Pradeep Banerjee

The Global Business Opportunity Waiting for Indian Entrepreneurs For decades, one of the most familiar descriptions of India’s economic rise was remarkably simple: India provides talent to the world. Engineers, software developers, accountants, doctors, consultants and technology professionals built careers serving international companies. But something more interesting is happening now. The question is slowly changing from “How can Indians work for global companies?” to: “How can Indian companies build products and services that the whole world wants to buy?” That may be one of the biggest business opportunities of the next decade. The idea is not particularly complicated. Build in India. Use India’s talent, engineering capability, digital infrastructure and growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. Then sell to customers in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The internet has already removed much of the old geographical barrier. But removing geography does not remove competition. And that is where the real story begins. India is no longer merely the back office The rise of Global Capability Centres, or GCCs, offers perhaps the clearest evidence of India’s changing role. According to India’s Economic Survey 2025–26, India had more than 1,700 GCCs employing over 1.9 million professionals as of FY24. These centres increasingly

Asian Games 2026: India’s First Gold, 11 Medals and the Stories Behind the Tally India has its first gold medal of the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games 2026—and it came from a team that has rapidly become one of the most successful forces in Asian women’s cricket. On September 22, the Indian women’s cricket team defeated Sri Lanka by 147 runs in the women’s T20 final, securing India’s first gold medal of these Asian Games. It was also India’s second consecutive Asian Games women’s cricket gold after the team won the inaugural women’s cricket gold at Hangzhou 2022. By September 23, India’s overall medal tally had climbed to 11: one gold, five silver and five bronze, placing the country eighth in the overall standings at the time of the latest update. The medal table, however, tells only part of the story. The more interesting story is where India’s medals are coming from—and what that says about the country’s sporting depth. The Gold That Changed the Conversation India’s women’s cricket team produced a commanding performance in the final. Batting first, India scored 216 for three. Smriti Mandhana made 79 from 45 balls, Shafali Verma contributed 48, while Richa Ghosh finished with an unbeaten

OTT Releases This Week: The fourth week of September is bringing something increasingly familiar to Indian viewers: there is no shortage of things to watch, only a shortage of time to watch them. From a missing-child mystery featuring Parineeti Chopra to a courtroom thriller led by Aneet Padda, a new romantic comedy, an international crime drama and a Willy Wonka-inspired reality competition, streaming platforms are filling the week of September 21–27, 2026 with a remarkably varied slate. The week’s releases span Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV and JioHotstar, with Indian and international productions competing for the same increasingly valuable commodity—your evening. And there is an interesting change beneath the entertainment headlines: Indian viewers are no longer consuming “international content” as a separate category. Global and Indian releases now sit side by side on the same home screen. Shaque: Trust No One — Netflix Streaming: September 24 One of the week’s biggest Indian OTT arrivals is Shaque: Trust No One, which marks Parineeti Chopra’s OTT series debut. The mystery thriller follows a mother whose newborn daughter is abducted from a hospital. Nine years later, photographs apparently showing the missing child force her to revisit the disappearance and question the people closest

Is America’s Skilled-Worker Door Getting Narrower? For years, the H-1B visa has been one of the most important bridges between India and the United States. An engineer could study in India, build a career, receive an opportunity from an American company and eventually move across the world to work on technology, finance, healthcare or research. For thousands of Indian professionals, that journey became almost routine. In 2026, it is anything but routine. The United States has tightened the H-1B system through higher costs, greater scrutiny and a new wage-weighted selection process. At the same time, visa-stamping backlogs in India have created another problem: even professionals with approved status can face uncertainty when they need to travel and obtain a visa stamp. The result is not simply a visa-policy story. It is becoming a story about India’s skilled workforce, American competitiveness and the future of global technology talent. H-1B Visa Changes and Indians The answer is simple: Indians are the largest group of H-1B beneficiaries. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, 71% of approved H-1B petitions in FY2024 were for beneficiaries born in India, compared with about 12% for China. That does not mean 71% of every H-1B application

How Indian-Origin Academics Are Shaping World Universities When people talk about India’s global influence, the conversation usually arrives at familiar destinations: technology companies, doctors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, engineers and scientists. There is, however, another Indian export that rarely gets the same attention. Ideas. Across universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and other countries, academics of Indian origin are teaching students, conducting research, supervising doctoral scholars and, in some cases, helping run some of the world’s most prestigious institutions. The interesting part is that this influence is not always visible. A professor does not necessarily make headlines every morning. There is no stock ticker for a successful research paper and no breaking-news alert when a scholar mentors a brilliant student. Yet universities are where tomorrow’s scientists, doctors, engineers, business leaders, policymakers and researchers are trained. And that makes academic influence rather important. From students to academic leaders Perhaps one of the clearest examples comes from Harvard. Srikant M. Datar, an alumnus of the University of Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad, became the 11th dean of Harvard Business School in January 2021. Harvard’s own current profile lists him as dean from 2021 to the present. His research has covered management control, strategy,

The Remarkable Story of India’s Population at Home and Around the World How many Indians are there in the world? It sounds like a question with a simple answer. India has roughly 1.48 billion people in 2026. Then there are tens of millions of Indians and people of Indian origin living outside the country. Put the numbers together and you arrive at something extraordinary: roughly 1.51 billion people when India’s current population estimate is combined with the Government of India’s latest overseas-Indian estimate. But there is an important catch. There is no single official number called “the global Indian population” because Indian citizens living abroad and people of Indian ancestry who hold foreign citizenship are not the same demographic category. And that distinction makes the story much more interesting. India itself is approaching 1.5 billion The latest 2026 population estimate based on United Nations data puts India’s population at approximately 1.477 billion. That represents about 17.8% of the world’s population. In simple terms, almost one out of every six people on Earth lives in India. That number is astonishing enough without adding anyone else. But millions of people with Indian citizenship or Indian ancestry live beyond India’s borders. The Ministry

The H-1B Era Quietly Creating a New Opportunity at Home? For decades, one of the most familiar career routes for an ambitious Indian technology professional looked something like this: Study or work in India → get an opportunity in America → obtain an H-1B → build a career in Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York or another U.S. technology centre. That model is not disappearing overnight. But it is changing. The combination of tighter U.S. immigration rules, higher costs, changing technology demand and the expansion of India’s own technology ecosystem is producing an interesting reversal. Increasingly, global companies are asking a different question: Why move all the talent to America when an enormous amount of the work can be done in India? And that question is helping transform India’s technology hubs. The H-1B route is becoming less central The shift did not begin with the latest H-1B restrictions. Data reported in 2026 shows that major Indian IT companies had already reduced their dependence on new H-1B workers, while increasing local hiring in the United States and moving more delivery work offshore. The Economic Times reported that new H-1B approvals for seven major Indian IT firms had fallen substantially from their 2015