1.Nandan Nilekani's 4 tips for India's economy to hit $8 trn mark by 2035

Outlining key factors for India's economic expansion, Nilekani spoke about the necessary "Big Unlocks" required to accelerate the country's growth rate from 6 per cent to 8 per cent and achieve an $8-trillion economy by 2035. "There are four unlocks for the future—technology, entrepreneurship, formalisation, capital," he said.  

On India's digital transformation, Nilekani highlighted the success of electronic toll payments and the DigiYatra initiative. "Today we have a single system of electronic toll payments. DigiYatra has helped 14 million passengers since December 22," he stated. He further pointed out that "India is also a single market for labours, which China isn't."  

India is set to become the most preferred initial public offering (IPO) market globally by 2035, according to Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. Speaking at the ArkamVC event in Bengaluru on Wednesday, Nilekani said, "Companies want to come back and list here. People are coming back, ghar wapsi happening."  Read on

2.A big share of India’s corporate flyers are women, new data signals opportunity

In 2024, one in six business flyers in India was female, according to MakeMyTrip. This shift presents a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for airlines, hotels, and brands catering to working women, CNBC reported.

India’s corporate travel market, valued at $10.8 billion in 2024, could hit $20.8 billion by 2030, with women accounting for $3.5 billion. Sectors leading female travel include education (28%), media (25%), and consulting (22%). Safety and convenience remain key priorities.

3.India’s share of global arms imports falls on local production boost

The key takeaway from the latest data on international arms transfers from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) is not that India is the second biggest arms importer—it was that in 2015-19 as well and the top importer between 2009-13, but that its share of global arms imports has been falling. The SIPRI report said, ‘Indian arms imports decreased by 9.3 per cent between 2015–19 and 2020–24. The drop was at least partly the result of India’s increasing ability to design and produce its own weapons, making it less reliant on imports.’

4.Why Uttar Pradesh Trumps Gujarat In E-Rickshaw Adoption

Why Uttar Pradesh Trumps Gujarat In E-Rickshaw Adoption In 2024, more than 50% of all autorickshaws sold in Uttar Pradesh were electric. The EV penetration in the segment was not even 2% in Gujarat.

In 2024, as many as 40,142 electric autorickshaws were sold in Uttar Pradesh. That figure stood at 1,070 for Gujarat—the EV penetration stood at 53.82% and 1.69%, according to VAHAN data collated and sourced from Clean Mobility Shift. That, when total passenger three-wheeler sales were comparable at 74,581 units in UP and 63,244 units in Gujarat.

According to industry watchers, company officials and auto drivers themselves, there are several factors at play when it comes to higher EV adoption in Uttar Pradesh. Read on.

5.India’s government is paying to equip young people with the skills they need to snag high-paying jobs — outside of India. 

A new “upskilling” academy offers courses and recruiting help, including German and Japanese language classes for prospective nurses and farmers, respectively, The Straits Times wrote: Germany and Japan are among the countries desperate for skilled workers, while many young, educated Indians are struggling to find a job at home. Helping more people get hired abroad is also a boon for India’s economy, officials say, because of remittances. The country is consistently the world leader in remittances; Indians living overseas sent an estimated $129 billion home in 2024.

6.Google DeepMind unveils new AI models in race to make robots useful

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now.

Why it matters: The team hopes their work could usher in an era of robots that are far more useful and require less detailed training for each task. Incorporating LLMs into robotics is part of a growing trend, and this may be the most impressive example yet. 

According to Google DeepMind, a robot trained using its new models was able to fold an origami fox, organise a desk according to verbal instructions, wrap headphone wires and slam dunk a miniature basketball through a hoop. The company is also partnering with start-up Apptronik to build humanoid robots using this technology. 

7.How BYD undercuts Tesla around the world, by the numbers

2024 was a big year for Chinese automaker BYD. The company secured its position as the biggest electrified-car maker in the world. It made waves for earning more revenue than Tesla for the first time in the third quarter of the year, and delivered more fully electric vehicles than Tesla for the first time in the fourth quarter.

BYD is particularly competitive with Tesla in non-Western countries, where Tesla sometimes has a more limited footprint and where the Chinese giant undercuts its American competitor on price. A new Rest of World analysis of prices for the companies’ lowest-cost vehicles looks at 10 non-Western countries and regions where both officially sell their vehicles, and where they offer prices up-front on their websites.

8.Greenland’s voters threw their weight behind a slower approach to independence.

Greenland’s center-right Demokraatit Party won a surprise general election victory yesterday, a closely watched decision that comes amid growing calls from residents for independence and President Donald Trump repeatedly expressing interest in acquiring the mineral-rich territory.

The Demokraatit Party, which advocates for a gradual approach to independence from Denmark, won around 30% of the vote. Party leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen has openly opposed Trump's wishes to acquire the territory and will now hold talks with other parties to try to form a government coalition and move toward full sovereignty.

Greenland has been controlled by Denmark for nearly 300 years, but the Arctic island of approximately 56,000 people has been gradually moving toward greater autonomy, achieving self-rule status in 2009. Greenland's strategic significance is partly due to its mineral, oil, and gas resources. The island's location between Russia, Europe, and the US is also advantageous for defense and trade purposes, including being home to the northernmost US military base.  

9.Women will benefit from a huge wealth transfer in the coming decades, new research showed. 

An estimated $124 trillion is set to be handed over to family members by 2048, roughly 80% of which is estimated to go to women, either because they are the surviving spouse or because they are the child of a person who died.

As a result, women will control around two-thirds of all private wealth in the US by 2030, according to a McKinsey estimate. That could drive growth in women’s sports, refashion the travel industry, and narrow long-term gaps in health care provision, Bank of America said in a recent report. “Women will soon control more money than ever before,” the bank’s economists wrote.

10.Why silver is the new gold: The Economist

It is a fabulous time to be a gold bug. Not long ago, outing yourself as one was a good way of getting people to back away from you at an investment conference. The popular image was of someone in possession of their own electricity generator, stacks of water-purification tablets and several years’ supply of tinned food. Now it just features a shrewd investor. Since the start of 2023 the shiniest asset’s price has soared by nearly 60% in dollars. That is more than any of the world’s leading share indices—including, after a turbulent couple of weeks, America’s S&P 500.

Yet the sweetest vindication goes to fans of another precious metal. Even gold enthusiasts tend to view an ardent interest in silver as somewhat eccentric. To traders it is the “poor man’s gold” or “the devil’s metal”. For years those nicknames were justified by silver’s lacklustre returns and the wild ride its price took along the way. The devil’s metal is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has almost kept pace with gold over the past year and has outperformed it over the past five. With investment flows now following returns, a once-niche asset is inching towards the mainstream.

It is a fabulous time to be a gold bug. Not long ago, outing yourself as one was a good way of getting people to back away from you at an investment conference. The popular image was of someone in possession of their own electricity generator, stacks of water-purification tablets and several years’ supply of tinned food. Now it just features a shrewd investor. Since the start of 2023 the shiniest asset’s price has soared by nearly 60% in dollars. That is more than any of the world’s leading share indices—including, after a turbulent couple of weeks, America’s S&P 500.

Yet the sweetest vindication goes to fans of another precious metal. Even gold enthusiasts tend to view an ardent interest in silver as somewhat eccentric. To traders it is the “poor man’s gold” or “the devil’s metal”. For years those nicknames were justified by silver’s lacklustre returns and the wild ride its price took along the way. The devil’s metal is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has almost kept pace with gold over the past year and has outperformed it over the past five. With investment flows now following returns, a once-niche asset is inching towards the mainstream.

Logic suggests that silver’s price should move similarly to gold’s. It, too, is rare, pretty and inert, and so has been used to forge jewellery and coins for millennia. This long-established role as a store of value lends it “safe-haven” appeal when investors are nervous. As with gold, the fixed amount of silver in the Earth’s crust ought also to make it a good hedge against inflation. Sure enough, both metals’ recent rallies came as investors fretted over geopolitical chaos and persistently rising prices. In doing so they overcame another common tendency, for their prices to fall when real interest rates rise and vice versa, since they generate no income.

So much for theory. In practice, different levels of mining supply and industrial demand ensure that the silver-to-gold price ratio is changing all the time. Over the long term, that has led to decades of disappointment for silverites. For most of the 1970s you would have needed to sell 30 to 40 ounces of silver to buy one of gold. Today it would be more like 90.

Speculators have been burned by the devil’s metal, too. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, faltering industrial demand and a spotlight on haven assets meant silver’s price depended more than ever on traders’ whims. As a result, the silver-to-gold price ratio spent years moving in line with the gold price. A bet on silver became an amplified bet on gold—a relationship cherished by hedge funds, which would usually have had to pay for a margin loan to obtain such leverage. The relationship then fell apart towards the end of the 2010s, causing traders relying on it to lose their shirts, as silver abruptly fell out of fashion with investors.

Now it is back in vogue. Central banks have spent years building up their gold reserves. In September Interfax, a Russian news agency, reported that its government would soon start buying silver, too. Last year was the first since 2021 that silver exchange-traded funds, which individuals use to buy commodities, saw net inflows. This year traders in New York have been draining London’s vaults of gold, amid fears that such imports may face tariffs in the future. They have been snapping up silver even faster—so much so, in fact, that the transatlantic price gap justifies loading bars of it onto commercial flights.

What is more, a widening gulf between supply and demand looks likely to keep the frenzy going. The annual supply of silver, driven by mining production and recycling, has contracted slightly over the past decade, according to the Silver Institute, a research outfit. Over the same period, industrial demand has surged by more than 50%, owing largely to silver’s use in solar panels. Imports into China, which manufactures large quantities of these, have shot up. Since mining capacity cannot be expanded quickly, the imbalance should continue to boost silver’s price for some time.

As the world becomes a more fractious place, it is hard to imagine investors’ demand for haven assets falling soon. Meanwhile, the incentives for governments to store value in places beyond the reach of Uncle Sam are growing. That is a big reason why central bankers have been buying so much gold of late. Some may be tempted, along with Donald Trump, to include cryptocurrencies in their reserves. But there is another precious metal that could do the job, too. It is time for silverites to come in from the cold.