It’s been a month since India’s nationwide shift to E20 petrol—20% ethanol-blended petrol. Vehicle owners have come forward to complain about falling mileage, damage to their vehicles, voided warranties, and the absence of insurance coverage.

The change has sparked outrage, and nothing is being done to placate the country’s many millions of angry drivers.

India’s move to E20 fuel took place much faster than originally planned. This pace may have been inspired by a previous success, when the government had to address worsening air pollution in the 2010s. 

At the time, regulators were able to skip a step to implement more stringent vehicle emissions standards. Even though there was some opposition from automakers, the change was largely unchallenged, and the public was onboard.

The context is different this time around, and the confidence exuded by the government is misplaced. 

The Ken’s Suprita Anupam explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/from-bs6-to-e20-india-learnt-the-wrong-lessons-heres-how-to-course-correct/

Dialysis is a tough business, and not because of any serious lack of demand. Over 280,000 patients were undergoing regular dialysis in 2024, a number that’s projected to go up to 520,000 by 2029. Add in less frequent or one-time treatments, and the number of patients who need the procedure every year breaches one million. 

It is the economics that is the tricky bit. High procurement costs, tricky consumable-stock management, and very low margins—in fact, nowhere on the planet can one run a small dialysis business sustainably. 

And India, with the lowest dialysis price point in the world, is the toughest market to crack. 

Which perhaps explains why IPO-bound kidneycare chain Nephroplus’ founder Vikram Vuppala built the kidneycare chain the way he did. It is already India’s—and Asia’s—largest dialysis service provider. And it is expanding, both inside and outside the country’s borders, for which it wants to put the Rs 353 crore it plans to raise from its IPO to good use. 

In this edition of Make India Competitive Again, The Ken’s Sudeshna Ray explains how testing itself in a market like India, and building expertise in a “full-stack” model, has been key to its success overseas. 

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/ipo-bound-nephroplus-built-resilience-in-india-its-now-using-it-to-win-overseas/

India’s stock market seldom tends to influence the workings of its federal bureaucracy. But for the country’s telecom mandarins, who have just floated a new draft national policy for the sector, the investor response to one listed company could be the canary in the coal mine. 

At Rs 9,800 crore, the market value of Tejas Networks, a Tata-owned maker of telecom equipment, is now half the peak it reached 10 months ago. What’s odd is that Tejas Networks is now worth only a little more than its revenue. At the heart of investor frustration, and perhaps even fear, is the big pile of payments the company is yet to receive from its customers, including the government (the owner of telco BSNL).

It’s striking, then, that the draft telecom policy includes a plan to handhold 500 startups and MSMEs working on emerging telecom technologies. But what’s truly conspicuous in the policy is what’s not in it.

The Ken’s Seema Singh explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Seetharaman G.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/tejas-networks-diving-share-price-is-a-mayday-signal-is-dots-antenna-working/

Software needs to be free to access, modify, and redistribute to be called open source. Anything less can’t carry the label.

This matters right now because generative-AI company Sarvam will open-source its models built for the IndiaAI Mission, the government’s initiative to foster artificial intelligence development within the country. That means it will release its weights, or parameters that make AI models “smart”.

By referencing Chinese releases like Deepseek and Alibaba Group’s Qwen, open-source software isn’t just a nice thing to have, there are elements of soft power as well. AI models that are available for anyone to tinker with can win developer mindshare and become more prominent in tech stacks around the world. This makes it harder for closed systems to defend their territory.

But the people behind IndiaAI have little to say about software licensing even though there’s a need to define those norms, especially given the vast capital that’s being poured into the national programme.

The Ken’s Sumit Chakraborty explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Brady Ng.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/free-code-can-build-indias-ai-fortune/

Let’s face it: opportunities are scarce for most graduates in India, particularly those who don’t have financial support to fall back on. A job at a major enterprise is the dream—and a path to better economic and social standing. Yet there’s a widening mismatch between what most graduates can offer and the skills required by corporations. 

The Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme (PMIS) was meant to close this chasm. The goal was to help 10 million people find internships over five years and place them in 500 of India’s top companies. These interns would then acquire new skills and learn the ways of corporate life. 

So far, the internship hasn’t lived up to expectations. In phase 1 of PMIS, 600,000 applications were received for 127,000 posts. In all, 82,000 offers were made, with only 8,700 interns becoming full-time hires at the companies they spent time at. PMIS is in its second phase now, and the current figures don’t look that different.

The main problem is money—PMIS’s participants don’t get paid enough. Its stated goal of helping graduates who need the most assistance doesn’t align with how the programme’s incentives are defined.

The Ken staff writer Debanjali Biswas explains in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Brady Ng.

Read this edition as a newsletter

India’s official figure for its unemployment rate in June was 5.6%. But that may well be lower than reality—out of 50 economists polled by Reuters, 37 believed that to be inaccurate. Seventeen of them estimated it falls somewhere between 7% and 35%.

That’s all to say Indians want gainful employment—no matter what the job is.

One type of coveted position is public service. For many, being a bureaucrat is an upward path for social and economic mobility.

In the 10 years leading up to FY23, the number of people who applied to take the civil service preliminary exam more than doubled to 1.1 million. Each vacancy had 3X the number of applicants. Meanwhile, there has only been a 40% increase in the number of new college graduates in the same period.

Narendra Modi’s administration has tried to encourage employment in the private sector, but the public’s infatuation for civil service isn’t about to dissipate.

Seetharaman covers the details in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as narrated by Rahel Philipose.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/indias-puzzling-fix-for-the-civil-service-job-obsession/

Two of India’s most prominent family business groups are in a fight. They’re both after a majority share of Chinese electronics company Haier’s India arm.

In one corner of the ring is Reliance, which recently launched its own electronics brand, Wyzr. In the other is the Bharti group, which has never sold consumer electronics. But this is a space where fortunes are being made, so it makes sense to have a hand in it.

Bharti appears to be in the lead, given it has teamed up with private-equity firm Warburg Pincus. They’re after a 49% stake and could pay $720 million for it. 

The Bharti group already operates in a range of sectors—telecom and infrastructure, insurance, real estate, hospitality, agriculture, food, and space communication. Its planned addition of electronics to the mix is just the latest episode in the increasing business concentration in India. 

For the last quarter of a century, 25 family business groups have accounted for 15–20% of India’s GDP. This has largely remained unchanged, and likely won’t change anytime soon.

Seema Singh explores why in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/the-hidden-costs-of-superstar-family-businesses/

Hospital bills in India are becoming more expensive, and a growing number of people are one medical emergency away from going bankrupt. Even for those with health insurance, the costs are going up.

In fact, patients who tell hospitals that they have coverage are charged more than others, which leads to higher premiums. It’s a prevalent practice that the chairman and managing director of the General Insurance Corporation of India (GIC), Ramaswamy Narayanan, characterises as “a systematic form of fraud”.

This has led both GIC and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irdai), to call for the Indian government to create a new regulator that will bring healthcare prices back under control.

The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray has the story in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Snigdha Sharma.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/gic-irdai-want-a-healthcare-regulator-but-who-can-regulate-better-than-the-consumer/

India’s logistics sector is hotter than ever. There are mergers and acquisitions, market debuts, startup energy, and investor attention. In the last five years, startups in this space have attracted more than $4 billion in investor money.

D2C e-commerce and quick commerce have catapulted firms such as Delhivery, Ecom Express, Blackbuck, Xpressbees, Shiprocket, and Shadowfax into the limelight. All of them promise tech-first logistics, national networks, and lightning-fast shipments.

Delhivery was the first of the pack to go public in 2022. Others are following suit. Shadowfax filed confidential IPO papers with Sebi in June, and Shiprocket has also filed a confidential draft red herring prospectus. Meanwhile, Xpressbees is said to have begun its IPO preparations by appointing investment banks like JP Morgan and Barclays.

The optimism is palpable, but what’s missing are signs of sustainable profitability.

The Ken reporter Suprita Anupam has the story, as read by Brady Ng.

Read this edition as a newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletter/make-india-competitive-again/cut-the-burn-not-corners-why-old-school-logistics-is-still-winning-quietly/ 

Subscribe to the Make India Competitive Again newsletter: https://the-ken.com/newsletters/make-india-competitive-again/ 

Download our app and subscribe to The Ken to access our latest releases: 

• iOS: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/the-ken/id1282944688 
  
  

Long queues formed outside bank branches across India in 2014 and 2015, with a range of people opening their bank account for the first time. These were farmers, day labourers, homemakers—Indians who had largely been neglected by the formal banking system until then.

This moment was part of the Indian government’s Jan Dhan Yojana Scheme, which enabled people to open zero-balance bank accounts at no cost. By the end of 2015, when the initiative ended, 250 million accounts had been opened.

Jan Dhan Yojana was a success, so much so that the State Bank of India reported in 2021 that the country had surpassed China in financial inclusion metrics.

Now, many of the bank accounts opened under the scheme are up for re-verification KYC (know-your-customer) procedures. Even though the process is straightforward—a check of listed documents such as one’s Aadhaar or PAN—many account owners can’t complete it. Besides, banks have little incentive to keep the accounts active.

The situation on the ground is at odds with the intention of bringing more of India’s population into the formal banking system. Sarthak Gupta unpacks the contradiction in this edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Snigdha Sharma.