Make India Competitive Again (Private)

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.

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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.

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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. 

Starlink can keep internet service going in Ukraine during wartime. It can move hardware into the Amazon Rainforest. The company can overcome all sorts of challenges to bring its high-speed satellite internet connection all over the world, but red tape has kept it from going live in India for three years.

The Department of Telecommunications gave Starlink a GMPCS licence—that’s a Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite licence—in early June, but there’s one snag. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, has capped satellite spectrum licences at five years, with a possible two-year extension. Starlink wants 20. 

On top of that, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service still needs to clear a checklist of requirements: spectrum allocation timelines, clearance from IN-SPACe (the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre), testing windows. And then there’s spectrum assignment, approvals for ground stations, and terminal certifications. The list goes on.

That means Starlink is still many months away from rolling out commercial service in India.

Compare this with the company’s progress elsewhere. Starlink inked a distribution and integration partnership with Airtel Africa in May. It secured commercial licences in nine countries within weeks, with five more sets of approvals under process. It cleared that much ground in the time it took to get once licence in India.

The Ken’s head of editorial desk Sumit Chakraborty dived into the details in this week’s edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Deputy Editor Seetharaman G.

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If you were to think about the world’s most technologically advanced economies, a few nations come to mind. The United States has Silicon Valley as its cradle of innovation, China’s scientists and researchers develop state-of-the-art IP every day, and Japan remains a global leader in robotics, especially industrial automation.

India doesn’t register in that cluster.

A few figures show us present conditions in more detail. Thirty years ago, India spent 0.6% of its GDP on R&D. In 2025, it’s at the same rate. The share occasionally inched up to 0.8% between then and now, but this is still low compared to major global economies.

Why is that? Consider the US: it has a dynamic private sector that pours capital into R&D. Meanwhile, that type of spending is anathema in India—trade trumps research, copying is preferred over invention.

The lack of R&D spending is in large part a mindset problem in private industry, government circles, and investors. For India to become an R&D powerhouse, there needs to be structural reforms.

Seema Singh explains in this week’s edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Snigdha Sharma.

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2024 was a record-breaking year for mergers and acquisitions in India, and the government seems to want to speed up the frenzy.

One of the proposals put forward by the finance minister was an overhaul of M&A regulations. She wants to introduce fast-track mergers for a range of companies, including unlisted firms and fellow subsidiaries. 

But lethargy isn’t really the biggest problem afflicting Indian M&As. In fact, forcing these deals to move faster may worsen other fundamental problems. There are recent examples that show us how this can play out, such as Jet Airways’ failed revival under the Jalan Kalrock consortium.

Meanwhile, there are other incentive structures that can ensure M&As deliver great results. 

Raghav Maggo explains what India’s M&A landscape needs in this week’s edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

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Wi-fi is a miracle. Not because it lets you go online wherever it’s offered, but because there’s no bureaucratic headache whenever users connect to a network.

This is only possible because of what’s called “unlicensed spectrum” that governments leave open. In India, more is about to be added to it. Call it the first real systemic reform for wi-fi in the country.

The plan is hardly new. It’s rooted in a roadmap developed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 2023. And it’s an outcome that tech companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have been lobbying hard for. After all, if the goal is to give hundreds of millions of people in India a fast internet connection wherever they are—at home or at bus stops, in schools or in shops—then licensed mobile networks just can’t do the whole job on their own.

But India’s telcos are not thrilled about this development. They want that space for future 5G expansions.

Sumit Chakraborty explains the conflict in this week’s Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

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A cursory look at the way India’s workforce has changed in recent years suggests that “women are striding into economic activity”, as Mint reported in mid-May. In fact, by FY24, three in four working women were self-employed. Women generally have a growing share in India’s workforce—a development that public officials persistently tout.

But look closely and you’ll find that the details paint a different picture.

The ministry of labour said last year that India added 80 million jobs in the four years leading up to FY22. The truth is self-employment and agriculture, much of which is unpaid family work, account for a large part of that increase. That hardly translates to formal jobs with real wages. Take inflation into account and things look even worse.

Sure, there are more workers in India’s fields and factories. But simply looking at the number of bodies at work is misleading. The data’s champions ignore the nuance that ends up telling a different story about India’s workforce, but there are professionals who find ways to work with data that is suspect.

Seetharaman G made sense of the situation in the latest edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Snigdha Sharma.

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There are plenty of reasons for India’s semiconductor companies to win. The US is seeking to dial back its reliance on China’s tech providers, shaking up global supply chains. Since one-fifth of global semiconductor-design talent is located in India, the country should be coming out on top.

But that isn’t how the shakeup is unfolding. Some projects like those of Murugappa Group, Micromax, and Tata Electronics are chugging along, but there are hardly any internationally noteworthy players.

Here’s one absent piece of the puzzle: there isn’t enough capital being directed into India’s semiconductor space. The government’s design-linked incentives, or DLI, are meant to kick-start the sector, but the funds simply aren’t enough to yield the results that would put India squarely on the map.

There are other problems too, from US President Donald Trump’s shenanigans to the fact that Indian firms still need to put in immense effort to convince customers that their chips can be just as good as anyone else’s.

It’s tough running a semiconductor company in India. Shristi Achar explains in the latest edition of Make India Competitive Again, as read by Brady Ng.

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India wants a sovereign AI model. It’s a big goal, and success means stringing together contributions from a range of entities, including Big Tech firms and domestic AI developers of all scales. The ideal version of this plan was meant to lead to plenty of competition—no preordained winners.

The latest development, however, is one that runs against that framework. Sarvam has been tapped to build India’s own large language model (LLM), while firms like Gan AI, Soket AI Labs, and Krutrim—all shortlisted to be part of the process—are still waiting for a call from the government.

Never one to let an opportunity slide, Sarvam is using its newfound status to raise up to $100 million in fresh venture funding, people in India’s AI ecosystem told The Ken.

As a nation, India is making a big bet to bring into existence a sovereign AI model. But it’s off to a rocky and familiar start: there’s one anointed winner while many others are left confused. 

Besides, there are questions about whether India’s flagship AI initiative is on the right course. Sarvam is a two-year-old company that’s funded with non-sovereign capital from the likes of Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Does that warp the nature of India’s plan to create a sovereign AI model?

Abhirami explains in this week’s Make India Competitive Again, as read by Snigdha Sharma.

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