The state boasts an extensive network of 11 national highways and 83 state highways. Yet, on the ground, these vital arteries remain choked, narrow two-lane bottlenecks. Traversing the 650-km expanse of National Highway 66 takes an agonizing 14 to 16 hours—double the time required to cover a similar distance between Delhi and Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. While the rest of the country races ahead with multi-lane, access-controlled expressways, Keralam is only now pushing through its first six-lane upgrade along National Highway 66—a delayed ₹66,000-crore project that experts note is arriving very late... To test the state of Keralam’s road connectivity and infrastructure—critical for the growth and investment it seeks—I decide to drive from Vizhinjam, near the southern tip, to the state’s border with Karnataka in the north. The distance of 769 km will take 21 gruelling hours. The average speed across the entire journey? A sluggish 33 km per hour.
2. Kerala takes to an ageing society with innovative policy responses like day care cenres and timebanks to address problems of loneliness among the elderly.
Started in 2021, the Kunduparambu Pakalveedu was the first daycare centre for senior citizens set up by the Kozhikode Corporation. In 2025, it won the best ‘Pakalveedu’ award among the 150 that are operational in Keralam today... Fun trips are arranged periodically... The seven fully funded Pakalveedu facilities the Kozhikode Corporation runs are just one part of its efforts in elderly care. The corporation spends 10% of its ₹132 crore annual outlay on the welfare of senior citizens, who account for 17% of the city’s population... According to a study jointly conducted by the Population Foundation of India (PFI) and International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMD) in 2025, 18.6% of Keralam’s population is today aged 60 years and above as against the India average of 10.8%... By 2051, almost one in three people in Keralam will be a senior citizen. The PFI-IIMD study puts the number at 30.6%. In comparison, the India average will be 20.4%.
The state has steadily strengthened its social safety net for the elderly. The previous Left Democratic Front government pioneered an ‘elderly budget’ to track interdepartmental spending and established a quasi-judicial elderly commission to safeguard senior rights. Backing these policies with substantial resources, the state ramped up its commitment in the 2026–27 budget, allocating 19% of its total outlay exclusively to senior citizens. The new United Democratic Front (UDF) government led by Satheesan is formulating policies to take these efforts forward. It has set up a separate department for elderly welfare... The new Keralam government has adopted an ‘aging in place’ model that allows elderly citizens to live in their neighborhood and social environment rather than shift to an institutional facility or an oldage home. It is the Japanese model and Keralam is studying it closely...
Keralam is just 1.5 children per woman, as against the replacement level (the average number of children per woman needed for a population to replace itself from one generation to the next) of 2.1 children. Life expectancy is also higher at 75.1 years compared to the India average of around 72 years. What complicates the process for Keralam is its high level of migration, especially among the younger population. As per the 2023 Kerala Migration Survey, 2.2 million people have migrated to other countries and another 0.5 million have done so to other parts of India. This means senior citizens are left behind.
3. Good long read on the Rs 2 trillion (initially estimated at Rs 1.08 trillion in 2017) Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail.
Under the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme, or ECMS, ₹69,000 crore of investment has come in, exceeding the scheme’s original investment target by ₹10,000 crore. The government has approved 106 projects, to make speakers, microphones, camera modules, displays, relays, coils, rare earth magnets and so on... Domestic manufacturing now meets India’s requirement for some products, such as plastic enclosures, anode materials, optical transceivers and relays. Local factories meet 60% of lithium-ion-cell demand, 80% of laminate demand and 75% of connector demand. Some components, including networking equipment, relays, LED lighting parts and automotive electronics are beginning to be exported to China, Vietnam, Singapore, Italy, The Netherlands and other countries... But for all the gleaming new production lines, local value addition in India remains modest, at 15–18%, versus 40% in China. Critical chips continue to be imported. Printed circuit boards, sensors, and specialized materials are only beginning to be produced locally at scale. Precision components that go into earbuds, hearables, wearables, smartphones et al. depend on imports... Plastics, heat sinks, shielding covers, battery packs, chargers and cables are already increasingly local. The next round includes PCBs, display modules, camera modules, passive electronic components and semiconductor packaging.
5. It is hard to displace America as the pre-eminent economic power. Sample this, even amidst all the dysfunction.
One Trumpian key performance indicator is what you might call the national cash flow statement. Gross payments entering America of all kinds hit a huge 30 per cent of GDP in the second quarter. Reflecting the aim of monetisation, not autarky, America is more globalised than at almost any point in history other than the prelude to the 2007-09 crisis. Energy exports have exploded. Weapons sales overseas are rising at a double-digit rate. Tech and financial firms are printing money abroad. Capital inflows, mainly from portfolios, loans and firms, are staggering, although exceeded as a share of GDP by the pre-2007 mania. While America is now spending almost as much on AI chips and tech hardware imports as on defence, the current account deficit has eased to 3 per cent of GDP. The payments of all kinds leaving the US must balance those entering, but investment outflows are often orchestrated by Wall Street, boosting the US’s role as the world epicentre of capital allocation.
6. The always excellent Simon Kuper is spot on about French politics.
The French tend to talk radical but act conservative. This is a country where 57 per cent are homeowners, and many people spend their lives looking forward to retirement. They rely on the state. They want it to function. Revolutionary language is in part just a bow to French heritage. Even many of the voters who backed radicals in past elections quietly wanted an overeducated technocrat to win. Then they could spend five years protesting against him. The 1968 “revolution” culminated in the election of centre-rightist Georges Pompidou, product of the École Normale Supérieure. But last Saturday was a dramatisation of a new French political alignment, in which technocrats, with Emmanuel Macron as their final incarnation, risk being chased from the stage...Macron has governed as a high-handed leader — “Jupiterian”, in his own description — who rarely consults. “Macron’s Achilles heel is that he’s not good at dealing with negotiation,” Philippe Aghion, the French economist who won last year’s economics Nobel, told me. “They don’t know how to deal with social movements. Or they don’t have the patience.” This is a Macronian flaw, but it’s also baked into France’s “vertical” political system, says the philosopher Gaspard Koenig. He pulls out his copy of Tocqueville’s Recollections, about the 1848 revolution, and reads: “But there is one institution that cannot be destroyed: centralisation.” Koenig says that demonstrators typically aspire only to replace France’s mighty leader with a different mighty leader.
And this is a problem for governments across the world, as electorates are unwilling to accommodate.
France’s deficits are becoming a slow-burn crisis. Public debt of 120 per cent of GDP would be manageable if parliament could agree to start cutting the deficit. Jean Tirole of the Toulouse School of Economics, the economics Nobel laureate for 2014, says: “I think what financial markets are worried about is the fact that nothing is happening.” He contrasts France with Greece during its 2010s’ debt crisis: “The Greeks at some point realised that things were very bad. I’m afraid we are not at this stage.” Popular support for balanced budgets appears weak. Government spending is 57.3 per cent of GDP, joint highest in the western world with Finland, and Tirole notes that even with deficits of 5 per cent, many accuse Macron of “austerity”.
7. The shortening of US debt tenors.
US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent appears to be reducing the average weighted maturities of Treasuries. These currently stand under six years (compared to 13 years in the UK, or around eight years in Germany, France and Japan)... One reason, Treasury officials tell me, is that — unlike with credit cards — short-term rates are currently lower than long-term ones. Another is that recent structural shifts in finance are boosting demand for short-term debt. The fast-expanding stablecoin sector, for example, is gobbling up short-term dollar debt — and now holds more Treasuries than Saudi Arabia and Germany combined. The maturity of debt bought and held by the Federal Reserve is also declining. And foreign investors are tilting short-term too, either because they are wary of making long-term bets on the US or because of foreign hedge fund trading strategies. Indeed, Fed research shows that hedge funds doubled their US debt holdings between 2023 and 2025, and now control about 8.5 per cent of the market — more than the official holdings of Japanese, Chinese and Saudi Arabian investors combined.
8. China's battery competitiveness in numbers.
China's battery manufacturers -- CATL, BYD, Gotion, CALB and Sungrow -- are able to build a gigafactory — the industry term for the plants making cells used in EVs, AI data storage centres and power grid backup systems — in China for about a third of the cost and three times faster than building the same type of facility in Europe.
9. Indian states are paying exorbitant subsidies to attract data centres.
10. Rama Bijapurkar points to an important aspect of the battle at Tata Sons and raises pertinent questions.
That a CEO with no shareholding backing, along with board members who do not represent chunks of shareholding, can challenge a promoter with a 66 per cent holding and pressure it to dilute its stake, and not have sway over decisions is a first-time challenge to power structures — which have stood the test of time, tradition, convention, and culture, rightly or wrongly. It brings a fresh round of calibration, especially by promoters, of their terms of endearment and engagement with professional CEOs, not to mention boards. More so, if their shareholding is well below 51 per cent... Given the promoter-friendly, promoter-respectful and promoter-on-top ethos of corporate governance that has existed and continues to exist in India, this departure from the norm against none other than the venerated, iconic Tata promoter group with its track record of trusteeship and larger good over personal gain has rocked the comfort boat all around.
The ripples it will cause are yet to become clear — will promoters be nervous seeing such a coup by the professional hire? How will they respond? Will they pick boards like in the old days, based on loyalty and narrow subject-matter expertise? Especially as the law of the land and the market regulator push more power and accountability in the hands of independent directors? Will boards be now placed under more pressure from external directives on which way to vote, getting trapped between the rock and the hard place of the promoter and the proverbial hand of God? Will CEOs have less freedom to operate and more fetters? And does this add to the bad rap that India has been getting of late as a safe, stable place to invest in for the long term? Probably yes to all.
11. Akash Prakash provides some home truths on India's equity markets.
Since the Indian market’s peak in September 2024, we have seen $65 billion in net outflows by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs). Over the last decade, India has received zero net-foreign flows. The stock of Indian equities owned by foreigners has fallen from $930 billion to about $675 billion, and foreign ownership as a percentage of the market is now at a 15-year low. India is now a consensus underweight for all global investors and our weighting itself has shrunk from 21 per cent in September 2024 to about 10 per cent today (MSCI Emerging Market index). One company, TSMC, has a benchmark weight 50 per cent higher than that of all of India! The three EM heavyweights — TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix — together account for 30 per cent of the index, but have almost three times India’s weighting...
Since the peak in September 2024, Indian equities are down about 25 per cent in dollar terms, even as the EM indices are up about 50 per cent. We have, therefore, underperformed by 7,500 basis points (75 percentage points) in the last two years alone. I have never in my career seen this quantum of underperformance in this short a period. It has destroyed careers and blown up funds. There are numerous funds that have destroyed 10-year track records in the last 24 months by simply being overweight India... for the first time I am now being asked about the need for an India-dedicated allocation. Many allocators no longer think India is important enough to warrant dedicated exposure.
12. India's battery energy storage systems (BESS) capacity is surging.
On 3 September this year, the CEA proposed mandating two-hour battery energy storage systems (BESS), with capacity equivalent to at least 10% of installed capacity, for all new solar and onshore wind projects commissioned after 1 July 2027. These systems can store solar and wind energy when it is generated for use later. India currently has only 8.6 gigawatt hour (GWh) of BESS capacity. Another 42.53 GWh is under construction, 38.42 GWh has been awarded, and 65.57 GWh is in the tendering process. That amounts to 155.12 GWh of existing and planned BESS capacity, while the CEA projects a requirement of 236 GWh by 2032.
The boom in solar generation is now creating problems like excess supply and the need for curtailment during day times.
According to Ember, a Norway-based think tank focused on energy transition, transmission constraints led to the loss of 300 GWh of clean electricity in India in the first quarter of 2026 (January–March), particularly at grid pooling stations in the northern and western regions. On 30 March alone, India lost 34 GWh of clean generation, equivalent to the daily electricity use of about 5 million urban middle-class households, Ember said in a report in May. The analysis also found that total renewable energy curtailment in Q1 2026 reached around 470 GWh, of which 300 GWh stemmed directly from transmission constraints. The northern region accounted for 178 GWh and the western region for 122 GWh. The southern region recorded none, reflecting better synchronisation between generation and grid expansion...Inadequate transmission capacity has left about 40GW of power purchase agreements (PPAs) and power sale agreements (PSAs) unsigned, according to the Ember report... Inadequate energy storage has also led to an oversupply of solar power, primarily between 11 am and 3.30 pm, forcing discoms into distress sales on power exchanges, according to executives with power developers. Power prices fell below ₹0.05 per unit 31 times in the first quarter of FY27, hitting zero on 1 May, according to data from the Indian Energy Exchange. In the year-earlier first quarter, power prices had dropped below ₹0.05 per unit six times... The bulk of India’s electricity is sold under long-term power purchase agreements at fixed schedules outside the exchange. Only about 13% of the country’s power is traded on the market.
13. Weight loss drugs are impacting the economy in unexpected ways.
As of June, roughly 38mn people in the US were actively using them, according to pollster Gallup. In the UK... People on weight-loss drugs are changing what they eat, do and buy, distorting traditional patterns of consumer spending. For certain sectors, such as gyms and healthcare supplements, GLP-1s are creating new customers and opportunities for expansion... Brands from restaurant chains to alcohol are trying to protect their margins by selling less of their product for the same price — or higher... In the UK, GLP-1s have cut grocery spending by an estimated £780mn per year at current uptake rates, according to Worldpanel by Numerator, a research group... Weight-loss drugs are part of what now looks like a broader, permanent shift in consumer behaviour, analysts say, as people fixate on health — on eating protein, taking supplements and tracking nutrition and exercise, while cutting back on alcohol.
And this
A 10 per cent average weight reduction among the 178 passengers on a Boeing 737 Max 8 would shave 2 per cent from the aircraft’s take-off weight, she found. For the four large US carriers combined, these savings could equate to about $580mn per year... The Magnum Ice Cream Company is focusing on bite-size and small portions and ice cream enriched with protein, which users are advised to eat more of to offset the muscle loss associated with the drugs.
14. The evolution of India's capital gains taxation regime for equities.
And STT in various countries.
15. Immigration in Spain under the Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
Between 2019 — the prime minister’s first full year in power — and 2026, the number of foreign-born residents in Spain surged by 3.5mn to 10mn, taking the country’s population to almost 50mn, according to the national statistics agency. Sánchez says immigrants have helped make Spain the rich world’s fastest-growing big economy, although growth in GDP per capita has been less impressive.
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