BacktoCricaddict Posted January 27 Posted January 27 This is heartwarming. Forget the culture wars. Every breath that India takes should be about Development. Energy. Self-reliance. https://zionlights.substack.com/p/why-india-keeps-betting-on-nuclear If India continues down this path, the country may eventually end up with a cleaner power grid than some much richer countries that chose to abandon nuclear altogether (Germany) or ban it outright (Australia). That might sound counterintuitive, but it’s not completely unlikely. Those countries are now on the back foot, as they’ve lost nuclear expertise, allowed supply chains to atrophy, and boxed themselves into vulnerable energy systems that compromise reliability and energy security. India’s nuclear strategy is also evolving at the institutional level. Late last year, the government introduced the landmark Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill to unwind six decades of exclusive state control over the sector. If passed, private companies, including foreign firms operating through joint ventures with Indian partners, will be allowed to build, own, and operate nuclear power plants for the first time. More broadly, this fits with India’s push to deepen its industrial base, and it signals growing confidence that nuclear isn’t a niche or stopgap solution, but a core pillar of the country’s clean energy transition. So - what India achieved is actually quite remarkable. From the very beginning, its nuclear program was less about quick wins and more about where the country wanted to be decades down the line, energy-wise. A common complaint in rich democracies is that politicians only think in short-term electoral cycles. India, at the dawn of the atomic age, made a genuinely long-horizon bet. That choice may not have paid off immediately, or exactly as planned, but it’s paying dividends now. In some important ways, India is better positioned than more developed countries that chose to phase nuclear out altogether. While others let domestic expertise wither, India kept building its nuclear ecosystem. It developed a full fuel cycle, including mining, fuel reprocessing (something only a handful of countries do), and waste management. And although thorium reactors have not been commercially deployed, India’s established expertise, research capacity, and institutional knowledge in the technology will be a significant advantage if they become commercially viable in the future. There’s also a broader lesson here about human capital. Investing in engineers, scientists, and domestic technical capacity tends to compound over time, even when access to cutting-edge Western technology is limited. India trained generations of people who learned how to solve hard problems under constraints, which is exactly the kind of capability that matters for long-run technological independence. India still burns a lot of coal, which means that decarbonisation efforts are going to require immense ambition. If India ever achieves its long-standing goal of energy independence, that outcome won’t be an accident. It will be the result of a strategy that put evidence above ideology, embraced ambition, and was explicitly about playing the long game - and playing it well. Tillu, Lord and IndianRenegade 3
G_B_ Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Rupee depriciation seems deliberate to gain exports. IndianRenegade 1
coffee_rules Posted February 5 Posted February 5 Another co-op , hoping it gives a run for its money to Ola Uber
diga Posted February 5 Posted February 5 (edited) 10 hours ago, coffee_rules said: Another co-op , hoping it gives a run for its money to Ola Uber In Bengaluru, Rapido is used by many and also namma yatri popular with autos Edited February 6 by diga
coffee_rules Posted February 6 Posted February 6 3 hours ago, diga said: In Bengaluru, Rapido is used by many and also namma yatri popular with autos I could not install namma yatri last time . They have a geo lock on IOS. Heard it is pretty good .
Tillu Posted February 23 Author Posted February 23 Read these comments from the Chinese on the internet about their life in the 80s and 90s which caught my interest. China was not too different from India. I really hope we too could progress like China. When I was a kid in china in the 80s, all you had during winter was cabbage for vegetables. Everyone’s balconies were stacked with cabbages. Little to no meat, restrictions on eggs, flour, rice, and other essentials. My birth certificate has an official stamp that allowed my mother to be able to purchase 2.5kg of meat. Nowadays it’s become the other way, too much opulence. I'm only in my 30s but I remember a lot. When I was a kid in Shanghai in the 90s I remember: power rationing. There would be mandatory blackouts past 9pm until around 5am in order to save electricity. water rationing. The plumbing and taps would also turn off at night. You couldn't flush the toilet or wash your hands if you got up in the middle of the night. There used to be a lot of low level street crime. I remember my grand-aunt having her necklace snatched from her neck by thieves. I also remember a huge scene at a market in Shanghai where cops were sprinting through an open market to chase down a thief who ducked into a clothing store. It's almost unheard of these days, as people are generally well taken care of enough not to resort to this (or policing got better with the pervasive cameras, who knows?). In public, my grandma and grandpa would always be on high alert for thieves and kidnappers (people used to kidnap children, apparently, in broad daylight. Scary stuff.) Street vendors everywhere was the default mode of commerce. There were basically no shopping malls and most vendors did not have a dedicated building, but just operated from a rolled out carpet or street cart. Nowadays it's the opposite, where street vendors only exist in certain specific clusters or in rural areas, but shopping malls are everywhere. censorship was so incredibly loose compared to post-Xi Jinping. I remember watching Evangelion, uncensored (blood, tits, and all), on primetime, as a 10 year old. Very inappropriate, but also formative and I loved it. Chinese cinema was also domianted by Hong Kong back then, and there was just an energy of freedom and experimentation that is now simply missing. Watching Chinese TV nowadays and it's just endless recycled garbage, or propaganda war movies, or endless recycled propaganda war movies. I hear young Chinese do not ever watch TV anymore, and I'm not surprised to hear that.
Tillu Posted March 14 Author Posted March 14 Found this on Reddit about the outrage over India sending diesel to Bangladesh. Good read. Several news outlets have run stories with headlines like “5,000 tons of diesel have arrived from India” and “Bangladesh has asked India for fuel assistance!” The framing makes it seem as if India is giving away diesel for free. The reality is that under the Bangladesh-India pipeline agreement, which was launched in December 2022, India will sell diesel to Bangladesh: 200,000 tons per year for the first three years, 300,000 tons for the next three years, 500,000 tons for the following four years, and then 1,000,000 tons per year thereafter. Bangladesh will pay the international market price. The diesel that Bangladesh buys from India is not produced by refining crude oil brought from the Middle East. India has oil fields in Assam. By refining the crude oil from there, India meets the diesel demand of the eastern and northeastern regions. Transporting this diesel by road to western, northern, and southern India is very costly. Therefore, India has to import 85 percent of its total oil needs from abroad. With the oil from Assam, it meets the demand of the eastern and northeastern regions and exports the remainder to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. This is not a case of aid or charity. India bore 75 percent of the cost to build the 130-kilometer pipeline to export diesel to Bangladesh. The pipeline was criticized because at that time the premium (the per-barrel transportation cost) was set at $5.50. Normally, transportation costs via a pipeline should be zero. But India set the premium by factoring in the cost of building the pipeline. The premium on the diesel Bangladesh buys from the international market is $2.50. Because of transportation costs, diesel from Assam is more profitable for the country to export to Bangladesh than to transport to other parts of India. And even though it has to be sold at international market prices—and the premium is higher—due to global shortages, it's now profitable to buy from India. It's a win-win situation for both. Bangladesh also bought 180,000 tons of diesel from India last January as per the agreement. It purchased 79,000 tons in the 2024-2025 fiscal year. But the diesel, bought at a hard cost in dollars, is being framed as ‘fuel assistance from India,’ as if it's being given for free.
Tillu Posted August 7 Author Posted August 7 India’s industrial strategy has a costly blind spot. While policymakers have rightly poured resources into semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence, they have largely ignored the thousands of industrial products that every successful manufacturing economy is built on. These include machine tools, bearings, pumps, valves, electric motors, compressors, gears, fasteners, industrial chemicals, transformers, cables, and thousands of other engineering products. They are the foundation of advanced manufacturing. India should continue investing in frontier technologies, but unless it becomes globally competitive in these industrial backbone products, it will remain an assembly economy rather than become a true manufacturing powerhouse. Manufacturing can be viewed as a three-layer ecosystem. At the bottom are industrial raw materials such as steel, aluminium, chemicals, and petrochemicals. At the top are frontier industries such as semiconductors, AI, electric vehicles, batteries, aerospace and robotics. Between them lies the largest layer — industrial backbone products that connect raw materials to finished goods. Every electric vehicle requires motors, bearings, gears, fasteners, wiring, moulds, dies and machine tools before it reaches a customer. Ignore this middle layer, and the entire manufacturing ecosystem becomes dependent on imports. Over the past two decades, India’s industrial policy has focused overwhelmingly on frontier industries. Initiatives such as Make in India, the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes, the India Semiconductor Mission, FAME, the National Green Hydrogen Mission and electronics and drone programmes have channelled billions of dollars into semiconductors, electronics, batteries and clean-energy technologies. The strategy has produced gains. Electronics assembly has expanded, and startups are building battery systems, drones, robotics, medical devices and semiconductor packaging solutions. Yet much of this manufacturing remains assembly-based. India continues to import semiconductors, sensors, precision components, speciality materials and industrial sub-assemblies because the domestic supplier ecosystem remains weak. Frequent duty exemptions on imported components further reduce incentives to manufacture them locally, keeping domestic value addition low. The policy focus on frontier industries has also shaped entrepreneurship. Most new manufacturing startups target electric vehicles, drones, satellites, and solar equipment. Few entrepreneurs aspire to build world-class companies that make bearings, industrial valves, machine tools, compressors, moulds, or precision engineering components. Yet these “boring” industries form the foundation of Germany’s Mittelstand, Japan’s precision manufacturing, and China’s status as the factory of the world. No country becomes a manufacturing leader by focusing only on high-tech products while neglecting the industrial base beneath them. China understood this early. It did not become the world’s factory by starting with semiconductors or electric vehicles. It first mastered tens of thousands of industrial backbone products, creating dense supplier networks, tooling companies, component manufacturers and engineering firms. Once that foundation was in place, the consumer electronics, automotive, battery, and renewable energy industries expanded rapidly. India is attempting almost the reverse — promoting frontier sectors while leaving much of its industrial base underdeveloped. India and China started from broadly similar manufacturing levels in the late 1980s, but their paths diverged after the 1990s. China steadily strengthened its manufacturing ecosystem, while India’s industrial backbone weakened. Few policy choices contributed to this outcome. India protected upstream industries such as steel, aluminium and petrochemicals through tariffs and other support. While this benefitted a few large producers, it raised input costs for thousands of downstream manufacturers that made machinery, components, and engineering goods. As Chinese manufacturing became cheaper and more efficient, many Indian firms found it more profitable to import than to produce locally. In many sectors, trading gradually replaced manufacturing. Even India’s pharmaceutical industry shifted from making many active pharmaceutical ingredients to importing them from China and focusing on producing finished medicines. High electricity tariffs, costly logistics, lending rates of 9-10 per cent, regulatory uncertainty and complex compliance requirements further weakened the competitiveness of Indian manufacturers. China invested aggressively in emerging industries while continuing to strengthen its traditional manufacturing base. India lags in both. A national strategy: India should continue investing in semiconductors, batteries and electronics. But it also needs a National Reverse Engineering Programme for Manufacturing (NREPM) to strengthen its industrial backbone. The objective is straightforward: Enable Indian firms to manufacture thousands of industrial products at world-class quality and globally competitive costs. The first task is to identify over a thousand industrial products that account for most of India’s engineering imports. These include bearings, pumps, nuts, bolts, compressors, machine tools, and fasteners. Most rely on mature technologies, where competitiveness depends on engineering, precision manufacturing, quality, reliability and cost — not scientific breakthroughs. Thousands of Indian micro, small and medium enterprises and mid-sized firms already manufacture many of these products but often fall short of global standards. NREPM should help them bridge that gap, replace imports and build export competitiveness. The second task is to build technology capabilities. Unlike the PLI schemes, which assumed firms already had the necessary technology, NREPM should focus on building those capabilities. The Indian Institutes of Technology, the National Institutes of Technology, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories, and other leading engineering institutions should become the programme’s anchor institutions. Based on their expertise, each should take responsibility for a set of industrial products, study the world’s best designs, reverse engineer them, develop improved prototypes and transfer the technology to Indian manufacturers. Success should be measured by products commercialised, imports replaced and exports generated — not by research papers. Institutions and teams that achieve these outcomes should be rewarded accordingly. Funding for NREPM can come from the government’s ₹1 trillion Research, Development and Innovation Fund (RDIF) under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation. The RDIF was created to support industry-led research, technology development and commercialisation. Expanding its mandate to finance technology development for manufacturing would help India build indigenous capabilities across advanced industrial sectors. The third task is to expand the programme beyond engineering products. Once established, NREPM should cover organic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles and other industrial inputs where India has manufacturing capability but continues to depend heavily on imports. India’s goal should not be to become the world’s assembly line for advanced products. It should be to become the world’s workshop for the industrial products that make those advanced products possible. That is the foundation on which every manufacturing superpower has been built. Business Standard Nikhil_cric 1
bsriharsha Posted September 1 Posted September 1 11 hours ago, ravishingravi said: GDP at 7.8% for Q1 ( Apr - Jun ). If everything is reported correctly, that's an encouraging sign
G_B_ Posted September 1 Posted September 1 RBI is shored up forex reserves at the right time... we seem to be heading towards a global bond crisis. ravishingravi 1
ravishingravi Posted September 1 Posted September 1 6 hours ago, G_B_ said: RBI is shored up forex reserves at the right time... we seem to be heading towards a global bond crisis. Indeed. It's here. This could be mother of all. AI, Oil, private Credit, global debt.
G_B_ Posted September 2 Posted September 2 Dont think it will be that bad. G7 govs will need to cut spending to balance the books. This will trigger a recession. It wint be as bad as 2008 but wont be shallow either. Investors looking at Japan France and Usa. Uk Canada will be sucked in.
Tillu Posted September 3 Author Posted September 3 (edited) On 9/1/2026 at 9:35 AM, bsriharsha said: If everything is reported correctly, that's an encouraging sign Every 10 years they change the base years to calculate the GDP. The last base year upon which the growth rates were calculated was 2011. They now changed the base year to 2025 which gave us 7.8% growth. As per the 2011 base year we grew at only 2%. As long as we do not achieve huge trade surpluses and gain huge dollar reserves, rupee will continue to depreciate and our GDP growth rate will be hampered. Edited September 3 by Tillu
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