Author: Ananya Singh
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What Young Indian Entrepreneurs Need to Grow for Startup-to-Scale-Up Gap?
India now has over 2.4 lakh DPIIT-recognised startups, a number that keeps climbing every year. By the government’s own count, about 3.2 percent of recognised startups, roughly 6,789 of 2,12,283, were categorised as closed (dissolved or struck off) as of January 31, 2026. Independent trackers had, until recently, described a far more turbulent sector. Tracxn…
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Who Really Benefits from India’s Handloom Exports?
In a narrow lane of Varanasi’s Nati Imli neighbourhood, a weaver spends several days at the loom finishing a Banarasi silk saree. The silk, the zari thread, and the labour together cost him around Rs 3,000, and when the finished piece is sold to the trader who commissioned it, his profit comes to roughly Rs…
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Counting Certificates, Not Jobs: Measuring a Decade of Skill India
On 18 December 2025, India’s Comptroller and Auditor General tabled Report No. 20 of 2025 in Parliament. It covered all three phases of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) from July 2015 to March 2022: a combined outlay of Rs. 14,450 crore and a reporting record that successive governments had cited as evidence of…
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Demographic Dividend or Trap: Why Are India’s States Heading in Different Directions?
In 1962, South Korea launched its first national family planning programme. Its Total Fertility Rate (TFR) at the time was 6.3. Over the next two decades, the government paired declining fertility with compulsory primary education, targeted public health investment, and a deliberate push to bring women into the formal workforce. By 1985, the TFR had…
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Rubble Economics: How War Dismantles the Construction and Real Estate Sector
A building cannot evacuate. A pharmaceutical company can shift production to a safer country. A financial firm can move its servers. A hospital can triage in a corridor. But a residential block in Mariupol, a commercial district in Aleppo, or a factory in Gaza has nowhere to go when the shelling starts. The capital loss…
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War and the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: Lessons from Sudan
The global pharmaceutical market grew nearly fivefold between 2001 and 2023, from roughly $365 billion to $1.3 trillion, according to IQVIA, and is projected to reach $1.9 trillion by 2027. That expansion was built on comparative advantage and cost efficiency: active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) concentrated in India and China, formulation outsourced across Asia, distribution networks…
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Long-Term Economic Cost of Brain Drain and Education Gaps in Wartime Ukraine
Human capital is the main resource of the economy of the 21st century. In the modern world, those countries that have significant intellectual assets are characterised by a higher level of development and a better quality of life. A negative migration balance over a long period of time, i.e. a phenomenon in which emigration from…