making it ideal for frying. It has a long shelf life. It is relatively neutral in taste. Most importantly, it is cheap.

In 1994, Unilever launched a massive internal project to eliminate trans fats from hundreds of products across multiple countries. Palm oil became the replacement. Soon, the rest of the food industry followed. What began as a health-driven shift ended up becoming one of the largest ingredient transitions in modern food history.

But even that does not fully explain palm oil’s dominance.

The real advantage lies in something much simpler: productivity.

An oil palm plantation can produce roughly 3-4 tonnes of oil per hectare annually, depending on conditions. Competing crops such as soybeans, sunflower, or rapeseed produce far less oil from the same amount of land. In some comparisons, oil palm generates 4-10 times more oil per hectare than alternative oil crops.

Agriculture is fundamentally a land-use business. The more output a crop generates per acre, the lower its production cost tends to be. Palm oil currently accounts for less than 10% of global land used for vegetable oils, yet produces more than a third of the world’s vegetable oil supply.

That is why palm oil is the most efficient edible oil crop humanity has discovered at scale. This explains why the ingredient spread far beyond packaged food.

Today, roughly 70% of personal care products contain one or more palm-derived ingredients. Palm oil derivatives appear in soaps, shampoos, cosmetics, detergents, toothpaste, moisturizers, and cleaning products. Most consumers never notice because palm oil rarely appears under obvious names.

Industry groups estimate there are more than 200 different ingredient names linked to palm oil derivatives. Terms like sodium lauryl sulfate, stearic acid, glyceryl compounds, and emulsifiers often originate from palm oil processing.

The result is that palm oil quietly became infrastructure. It is not merely an ingredient anymore. It is a foundational building block of modern consumer goods.

India offers perhaps the clearest example of this transformation.

In 1993, India’s per-capita GDP stood at around $298. By 2013, it had risen to roughly $1,452. As incomes increased, diets changed. Historically, one of the most consistent patterns in economic development is that people consume more fats as they become wealthier. India followed the same path.

Palm oil imports, which were measured in hundreds of thousands of tonnes a few decades ago, have grown into a multi-million-tonne business. Today, India is the world’s largest buyer of palm oil. It finds its way into everything from packaged snacks and instant noodles to restaurant kitchens and street food stalls.

The reason is simple. Palm oil is often the cheapest edible oil available.

That became evident again in 2025. As soon as palm oil became cheaper than soybean and sunflower oil, Indian imports surged. For all the conversations around sustainability, affordability still drives many purchasing decisions across the food system.

But that’s only one part of the story. Because while consumers worry about palm oil, governments often depend on it.

Take Indonesia and Malaysia.

Together, they produce roughly 85% of the world’s palm oil supply. For these countries, palm oil is a major economic engine. Millions of livelihoods depend on the industry. Palm oil contributes significantly to export earnings, rural employment, infrastructure development, and poverty reduction.

Malaysia has long described palm oil as a tool for rural economic development. Indonesia views it similarly. In both countries, entire regions have been transformed through plantation agriculture.

This creates a difficult trade-off.

Environmental groups focus on the forests being lost, while governments focus on the livelihoods being created. Neither side is entirely wrong.

Oil palm has been one of the biggest drivers of commodity-linked deforestation. A World Resources Institute analysis found that it replaced around 10.5 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2015, much of it in Indonesia and Malaysia. Forest clearing and peatland drainage also released vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

That’s why palm oil remains one of the most controversial agricultural commodities in the world.

Because the demand for vegetable oils would not disappear. Replacing palm oil would require alternative crops. Since soybeans, sunflower, and rapeseed produce much lower yields per hectare, significantly more farmland would be required to generate equivalent oil output.

Many environmental researchers now acknowledge this dilemma. The problem is increasingly seen not as palm oil itself, but how and where it is produced.

Perhaps palm oil has become a victim of its own success. It is everywhere precisely because it solves so many problems. The future of the industry will likely depend less on eliminating palm oil and more on making it better.

Governments, companies, and researchers are increasingly investing in satellite monitoring, traceability systems, genetic improvements, yield enhancement, and certification frameworks. The goal is to produce more oil from existing plantations rather than expanding into new forests.

The world may want less dependence on palm oil, but until someone invents a substitute that is equally cheap, equally versatile, productive, and scalable, palm oil will remain one of the most important commodities on the planet.

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A few years ago, most Indians probably associated them with wedding photographers.

If you attended a destination wedding in Udaipur, there was a good chance a drone was hovering overhead capturing cinematic shots of the baraat. If you watched a travel vlog on YouTube, chances are the opening scene featured a sweeping aerial view shot by a drone. They were interesting gadgets. Expensive toys, perhaps. Useful for photography, but not particularly important.

Today, that same technology is being used to monitor India’s borders, inspect highways, survey villages, spray pesticides, deliver medicines and potentially fight wars.

Businesses, governments and militaries have all started realising that drones can solve problems that were previously expensive, dangerous or simply impossible to solve efficiently. Yet the most important question facing India’s drone industry today is not whether India can build more drones.

It is whether India can avoid becoming dependent on someone else for the technologies that make those drones work.

Because countries that master drones are not merely building flying machines. They are building capabilities in software, sensors, batteries, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, manufacturing and autonomous systems. A drone is where all of those technologies come together in a single machine.

And the opportunity is substantial. According to IBEF, India’s drone market was worth about $1.2 billion, or roughly ₹11,000 crore, in 2025. By 2030, it is expected to exceed $3.2 billion, or around ₹29,000 crore, growing at roughly 21.5% annually.

Yet ₹29,000 crore is not particularly large in the context of the Indian economy. India’s IT services exports alone exceed ₹20 lakh crore. The telecom industry is significantly larger. Even the biscuit industry generates more revenue.

That leaves an obvious question.

Why is everyone paying so much attention to drones?

The answer is that drones are becoming useful in more places than almost anyone expected.

A drone sale creates demand for batteries, motors, sensors, cameras, communication systems, software, navigation modules, mapping technologies, pilot training, maintenance services and data analytics. In other words, the value of the industry extends far beyond the drone itself.

That is particularly true in defence.

For decades, military power was largely a function of expensive equipment. Countries invested in fighter aircraft, tanks, artillery systems, missiles and naval assets. Military superiority often depended on who could afford the most advanced hardware.

Recent conflicts have challenged that assumption.

The Russia-Ukraine war was the first major reminder of how dramatically drones could alter modern warfare. Relatively inexpensive drones were being used to identify targets, direct artillery fire and destroy military equipment worth millions of dollars. A machine costing a few thousand dollars could neutralise assets that took years and enormous budgets to acquire.

More recently, the conflict between Israel and Iran reinforced the same lesson. Drones were used for surveillance, precision strikes, long-range attacks and air-defence suppression. In some cases, low-cost unmanned systems forced countries with some of the world’s most sophisticated military capabilities to rethink how they defend their airspace.

The implications were difficult to ignore. Drones were no longer niche military tools. They were becoming central to how modern conflicts are fought.

India took notice.

Industry reports suggest that India is preparing military drone orders worth more than $2 billion, or over ₹20,000 crore, from domestic manufacturers. If approved, it would rank among the largest drone-related defence procurements in the country’s history.

Several Indian companies are already positioning themselves for that opportunity. IdeaForge has emerged as one of the country’s leading drone manufacturers and supplies surveillance drones to the armed forces. Paras Defence and Zen Technologies are building capabilities across drones, loitering munitions and anti-drone systems.

Larsen & Toubro and Hindustan Aeronautics are expanding their presence through indigenous UAV programmes and strategic partnerships, while startups such as Garuda Aerospace are building products for both defence and civilian markets.

Yet warfare is only one part of the story.

What makes drones unusual is that the same technology is proving useful across agriculture, infrastructure and governance.

Agriculture offers perhaps the clearest example. India has roughly 140 million hectares of net sown area, and many farming operations still depend heavily on manual labour. Drones can spray pesticides and fertilisers faster, more uniformly and with lower chemical wastage.

Recognising this potential, the government has introduced subsidies for drone adoption and support for drone service centres, while industry estimates suggest the agricultural drone opportunity alone could eventually exceed ₹75,000 crore.

Similar use cases are emerging elsewhere. The National Highways Authority of India uses drones to monitor projects, while Railways deploys them to inspect tracks and bridges. Under the SVAMITVA scheme, drones have surveyed more than 3.28 lakh villages and helped issue property cards in over 1.82 lakh villages. Work that once required months of manual surveying can now be completed far more quickly.

The result is visible in adoption.

In July 2024, India had issued around 16,000 Remote Pilot Certificates and approved 116 training organisations. By February 2026, those figures had increased to nearly 40,000 certified pilots and more than 240 approved training organisations.

India also now has hundreds of drone-related companies operating across different parts of the value chain. Industry estimates suggest more than 500 entities and over 200 startups are active in areas ranging from manufacturing and software to services and components.

But there is a reason policymakers increasingly talk about drone sovereignty rather than drone manufacturing.

India has seen this movie before.

The country became one of the world’s largest smartphone assembly hubs, yet many of the most valuable parts of the smartphone economy, processors, operating systems, advanced components and intellectual property, remained concentrated elsewhere.

The risk with drones is similar.

According to government disclosures, around 39% of flight controllers used in DGCA-certified small drones were sourced from Chinese manufacturers. Since flight controllers function as the drone’s brain, controlling navigation, stability and mission execution, the figure highlights a broader challenge. India is becoming increasingly capable of manufacturing drones, but many of the technologies that make those drones work are still imported.

China dominates large parts of the global drone supply chain, accounting for roughly 80% of the global drone market. DJI, the country’s largest drone manufacturer, reportedly controls nearly 90% of the US commercial drone market. That concentration has heightened concerns around supply-chain dependence, particularly for countries trying to build domestic drone capabilities.

For defence applications, concerns extend beyond supply chains to cybersecurity and operational reliability.

A drone used for national security cannot afford uncertain dependencies.

This is why India’s drone journey has entered a new phase.

The first phase was regulatory, where the question was whether drones could legally fly. The second phase was commercial, where businesses and governments experimented with real-world applications. The third phase, which is unfolding today, is strategic.

Can India control the technologies that make drones work?

The government’s answer appears increasingly clear. The Drone Rules of 2021 simplified compliance requirements. Imports of finished drones were restricted while component imports remained permitted. Production-linked incentives were introduced. GST was reduced to 5%. New incentive programmes worth thousands of crores are being discussed to accelerate localisation.

The goal is straightforward. India does not want to stop at assembling drones. It wants to build the flight controllers, sensors, batteries, communication systems and software that sit inside them.

That is why the drone story matters.

It is tempting to view drones as a standalone industry. In reality, they are becoming a testing ground for something much larger. Every challenge the sector faces, whether it involves batteries, sensors, software, communications, navigation or manufacturing, mirrors challenges India will face across advanced technology industries in the years ahead.

Success would create capabilities that extend far beyond drones. Failure would leave India dependent on foreign technologies in one of the fastest-growing strategic industries in the world.

The drone flying overhead is the visible part of the story.

The real race is happening inside the machine.

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Now the problem is that we’re trying to put it into everything.

Last month, food companies across the US started sounding the alarm about a whey protein shortage. Some suppliers reportedly ran out of stock for the rest of the year. Prices hit record highs. Smaller brands began reformulating products. Others paused production entirely.

But how can there be a whey shortage when supermarket shelves are overflowing with whey protein consumables like bars, shakes, chips, cookies, cereals, ice creams, coffees and protein powders to make every gym-goer feel personally responsible for national muscle growth?

The answer is simple.

Modern food industry has become heavily dependent on: whey protein. And the reasons behind it reveal how consumer trends can sometimes grow faster than the systems that support them.

To understand what’s happening, we need to start with whey itself.

How whey took over the food industry?

Whey protein comes from milk. More specifically, it is the liquid left behind when milk is turned into cheese. For decades, this liquid was considered a waste product. Dairy producers often fed it to livestock, dumped it on fields or simply threw it away because there wasn’t much demand for it.

That changed in the 1980s when advances in food processing made it easier to extract, dry and package whey into powder. Suddenly, the dairy industry had discovered a valuable product hiding inside a byproduct.

For years, supply comfortably matched demand.

Then the world became obsessed with protein.

Today, protein has escaped the gym and entered everyday life.

Starbucks sells protein-enhanced drinks. Chipotle promotes higher-protein meal options. Dunkin has experimented with protein additions. Food companies are adding protein to waffles, chips, cookies, desserts and beverages. Social media influencers compete over who can consume the most grams in a day. The term “protein-maxxing” has become part of internet fitness culture.

Protein is having a moment

According to NielsenIQ, sales of products that prominently advertise whey protein on their packaging have continued to grow, with total dollar sales rising around 7% over the past year. Meanwhile, products containing whey protein are now generating billions of dollars in annual retail sales.

The protein boom is not limited to athletes anymore. Weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy have added another demand driver. People taking GLP-1 medications often lose muscle mass alongside weight, leading doctors and nutritionists to recommend higher protein intake. That has pushed protein products further into the mainstream.

Governments have also played a role. In the United States, protein has increasingly been positioned as a desirable nutrient, and consumers have embraced the message enthusiastically.

The result is that demand for whey protein has exploded. Unfortunately, whey supply doesn’t work like software.

When Netflix needs more streaming capacity, it can add servers. When a cloud company needs more storage, it can build more data centres. When the food industry needs more whey protein, it can’t simply manufacture more whey.

Because whey only exists when somebody makes cheese.

That’s the fundamental constraint behind the current shortage.

Every kilogram of whey protein starts with milk. That milk must first be converted into cheese. The remaining liquid whey must then be collected, filtered, processed, concentrated, dried and packaged.

The more refined the protein product, the more complicated the process becomes.

Whey Protein Concentrate (WPC) undergoes several processing stages. Whey Protein Isolate (WPI), the premium version found in many sports nutrition products, requires even more filtration and specialised equipment.

The problem is that demand for whey protein has exploded much faster than the industry can build this infrastructure.

Industry experts estimate that modern dairy processing facilities can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In some cases, large plants can approach $1 billion in investment. Even if a company decides today that it wants to produce more whey protein, it could take years before new capacity becomes operational.

That’s where the mismatch begins.

The numbers coming out of global dairy markets show just how severe the imbalance has become.

According to DCA Market Intelligence, European food-grade whey powder prices have risen more than 50% since the beginning of 2026, reaching record levels. Higher-end products have surged even more dramatically. Whey Protein Concentrate 80% recently traded at around €20,250 per metric tonne, while Whey Protein Isolate reached approximately €25,750 per metric tonne.

The Financial Times reported that some whey protein isolate prices have increased nearly fivefold compared to 2023 levels.

In the United States, wholesale prices for high-protein whey concentrates have jumped more than 40% in just a few months. USDA reports indicate inventories remain extremely tight, with some manufacturers already selling out their production capacity for the remainder of the year.

This isn’t just affecting commodity traders.

Real businesses are feeling the pain. Smaller companies without purchasing power are being squeezed the hardest because they lack the scale needed to negotiate favourable contracts.

That creates a difficult choice. Raise prices and risk losing customers. Or absorb the costs and destroy margins.

Neither option is particularly attractive.

What’s interesting is that consumers have barely noticed any of this yet.

Protein powders are more expensive than they were a few years ago, but the full impact has not reached supermarket shelves. Industry analysts estimate that ingredient inflation can take 12 to 18 months before it fully appears in retail pricing.

In other words, much of the price shock is still working its way through the system. That means protein bars, shakes, snacks and other fortified products could become noticeably more expensive over the next year.

So where does India fit in?

India faces a slightly different challenge.

The country is the world’s largest milk producer, yet it remains surprisingly dependent on imported whey protein.

India generates enormous quantities of milk, but much of it goes into liquid milk consumption, traditional dairy products and local dairy processing. Large-scale cheese production and advanced whey extraction infrastructure remain relatively limited compared to Western markets.

As a result, sports nutrition companies and protein-food manufacturers often depend on imported whey ingredients. That dependence is becoming costly.

Whey protein concentrate prices in India have climbed from roughly ₹700-800 per kilogram a few years ago to around ₹2,000-2,300 per kilogram today.

Quick commerce platforms have reported protein-related product orders growing by roughly 150% over the past two years. Protein powders have become one of the fastest-growing categories across online nutrition platforms. Every major FMCG company now wants a piece of the protein market.

India also has a genuine nutritional reason to care about protein. Several studies have suggested that large sections of the population consume less protein than recommended levels. Rising incomes, urban lifestyles and greater health awareness are creating long-term demand for protein-rich foods. It’s simply becoming more valuable.

The bigger lesson, however, goes beyond protein.

Every few years, consumers discover a new obsession. Sometimes it’s low-fat foods. Sometimes it’s gluten-free products. Sometimes it’s probiotics, collagen or superfoods.

This time, it’s protein.

And until new dairy processing capacity catches up, the ingredient that powers everything from your gym shake to your protein coffee may remain one of the hottest commodities in the food business

That’s all for this week’s brew.

If there’s a business trend or industry rabbit hole you think we should jump into next, let us know.

See you next week.

China wants to dominate the material those clothes are made from.

And India is stuck somewhere in the middle trying to figure out whether it wants to build an industry or merely host factories for one.

That, in one sentence, is the story of lyocell right now.

A few years ago, almost nobody outside the textile industry had heard of this fabric. Today, it is becoming one of the most important fibres in global apparel manufacturing. H&M, Zara, Marks & Spencer, Decathlon and dozens of European fashion brands are actively increasing the share of “preferred fibres” in their products.

The European Union is tightening sustainability norms for textiles through regulations like the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the Digital Product Passport framework. Suddenly, the fashion supply chain is under pressure to prove not just where clothes are made, but what they are made from.

And that is pushing global brands toward fibres like lyocell.

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how the modern clothing industry works. Most fabrics today come from two broad buckets. Natural fibres like cotton. And synthetic fibres like polyester, which is essentially derived from petroleum. Polyester dominates because it is cheap, durable and easy to mass produce. But it is also one of fashion’s biggest pollution problems. Every wash releases microplastics. It is fossil-fuel dependent. And Europe increasingly wants alternatives.

That created a massive opening for a third category called regenerated cellulosic fibres. These are fibres made from wood pulp. Think viscose, modal and lyocell. But among these, lyocell became the premium option because its chemistry solved one of the textile industry’s dirtiest problems.

Traditional viscose manufacturing uses toxic chemicals like carbon disulphide, which often leak into rivers and surrounding ecosystems. Lyocell uses a closed-loop solvent spinning process where nearly 99% of the chemicals get recovered and reused.

The fibre itself is biodegradable, breathable, softer than cotton, stronger when wet, and drapes like premium fabric. In the fashion industry language, it delivers both “performance” and “sustainability”. Which usually translates to higher margins.

That combination turned lyocell into one of the fastest-growing fibre categories globally. The global lyocell market was estimated at roughly $1.5-2 billion a few years ago and is expected to grow at high single-digit to low double-digit CAGR rates over the coming decade depending on the estimate. Europe especially became obsessed with it because regulators there are now actively restructuring textile imports around sustainability metrics.

And for once, India had an early lead in something advanced.

Aditya Birla Group, through Grasim Industries, built one of the world’s few commercial-scale lyocell plants at Kharach in Gujarat years before the category became fashionable. India was not merely stitching garments here. It was actually manufacturing an advanced textile material that the world wanted. That distinction matters because India’s textile industry has historically lived at the lower end of the value chain. Cheap labour, spinning, dyeing, garment exports. Rarely upstream technology.

The Indian government even supported some of this development through institutions like the Technology Development Board. At one point, this looked like the kind of industrial story policymakers dream about. India had capability. Europe had demand. China was relatively late.

Then China arrived properly.

And the entire economics of the industry changed.

The most important company here is Sateri, a subsidiary of Singapore-headquartered Royal Golden Eagle Group. Six years ago, Sateri did not manufacture lyocell at all. Today, it has become the largest producer in the world.

Its newest plant at Yutai in Shandong province started commercial production in March 2026. Once fully ramped up, this single facility alone will hold more lyocell capacity than the entire global industry had as recently as 2023. Across all facilities, Sateri now has roughly 600,000 tonnes of installed lyocell capacity and plans to move toward nearly one million tonnes eventually.

To put that into perspective, Aditya Birla’s current footprint is estimated around 50,000 tonnes. Birla is expanding aggressively, but even after Harihar is fully operational, its total capacity will be around 110,000 tonnes. Sateri’s capacity today is already close to 600,000 tonnes. And scale changes everything in manufacturing.

Lyocell was originally positioned as a premium fibre that could sell above cotton and viscose. But China’s giant capacity buildout has now crushed prices. In parts of China, lyocell reportedly trades below viscose prices itself. That is remarkable because viscose was supposed to be the cheaper, dirtier alternative.

This is starting to look eerily similar to what China previously did in solar panels, EV batteries and steel. Enter aggressively. Build huge capacity. Push prices down so hard that competitors struggle to survive. Then dominate global supply chains.

Even Lenzing, the Austrian company that invented lyocell and built its TENCEL brand into the global benchmark, is under pressure. Since 2021, Lenzing has lost roughly 80% of its market value. It scrapped a major US expansion project. And it is increasingly retreating from commodity-grade lyocell to focus on premium specialty segments where Chinese oversupply hurts less.

The interesting part is that India is simultaneously benefiting and losing from this shift.

In January 2026, after nearly nineteen years of negotiations, India and the European Union finally signed their long-awaited Free Trade Agreement. One major provision removes the 8-12% import duty Europe imposed on Indian textile exports. China does not get this advantage.

On paper, this should have been a huge opportunity for India. Europe’s textile market is worth over $260 billion. Sustainable fibres are among the fastest-growing categories inside it. India already has a massive garment manufacturing ecosystem. Add cheaper access to Europe and a domestic lyocell industry, and this should have been a strong export story.

But there is a catch.

Trade agreements help only if you have manufacturing depth ready to exploit them. And right now, China’s scale advantage is becoming overwhelming.

Worse, some of that Chinese-linked capacity is now entering India itself.

In August 2025, Tamil Nadu signed an MoU with RGE, Sateri’s parent company, for a 150,000-tonne lyocell plant in Thoothukudi. That single foreign-backed facility on Indian soil could eventually produce more lyocell than all of Birla’s Indian operations combined.

Which creates an uncomfortable question.

If India’s biggest opportunity in advanced manufacturing still depends on foreign-owned capital, foreign technology ecosystems and imported industrial strategy, how much value are we truly capturing?

Because industrial policy is not merely about attracting factories. It is about building ecosystems. China did not dominate sectors like batteries or solar by just offering cheap land. It built integrated supply chains, logistics networks, port infrastructure, chemical ecosystems, state financing support and massive scale simultaneously.

Sateri’s Chinese plants are deeply integrated with biomass power systems, wastewater treatment infrastructure and inland logistics. This is coordinated industrial development at scale. Not isolated factory announcements.

India still largely approaches manufacturing through MoUs, subsidies and tariff negotiations. But lyocell is not just another textile fibre anymore. It sits at the intersection of sustainability regulation, fashion supply chains, advanced materials and geopolitics.

Everyone wants the same market. But not everyone is playing the same game.

Right now, India still has advantages. It has a large textile ecosystem, improving trade access to Europe, lower labour costs, and companies like Birla that already understand the chemistry and manufacturing process. If the EU’s sustainability push accelerates, demand for regenerated cellulosic fibres could rise sharply over the next decade.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You now know more about lyocell than 97% of people standing in a Zara store.

That’s all for this week’s brew.

If there’s a business trend or industry rabbit hole you think we should jump into next, let us know.

See you next week.

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Last week, we sat down with Angad Daryani from Praan on our This is Business channel to talk about something most Indians deal with every single day but rarely think deeply about: the air we breathe.

The conversation starts with pollution, but quickly turns into a much bigger discussion around indoor air, industrial emissions, Indian cities, climate-tech hardware, and why solving pollution in India is far messier than just tracking AQI numbers on an app.

Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy stories where technology, business, and everyday life quietly collide.

The Bite:

Every oil crisis leaves behind a different kind of country.

The oil shock of the 1970s did not just create fuel shortages. It changed how nations thought about mobility itself. The Netherlands, hit by soaring oil prices and supply disruptions, began redesigning cities around bicycles and public transport instead of cars. Norway started slowly reducing dependence on fuel imports through long-term energy and EV policies. At the time, none of this looked revolutionary. It looked like survival.

Fifty years later, India may be entering its own version of that moment.

Over the past few weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly spoken about reducing fuel consumption. During a recent speech, he urged Indians to adopt work from home where possible, use public transport more often, rely on railways, avoid unnecessary travel, carpool regularly, and accelerate EV adoption. For most people, these sounded like simple lifestyle suggestions. But the context behind them is much bigger.

India’s fuel bill is becoming too large, too volatile, and too dependent on global events that India cannot control.

The country imports nearly 85-90% of its crude oil requirements. In FY25 alone, India’s crude oil import bill crossed roughly $130 billion. Every barrel is purchased in dollars. So when crude prices rise globally or the rupee weakens, India pays twice. Once through higher import costs and again through inflation that spreads across transport, food, logistics, flights, delivery costs, and manufacturing.

This vulnerability becomes especially dangerous during geopolitical crises. The Russia-Ukraine war disrupted global energy markets for months. Now fresh tensions around the Strait of Hormuz and West Asia have revived fears around oil supply disruptions again.

Nearly one-third of global seaborne oil trade passes through Hormuz. Even the possibility of instability there pushes oil prices upward. For a country like India, which imports most of its energy needs, that becomes an economic problem almost immediately.

This is exactly why the government’s language around EVs has started changing.

A few years ago, electric vehicles were mostly sold as environmental products. Cleaner air. Lower emissions. Sustainable mobility. But recent policy discussions and speeches increasingly frame EVs as tools for energy security and economic resilience. The concern now is not just pollution in Delhi or Mumbai. The concern is that India’s economic growth still runs heavily on imported fuel.

And India’s oil consumption is only rising.

India recently overtook China as the world’s most populous country. Vehicle ownership is climbing rapidly across two-wheelers, cars, logistics fleets, ride-hailing, and commercial transport. Freight movement is increasing. Urban delivery networks are exploding because of e-commerce. More highways are being built. More flights are operating. More people are travelling.

All of this increases fuel demand.

India already consumes more than 5 million barrels of oil per day and remains the world’s third-largest oil importer. If mobility demand keeps expanding while oil dependence stays this high, future global oil shocks become even more painful.

That is why the EV conversation is now moving beyond private cars.

In fact, the government’s biggest concern may not even be urban consumers buying electric SUVs. The real focus is shifting toward buses, delivery fleets, trucks, and commercial transportation because this is where India burns enormous amounts of diesel every single day.

This explains why India is now reportedly preparing more than $1 billion in incentives specifically for electric buses and trucks. The government is also considering interest subsidies for commercial EV financing because current borrowing costs remain extremely high. According to IEEFA estimates, some commercial EV borrowers still face interest rates ranging from 15% to 33%, which destroys the cost advantage EVs are supposed to offer.

Commercial transport sits at the centre of India’s fuel economy. Long-distance trucks move goods across states continuously. Diesel buses run through cities from early morning until late night. Delivery fleets operate almost non-stop in urban areas. Electrifying even a small part of this ecosystem can reduce fuel consumption at scale far faster than replacing a few premium private cars.

That is also why electric buses have suddenly become one of the most visible parts of India’s EV transition.

Delhi now operates over 4,300 electric buses out of a total public bus fleet of roughly 6,100. The city has also expanded charging and battery-swapping infrastructure aggressively over the past few years. This is becoming a policy template because buses solve multiple problems together. They reduce diesel demand, improve air quality, and move far more people per vehicle compared to private cars.

But India’s EV push is still full of contradictions.

Part of this is practical. Charging infrastructure remains inconsistent, especially outside major cities. Range anxiety becomes a bigger issue for official and long-distance usage. Electric vehicles also remain more expensive upfront. A Tata Nexon EV can cost ₹15-17 lakh, while its petrol counterpart still sits closer to ₹9-13 lakh.

But the larger issue is that India’s EV ecosystem is still incomplete.

Charging infrastructure has grown rapidly from around 5,000 public chargers in 2020 to nearly 40,000 in 2025. Yet this remains tiny for a country of India’s scale. Financing remains expensive. Battery supply chains are still developing. Domestic cell manufacturing is still being built out. Public charging stations in many areas continue to struggle with low utilisation rates and weak economics.

At the same time, the scale of investment required is massive.

According to IEEFA estimates, India’s EV ecosystem attracted roughly ₹2.23 lakh crore in investments between 2020 and 2025 across manufacturing, charging infrastructure, and policy support. This sounds huge until you look at the larger target. The country may require nearly ₹12.5 lakh crore in EV-related investments by 2030. In other words, more than 80% of the required capital is still missing.

This is why the government’s EV strategy increasingly looks less like a climate policy and more like industrial policy.

India wants domestic battery manufacturing. It wants local EV supply chains. It wants electric buses produced locally. It wants less dependence not only on imported oil, but eventually on imported battery components too. Companies like Tata Motors, Mahindra, Ola Electric, and Ather are part of this broader push toward localisation. State-backed procurement agencies like CESL are also trying to accelerate adoption by introducing EV leasing models for government departments.

What India is slowly realising is that fuel dependency shapes far more than transport costs. It affects inflation, fiscal pressure, trade deficits, urban pollution, logistics economics, and even geopolitical flexibility.

That is why the current EV push feels different from earlier waves of policy enthusiasm.

This time, the pressure is not coming only from climate targets or startup optimism. It is coming from the uncomfortable reality that every major oil crisis somewhere else in the world still finds its way into Indian households. Sometimes through petrol prices. Sometimes through inflation. Sometimes through food and transport costs that quietly rise together.

The 1970s oil crisis forced countries like the Netherlands and Norway to rethink mobility because fuel insecurity became impossible to ignore.

India now seems to be arriving at similar crossroads.

If you’ve made it this far, there’s a decent chance you’ll now start connecting a lot more dots every time petrol prices suddenly jump.

Anyway, that’s all for this week’s brew.

If there’s a trend, industry, or weird corner of the economy you think we should obsess over next, send it our way. We’re always looking for the next rabbit hole.

See you next week.

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That sounds funny at first.

Until you realise this is probably the clearest sign yet that South Korea has pulled off something almost no country has managed at this scale. It turned entertainment into infrastructure.

Because Korea is no longer exporting just music or TV shows. It is exporting habits. Beauty standards. Food cravings. Fashion choices. Language learning. Tourism. Fandom culture. Even emotional vocabulary.

And India is right in the middle of this wave.

According to the Overseas Hallyu Survey, Indian fans now spend an average of 18.6 hours every week consuming Korean content. That includes K-dramas, K-pop, Korean variety shows and online content. To put that in perspective, that is nearly a part-time job dedicated entirely to Korean culture. India is now considered one of South Korea’s largest overseas audiences.

The roots of this global expansion go back to the late 1990s when South Korea began actively investing in cultural exports after the Asian Financial Crisis. Policymakers realised that culture could become an economic asset in the same way electronics or automobiles had earlier transformed Japan’s global image.

The Korean Wave, or Hallyu, initially spread through television dramas and pop music across East and Southeast Asia before expanding into Europe and North America. India entered this cycle slightly later, but once streaming platforms removed distribution barriers, growth accelerated rapidly.

In 2012, PSY’s Gangnam Style became the first YouTube video ever to cross 1 billion views. Most Indians at the time treated it like a funny viral song with a horse-riding dance step. Nobody thought it was the opening scene of a global soft-power strategy.

Then came BTS and BLACKPINK. Then came Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020. Then Squid Game arrived and became Netflix’s biggest show globally. And that’s when Korean culture stopped looking “foreign” and became mainstream.

But the real acceleration happened during COVID.

During lockdowns, Indian audiences were trapped indoors with endless screen time and very little emotional certainty. Korean dramas arrived at exactly the right moment. They were tightly written, visually polished and emotionally direct. Most importantly, they ended. Which sounds like a small thing until you remember Indian television has spent two decades stretching one wedding scene across 19 episodes.

Shows like Crash Landing on You, Vincenzo, Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Business Proposal exploded in India because they offered something Indian OTT audiences were desperately craving: high production quality without creative exhaustion.

Netflix saw this early. By 2023, more than 60% of Netflix users globally had watched Korean titles. And platforms did not just dump Korean shows online and hope for the best. They dubbed them in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Korea became accessible to audiences far outside metro cities.

That accessibility changed everything.

Because the Korean Wave is not just about watching content. It works like a funnel.

People enter through K-dramas or K-pop. Then they start trying Korean food. Then skincare. Then fashion. Then language learning. Then tourism. Then fandom communities.

One Korean drama can sell ramyeon, sheet masks, sneakers, fried chicken, tourism packages and Korean classes at the same time.

Take food, for example.

For years, Korean food outside Korea was largely reduced to barbecue and kimchi. But that perception is changing fast, especially in America. Restaurants like Atomix, Cote, Atoboy and Coqodaq in New York have pushed Korean cuisine into the global fine-dining conversation.

And Korean food is increasingly being treated not as “ethnic food” but as mainstream American cuisine.

The interesting part is how Korea achieved this.

Unlike many countries that try to preserve culinary authenticity at all costs, Korean chefs often used familiarity as a bridge. Creamy tteokbokki started resembling vodka pasta. Korean fried chicken became a luxury comfort food. Chefs fused Korean flavours with burgers, grits, oysters and even steakhouse culture.

That’s how Korean cuisine stopped being “a cuisine you try once” and became a cuisine people built routines around. That same playbook exists across beauty too.

K-beauty grew because Korean skincare products solved a problem global beauty brands ignored for years. They made skincare feel approachable, affordable and ritualistic instead of clinical.

Sheet masks, BB creams and “glass skin” routines became mainstream in India because K-dramas constantly visualised flawless skin as part of aspirational living. Indian skincare brands quickly noticed this. Pilgrim’s Korean skincare range became one of its major growth drivers because Indian consumers were actively searching for Korean-inspired products.

And then comes language.

A generation that once treated French as the language of aspiration is now learning Korean through Duolingo because of Netflix shows and BTS lyrics.

Korean is now among the fastest-growing languages being learned in India on several language-learning platforms. The Korean Cultural Center in Delhi has seen rising demand for Korean classes, while the All India K-pop Contest hosted by the Korean Cultural Center attracted 4,000 participants in 2023.

And Indian fandoms have become frighteningly organised.

India now has one of the world’s largest BTS fanbases. But unlike traditional celebrity fandoms that mostly trend hashtags and fight on Twitter, K-pop fandoms operate more like digital communities.

During the Assam floods in 2020, Indian BTS fan groups reportedly raised hundreds of thousands of rupees within 24 hours. During India’s second COVID wave in 2021, BTS ARMY India raised over ₹20 lakh through crowdfunding platforms for oxygen cylinders, medical supplies and community kitchens.

Think about that for a second: an entertainment fandom developed crisis-response capabilities.

This is where the Korean Wave becomes really fascinating. Korea did not just export content. It exported participation models. Fans are not treated as audiences. They are treated as ecosystems that continuously engage, mobilise and consume.

And all of this was heavily supported by the South Korean state.

The Korean government understood early that entertainment could function as economic policy. It invested in cultural exports, tourism campaigns and global distribution infrastructure long before most countries took soft power seriously.

The “Visit Korea Year 2023-2024” campaign bundled K-pop concerts, cultural festivals and travel discounts together. Korean tourism increasingly sells emotional familiarity instead of geography. People do not visit Seoul because it is a city. They visit because they already feel emotionally connected to it through dramas, idols and food.

This strategy worked so well that Korean food brands now reportedly operate more than 4,600 overseas outlets across 56 countries. The United States has even overtaken China as the biggest overseas market for Korean food brands.

But how did South Korea, a country with a population smaller than many Indian states, manage to build one of the world’s strongest cultural export systems?

Because India already has everything on paper. Massive film industries. Music industries. Regional storytelling traditions. A diaspora everywhere. A population obsessed with entertainment.

But Korea built coordination.

Its music, food, beauty, fashion, tourism and streaming industries all reinforce each other. Every K-drama becomes a marketing machine for Korean brands, locations, food and lifestyle. Every fandom becomes a distribution network. Every platform release becomes cultural diplomacy.

India produces global stars. Korea built a global system.

And that difference is becoming impossible to ignore now.

Especially when Indian malls host K-pop dance competitions, theatres screen BTS concert films across 20 cities, Korean ramyeon fills supermarket shelves, and teenagers in Kochi or Rourkela learn Korean lyrics before they learn French verbs.

The Korean Wave is no longer a trend.

It is what happens when culture becomes strategy.

If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you’ll notice Korean influence everywhere now.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule. If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

And if we run with your idea, we’ll send a little Filter Coffee surprise your way.

That’s all for this week. See you on the next brew.

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This is not a coincidence. This is a land grab.

Because of global beauty brands, India has officially moved from “interesting market” to “we can’t afford to miss this.”

To understand why, start with one number.

India’s beauty and personal care market is expected to hit $40 billion by 2030, making it the fourth-largest in the world. But here’s the catch. The average Indian spends only about $17 per year on beauty, which is roughly half of Indonesia or Vietnam and just a fifth of Brazil. That gap is the opportunity. When incomes rise, beauty spending tends to multiply, not grow slowly. Nykaa’s own data suggests it can go up as much as five times.

You can almost track this shift by just looking at people’s dressing tables.

Not very long ago, beauty for most Indians was simple and predictable. A kajal, a lipstick, maybe one trusted cream that sat in the same corner for years. That was the routine. It worked, and nobody questioned it.

Now that same routine looks very different.

Somewhere along the way, a sunscreen got added. Then a moisturiser that wasn’t the “family cream.” Then maybe a serum someone saw on Instagram. A lip balm for everyday use. A blush for weekends. A face wash that actually claims to do something specific.

Before you realise it, what used to be a two-item pouch quietly turned into a small collection.

This shift from “occasion-based beauty” to “routine-based consumption” is what global brands care about. Because routine means repeat purchases, and repeat purchases build billion-dollar categories.

But where most of this global attention is actually going: luxury beauty.

India’s luxury beauty market was still tiny at about $1 billion in 2024, but it is projected to grow to $1.6 billion by 2028 and $4 billion by 2035, at roughly 14% CAGR. More importantly, luxury beauty is just 4% of India’s total beauty market, compared to 20–25% in Southeast Asia and 35–50% in developed markets. In simple terms, India hasn’t even started premiumising properly yet.

That’s why global brands are rushing in early. Because in markets like China, brands that entered late missed out on the biggest growth phase. And India is now entering that same phase, especially as per capita income moves into the $2,000–$2,500 range, which historically triggers a consumption boom across Asia.

But it’s not just about size. It’s also about who the Indian consumer is becoming. By 2030, people aged 15 to 45 will make up nearly half the population, and this group is far more aspirational and spend-driven. Add to that the fact that Gen Z alone is expected to drive 50% of beauty consumption, and you get a market that is young, experimental, and heavily influenced by Instagram and YouTube.

In fact, about 47% of Indian consumers discover beauty products through Instagram Reels, and 70% rely on influencers before buying.

This is a very different consumer from a decade ago. Today’s buyer doesn’t just trust brands. They Google ingredients, watch reviews, compare prices, and call out products that don’t work. Which is why the shift from “brand loyalty” to “product loyalty” is becoming real. People will try Fenty once because of Rihanna, but they will only repurchase if it survives Mumbai humidity and actually matches their skin tone.

That brings us to the second reason global brands are here. India is one of the most complex beauty markets in the world. It’s not one market. It’s multiple markets stacked together. Skin tones vary widely, undertones are often golden or olive, climates range from humid to dry, and preferences differ by region. What works in London or New York doesn’t automatically work in Chennai or Delhi.

This complexity used to be a barrier. Now it is an advantage.

Because brands that crack India don’t just win here. They build products that can work across emerging markets globally. That’s why companies are not just selling in India anymore. They are learning from India.

Take L’Oréal’s decision to build a €350 million AI-powered innovation hub in Hyderabad. This is not about selling more lipsticks in India. This is about using India’s data, tech talent, and diverse consumer base to build the future of beauty globally.

Then there’s the third shift. Global brands are no longer entering India alone. They are partnering, acquiring, and investing.

Estée Lauder is taking full control of Forest Essentials, which already has close to 200 stores and a strong Ayurveda-led positioning. Unilever saw this coming early. Its ₹2,955 crore acquisition of Minimalist was a clear signal that global players want a seat at India’s fast-growing, actives-led skincare table.

L’Oréal is exploring a deal with Innovist, which owns brands like Bare Anatomy. Puig has already acquired a majority stake in Kama Ayurveda. Even early-stage bets are happening, like Unilever Ventures backing clean fragrance startup Secret Alchemist.

This is not random. Building a brand in India from scratch takes years. Acquiring an Indian brand gives instant access to local product-market fit, consumer trust, and distribution data.

At the same time, Indian platforms have become powerful enough to control how brands enter the country. Nykaa has scaled from 77 stores in FY21 to 187 stores in FY24, while still doing most of its business online. Reliance has taken over Sephora India and is pushing its own platform, Tira, which is aiming for 100+ stores in the next few years. Together, these platforms offer something global brands struggled with earlier: a ready-made omnichannel network.

And that changes the game completely. Today, a brand can launch in India not just through stores, but through apps, influencer campaigns, quick commerce, and assisted selling at scale.

But here’s where things get interesting. While global brands are coming in aggressively, India is not just a passive market anymore.

Brands are being forced to adapt. They are launching mini SKUs to improve affordability. They are experimenting with lighter textures. They are expanding shade ranges beyond token inclusivity. They are investing in local influencers and beauty advisors. And most importantly, they are learning that India cannot be treated as an afterthought market where old global launches are dumped.

Because the Indian consumer today is watching closely. The first purchase might be driven by hype. The second purchase is driven by performance.

So when you put all of this together, the picture becomes clearer.

Global brands are coming to India because it offers scale, growth, and a young consumer base that is just starting to spend seriously on beauty. But they are staying invested because India offers something deeper. It offers data, diversity, product insights, and a chance to build brands that can travel globally.

At the same time, India is no longer just a market to sell into. It is becoming a market to build from.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

And if we run with your idea, we’ll send a little Filter Coffee surprise your way.

That’s all for this week. See you on the next brew.

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The world’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, which produces over 5 billion units every year and supplies brands like Durex and Trojan, has warned that prices could rise by 20-30%. The reason is not demand, not marketing, but a supply chain shock triggered by the Iran conflict.

Raw material costs have surged, shipping routes have slowed down, and even a single missing component can halt production lines. What sounds like a niche manufacturing issue is actually a ripple effect from oil markets to everyday consumer goods.

To understand why this is happening, you have to start with what condoms are made of. Most modern condoms rely on materials like synthetic rubber, nitrile, silicone lubricants and plastic-based packaging.

All of these are derived, directly or indirectly, from petrochemicals. And petrochemicals come from crude oil. When oil supply chains are disrupted, everything that depends on it starts wobbling. Since the conflict began earlier this year, key inputs like naphtha, a critical petroleum by-product used to make synthetic materials, have seen extreme volatility.

Asia depends on the Middle East for more than half of its naphtha supply, and refining margins have jumped from about $108 per tonne before the war to over $400 per tonne. Plastic resin prices in Asia have also surged by as much as 59%

At the same time, logistics have become a bottleneck. Shipments that used to take one month are now taking close to two months. That means inventory is stuck at sea while shelves run empty.

For a product like condoms, which is high-volume, low-margin, and highly dependent on consistent supply, this kind of delay creates immediate shortages. Demand itself has also gone up by roughly 30% this year, partly because distributors and buyers are stocking up in anticipation of further disruptions.

India is one of the largest condom markets in the world, consuming roughly 2.4 billion units annually. The market itself is estimated to be close to $900 million and is steadily expanding as conversations around sexual wellness become more open and digital platforms make purchases more discreet. Brands like Manforce, Durex, Moods, Skore and KamaSutra have turned what used to be a purely functional product into a lifestyle category, with flavoured variants, premium positioning and aggressive marketing.

However, economics still remain very sensitive. Condoms remain a critical public health product. For large sections of the population, especially low-income groups, access depends on affordability and availability through public channels.

This is where the global shock hits hardest. If input costs rise sharply and manufacturers pass that on, even partially, retail prices will go up. For urban consumers buying premium variants online, this may just mean paying slightly more. But for mass segments and government procurement, it creates a deeper challenge.

Public health systems already operate within tight budgets. Any increase in procurement costs means either fewer units distributed or higher spending requirements. Neither is easy to manage, especially when demand is not optional.

And the impact does not stop at condoms. What this situation really highlights is how deeply connected everyday products are to global energy markets. The same petrochemical disruption is affecting everything from plastic packaging to medical supplies, food containers and even toys.

In India, there have already been instances of sharp increases in prices of plastic components like bottle caps. When oil supply tightens, it does not just make fuel expensive, it quietly pushes up the cost of living across categories that people rarely connect back to crude oil.

There is also a subtle global reshuffle underway. While Asian manufacturers that rely on Middle Eastern feedstock are under pressure, North American producers are relatively insulated because they use ethane derived from natural gas. That gives them more stable input costs and better margins in times like this. Over time, this could influence where production shifts and how companies rethink their supply chains.

For India, the long-term question is whether domestic manufacturing can buffer some of these shocks. India does have a base in natural rubber production, which is used in certain types of condoms, but a significant part of the industry still depends on synthetic inputs linked to global petrochemical markets.

Building resilience would mean diversifying raw material sources, strengthening local supply chains, and possibly investing more in alternatives.

Over the past decade, India’s sexual wellness market has moved from quiet pharmacy purchases to openly marketed products on quick commerce apps and D2C platforms. If prices rise significantly, there is a risk that consumption becomes more price-sensitive again, especially among younger or lower-income consumers. That could slow down the progress made in normalising safe sex.

For consumers, it may soon mean paying a bit more for something they rarely think twice about. For businesses and policymakers, it is a reminder that even the most basic products depend on fragile global systems. And for India, it highlights the importance of building stronger, more self-reliant supply chains in categories that may seem small, but carry outsized importance.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

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In January 2025, over 2.2 lakh people packed into Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium across two nights, making it one of the largest concerts of the century. But the real story wasn’t inside the stadium. It was outside.

The event generated nearly ₹641 crore in economic impact, with ₹392 crore flowing directly into the city. Hotels sold out, flights ran at peak capacity, airfares jumped 3 to 4 times, and over 1.4 lakh passengers passed through the airport in just three days. For every ₹100 spent on a ticket, fans spent another ₹585 on travel, food, shopping, and stay. What looked like a concert was actually a full-blown economic engine.

And this is no longer a one-off moment. It is becoming a pattern.

Across India, concerts and live events are turning into something people plan their lives around. Fans are flying across cities, booking hotels, taking leaves, and building entire trips around shows. Nearly 5 to 6 lakh Indians travelled across cities for concerts in 2025 alone, and industry estimates suggest fans are willing to travel over 500 kilometres and pay up to three times normal hotel prices if the artist is big enough.

This behaviour has a name now, event tourism, and it is quietly reshaping how India spends.

Event tourism is when people travel to a city primarily to attend a specific event, and then build an entire trip around it. Instead of visiting a place for sightseeing and maybe catching an event on the side, the event itself becomes the main reason to travel. Everything else like flights, hotels, food, shopping, even local exploration happens because of that one event.

At the heart of this shift is a very simple reality.

India is young, and it is earning more. Over 65% of the population is under 35, and income per capita is rising among the fastest in major emerging markets. Once basic needs are met, spending naturally moves toward experiences. And concerts sit right at the centre of that shift.

Today, more than 70% of Gen Z and millennials in Tier 1 cities have attended at least one ticketed live event in the past year. This is not casual consumption. It is planned, intentional, and increasingly habitual.

But money alone does not explain it. Culture does.

For younger audiences, concerts are not just entertainment. They are identity markers. The artists you follow, the festivals you attend, and the moments you post online all signal who you are. There is also a strong element of FOMO.

When thousands of people are sharing stories, inside jokes, and memories from the same event, not being there feels like missing out on something bigger than just a show. And the fact that experiences now matter more than material purchases, and you begin to see why people are willing to spend ₹5,000 or even ₹25,000 on a ticket without thinking twice.

This demand is showing up clearly in the numbers.

India’s live events market has already crossed ₹20,000 crore and is growing at around 15-19% annually, which is faster than the global average. The organised segment alone is over ₹12,000 crore, and ticketed music events added more than ₹1,300 crore in incremental revenue recently.

In 2025, India hosted over 34,000 live events across concerts, comedy, and theatre. What’s even more telling is how the spending pattern is evolving. Premium experiences like VIP zones, hospitality decks, and exclusive access packages have seen more than double the footfall in just a year, which shows that people are not just attending events, they are upgrading how they experience them.

If you look at where this demand is coming from, it gets even more interesting. It is no longer limited to metros. Cities like Shillong, Guwahati, and Nashik have seen event footfall jump by over 200 percent in some cases. Around 35% of attendees at large concerts like Coldplay came from non-metro cities. Fandom in India is no longer tied to geography. If the artist matters, people will show up from anywhere.

Karan Aujla is a strong example of how Indian artists are scaling within this growing concert economy. His 2024–25 India tour sold out across multiple cities, with ticket prices ranging from around ₹2,000 to ₹25,000 depending on the city and access tier. In cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Chandigarh, tickets were reportedly sold out within hours of release. A significant portion of his audience travels across cities, especially from North Indian hubs like Punjab and Delhi, as well as smaller towns. His shows also lean heavily on premium sections, which signals that audiences are willing to spend more for proximity and a better experience, not just entry.

Diljit Dosanjh, who operates at a similar scale, offers an even clearer picture. His “Born To Shine” and subsequent tours have delivered stadium-level attendance, with shows in India and abroad selling out within minutes. In several cases, resale prices have jumped 2 to 3 times. His concerts have also triggered the same spillover effects seen with global artists, including spikes in hotel prices and increased travel demand.

If you zoom out, these artists help explain something important. India’s concert economy is not just driven by global superstars anymore. It is becoming layered. At the top, you have mega stadium acts like Coldplay. In the middle, you have large-scale Indian artists like Diljit and Aujla filling arenas. And at the base, you have indie artists building consistent demand across cities.

Even without perfect numbers, the pattern is clear. Sellouts are happening faster, ticket prices are rising, premium categories are growing, and fans are increasingly willing to travel. That is exactly the kind of behaviour needed for a concert economy to sustain itself at scale.

This shift is also changing how the industry makes money. Before 2020, concerts in India were largely brand-funded, with sponsors covering most of the costs and ticket sales contributing just 10 to 30 percent of revenue. Today, that model has flipped. Tickets now account for 50-70% of earnings, with fans directly paying for access, experiences, and exclusivity.

Brands are still involved, but they are no longer carrying the business. Platforms like BookMyShow, District, and Skillbox have built entire ecosystems around this, handling ticketing, discovery, marketing, and even on-ground execution. Buying a ticket is no longer just a transaction. It is the first step of the experience.

And then there is the ripple effect.

Live events do not just generate revenue for organisers. They create entire micro-economies. Hotels see occupancy spike by 60-100% during major events. Restaurants and bars report 25-40% higher sales. Local transport, retail, and even small vendors benefit from the surge in footfall.

A single large event can inject ₹25 to ₹40 crore into a city over a weekend. The sector also employs over 10 million people directly and indirectly, from artists and technicians to security staff and caterers. In the case of Coldplay alone, around 15,000 people were involved in making the event happen.

All of this sounds like a market that is ready to explode. But there is a catch.

India does not have the infrastructure to keep up.

Despite the demand, the country has fewer than 10 purpose-built venues that can host concerts with more than 10,000 people comfortably. Most events are still held in cricket stadiums, open grounds, or temporary setups.

These spaces were not designed for concerts, which means sound quality, crowd flow, safety, and logistics often suffer. Even in metros, entry and exit can take hours, and traffic outside venues becomes chaotic. In Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the situation is even more basic, with events relying on college grounds or open fields.

This lack of infrastructure also impacts profitability. Concerts are expensive to produce. Artists charge high fees, and organisers have to build everything from scratch each time, from stage and sound to lighting and crowd management.

On top of that, they need to deal with complex licensing systems that can involve 10-15 different approvals across departments. All of this adds cost and uncertainty. As a result, many large events operate on thin margins, and profitability often takes years to achieve.

So what you have is a market where demand is already strong, but the system around it is still catching up.

That is also where the opportunity lies.

If this ecosystem matures, the real winners will not just be the artists or the organisers. It will be the infrastructure around it. Venues, ticketing platforms, production companies, hospitality chains, transport networks, and even content platforms that stream or package these events. Because while a concert lasts a few hours, the spending around it stretches across days, sometimes weeks.

India is essentially at the early stage of something much bigger. Globally, live music is expected to become a $33 billion industry by 2027. Countries like the US, UK, and UAE have already turned concerts into major economic drivers by investing in infrastructure, policy support, and tourism integration. India has the audience, the cultural diversity, and the digital ecosystem to do the same, but it still needs the physical backbone to support it.

That is why 2025 and 2026 are starting to look like a turning point. Global artists are adding multiple Indian cities to their tours. Domestic artists are building large-scale touring brands. New venues and event formats are being tested. The government is also beginning to recognise live events as part of the broader creative economy, with ambitions to make India one of the top five live entertainment markets by 2030.

If that happens, concerts in India will stop being rare moments and become a regular part of how cities function.

And when that shift happens, the real story will not be about music. It will be about how an entire economy quietly built itself around people simply wanting to show up and experience something together.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

And if we run with your idea, we’ll send a little Filter Coffee surprise your way.

That’s all for this week. See you on the next brew.

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Recently, on This is Business, we met with Ryan Singh at Loop Health in Bangalore to understand how corporate healthcare actually works in India.

What stood out was a simple disconnect. For most professionals, healthcare only enters the picture when something goes wrong.

At the same time, this is probably the most health-aware generation India has seen. People are tracking fitness, taking supplements, and actively trying to stay healthy.

That creates a gap between how people live and how the system is designed.

Loop is building a model that tries to close this gap by bringing healthcare and insurance closer together.

If you want to understand how this shift could change the way healthcare works for working professionals in India, this conversation is a great place to start:

In the last issue, we spoke about where India really stands in the space race, and how the country is slowly building its place in a highly competitive, capital-heavy global industry.

Recently, one headline stood out.

IndiGo invested ₹10 crore in a Bengaluru startup called Sarla Aviation, a company building flying taxis for Indian cities. Around the same time, there were reports of India exploring dedicated air taxi corridors, while Dubai is already preparing to launch commercial flying taxi services by 2026.

So we paused for a second.

Flying taxis have quietly moved from concept to execution. The real question now is whether they can become a viable part of everyday transport.

The Bite:

IndiGo has just placed a telling bet on the future of mobility.

The airline invested ₹10 crore into Bengaluru-based startup Sarla Aviation, a company building flying taxis for short-distance travel.

Around the same time, industry bodies in India proposed dedicated air taxi corridors in cities like Delhi-NCR, and globally, places like Dubai are already constructing vertiports to launch commercial air taxi services in 2026. What once felt like a distant sci-fi promise is now inching closer to real-world deployment, and India is trying to make sure it is not left behind.

To understand why this is suddenly gaining momentum, you have to start with a very simple problem that almost every Indian city faces.

Traffic is broken. In cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi, a 20 to 30 kilometre journey can easily take over an hour, sometimes even two. India’s transport system works reasonably well for very short distances through autos and cabs, and for long distances through trains and flights. But the segment in between, typically 20 to 300 kilometres, is where things fall apart. This is exactly the gap flying taxis are trying to solve.

These vehicles are called eVTOLs, short for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Unlike airplanes, they do not need runways. Unlike helicopters, they are designed to be quieter, cheaper, and more efficient. They take off vertically like a drone, transition into forward flight like a plane, and are powered by electric or hybrid-electric systems. This makes them particularly suitable for dense urban environments where space is limited and noise is a concern.

Globally, this is no longer a fringe experiment. The flying taxi market is already estimated at around $4.4 billion in 2026 and is expected to more than double to roughly $9.5 billion by 2030, growing at over 20% annually.

The broader eVTOL aircraft segment, which is the core technology behind flying taxis, is growing even faster at over 30% annually.

Companies like Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, and Volocopter have already conducted test flights and secured partnerships with major airlines. United Airlines has invested in Archer, Delta has partnered with Joby, and Toyota has backed Joby’s manufacturing efforts. Dubai is preparing to launch one of the world’s first commercial air taxi networks by the end of 2026, complete with dedicated vertiports near airports and key urban hubs.

A vertiport is basically a mini-airport for flying taxis. It’s a dedicated space where eVTOL aircraft can take off, land, recharge, and pick up passengers.

India’s approach, however, is slightly different from the West. In most global markets, flying taxis are being positioned as premium services for high-income travellers, airport transfers, and tourism.

In India, the narrative is more problem-driven. The focus is on solving congestion, improving regional connectivity, and eventually making this accessible beyond just the ultra-rich. That is why companies here are talking about pricing air taxi rides at roughly two to three times the cost of a premium cab, rather than pricing them like helicopters, which are far more expensive.

Right now, the numbers still reflect a premium product. Estimates suggest that flying taxis in India could cost around ₹240 per kilometre, compared to roughly ₹55 per kilometre for a premium cab. That is about four to five times higher. But the value proposition lies in time. A 27 kilometre trip that takes 60 to 90 minutes by road could be completed in about 7 minutes by air. For certain use cases, that kind of time saving can justify the higher cost, especially for business travellers, emergency services, and airport transfers.

What makes India particularly interesting is how quickly the ecosystem is being built around this idea. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has already issued guidelines for certifying eVTOL aircraft and vertiports in 2024, which is earlier than many expected. These guidelines define how aircraft should be designed, tested, and approved, as well as how landing infrastructure should be built. There is also an evolving digital backbone in the form of the Digital Sky platform, which currently manages drone traffic but is expected to scale into a broader low-altitude air traffic management system. This includes features like real-time tracking, airspace zoning, and the “No Permission, No Take-off” protocol, which ensures that every flight is digitally authorised.

At the same time, the government has launched sandbox trials across multiple locations, including Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, to test how these systems work in real-world conditions. These trials, expected to run through 2026, are meant to answer practical questions around safety, noise, energy demand, and public acceptance. They will also help shape the final regulations that will govern commercial operations.

On the startup side, India already has a few serious players. Sarla Aviation is building a hybrid-electric aircraft called “Shunya,” designed to carry six passengers and one pilot, with a payload capacity of around 680 kilograms. It is targeting short urban routes and plans to launch operations by 2027 or 2028.

The ePlane Company, incubated at IIT Madras, is working on a smaller three-seater aircraft focused on compact, rooftop-to-rooftop travel within cities. It has already received design approval from the DGCA, which is a significant milestone for any aerospace startup. Then there is BluJ Aerospace, which is taking a different route by using hydrogen-electric propulsion to enable longer-range flights of up to 600 to 700 kilometres for regional connectivity.

These companies are not just building aircraft. They are trying to build an entire ecosystem around them. That includes manufacturing, battery systems, avionics, software, and maintenance infrastructure. IndiGo’s investment in Sarla Aviation is particularly important in this context because it signals that large aviation players are willing to back domestic startups rather than relying entirely on foreign technology. This is partly because global partnerships have not always aligned with India’s timelines and regulatory environment, forcing companies to look inward.

But for all the excitement, the biggest challenges are not in the sky. They are on the ground. Infrastructure is the real bottleneck. Flying taxis need vertiports, which are essentially specialised landing and take-off hubs. Building these from scratch in cities like Mumbai or Delhi is both expensive and impractical due to land constraints. That is why there is a growing push to use existing rooftops of buildings, hospitals, and offices as landing zones. This reduces land acquisition costs but introduces new engineering challenges around safety, structural strength, and obstacle clearance.

Then there is the issue of power. Charging an eVTOL aircraft is not like charging an electric car. Each fast charging cycle can require anywhere between 300 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of power. If multiple aircraft are charging simultaneously at a single vertiport, the peak demand could go as high as 13 megawatts. That is comparable to the power consumption of a small industrial facility. India’s urban power grids are already under stress in many areas, so supporting this kind of demand will require significant upgrades, along with energy storage systems to manage peak loads.

The economics of building and operating this infrastructure are also complex. Charger hardware alone can account for 40-55% of the total cost of a vertiport, while transformer upgrades, civil works, and cabling add further to the bill. Early estimates suggest that even smaller charging stations could take four to five years to break even at moderate utilisation levels. For large-scale eVTOL hubs, the capital requirements will be much higher, which means initial operations may depend on premium pricing, government support, or both.

Another layer to this is airspace management. Cities like Bengaluru have complex airspaces with multiple airports, defence zones, and restricted areas. Integrating hundreds or thousands of low-altitude flights into this environment without causing safety risks is a major challenge. Regulators are working on creating dedicated air corridors and integrating them with existing air traffic control systems, but this is still a work in progress.

Despite all these hurdles, the direction of travel is clear. The next two to three years will likely be about testing, regulation, and limited pilots. By 2027 or 2028, we could see the first commercial routes in select cities, initially serving niche segments like airport transfers and medical logistics. Beyond that, the real question is whether this can scale into something more mainstream.

The answer depends on whether three things come together. First, regulations need to mature quickly without compromising safety. Second, infrastructure investments need to keep pace with demand. And third, domestic manufacturing needs to scale up so that aircraft can be produced at lower costs and in larger numbers. If all three align, flying taxis could move from being a novelty to becoming a meaningful part of the transport mix.

At its core, this is not about replacing cars or solving traffic entirely. It is about creating a new layer of mobility for high-value, time-sensitive travel. In a country where time lost in traffic translates into economic loss, stress, and missed opportunities, even a small shift in how people move can have an outsized impact.

India is not the first country to explore flying taxis, but it might be one of the few where the problem is large enough, the demand is dense enough, and the policy support is strong enough to make it work at scale. The skies may still look empty today, but for the first time, there is a serious effort underway to put them to use.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

We’ll land in your inbox again next week, right on schedule.

If there’s a topic you think deserves more attention, send it our way. We’re always listening.

And if we run with your idea, we’ll send a little Filter Coffee surprise your way.

That’s all for this week. See you on the next brew.

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