Pradeep Banerjee

India’s artificial-intelligence story is entering a more consequential phase. The question is no longer simply whether Indian companies can build AI products for the Indian market. The bigger question is whether those products can travel—across languages, industries, regulatory environments and national borders. A new partnership between CoRover.ai and Tech Mahindra is attempting to answer that question. Announced on September 22, the collaboration aims to combine CoRover’s BharatGPT with Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus and TechM Orion to develop AI solutions for enterprise, government and societal applications, with an explicit ambition to take India-origin capabilities into international markets. That makes the partnership interesting for a reason beyond the two company names. It represents an emerging Indian model of AI development: combine locally relevant language and AI capabilities with large-scale engineering, implementation and international distribution. The hard part, of course, begins after the press release. Three AI Platforms, One Larger Ambition The partnership brings together three different technology components. CoRover’s BharatGPT is positioned as a multilingual generative and conversational AI platform designed around Indian users and use cases. CoRover says BharatGPT supports more than 14 Indian languages through voice and is available across voice, video and text. The company also describes deployments across

India’s Global Acquisition Drive: Why Indian Companies Are Buying Abroad Indian companies are increasingly looking beyond India’s borders—not simply to sell more products, but to secure the assets, capabilities and supply chains that may determine who remains competitive in the next decade. That shift is becoming visible in India’s overseas mergers and acquisitions. According to JPMorgan data cited by Reuters, Indian outbound M&A has already reached nearly $24 billion in 2026, putting the year on track for a record. JPMorgan says geopolitical volatility and the strategic importance of resources such as critical minerals are encouraging Indian companies to look overseas. The interesting part is not merely the size of the cheque. It is what Indian companies are trying to buy. India Is Buying More Than Companies Traditional overseas acquisitions usually had a straightforward logic. Buy a foreign company to enter a market. Acquire a brand. Obtain technology. Gain customers. Expand distribution. Those motivations remain. But the global business environment has changed. Pandemic-era disruptions, wars, export restrictions, sanctions and competition over critical minerals have demonstrated that supply chains can become strategic vulnerabilities. A factory may be perfectly efficient until its raw material stops arriving. A battery manufacturer may have excellent technology

How India’s Entrepreneurial Talent Built 205 Unicorns Abroad For decades, the Indian diaspora has been measured in familiar numbers: population, remittances, professionals, students and migrants. A new dataset suggests that another number deserves attention. $560 billion. That is the founder-share-attributed company value associated with 205 current and former unicorns outside India that have at least one founder who grew up in India, according to the new Indian Diaspora Index from Prosus and Dealroom. The finding provides a different way of looking at India’s global entrepreneurial footprint. It is not a calculation of the personal fortunes of Indian founders. Nor does it mean that Indian founders own $560 billion of these businesses. Instead, Prosus and Dealroom apply a founder-share methodology to attribute a portion of each company’s value to qualifying founders. The report explicitly cautions that the $560 billion figure is founder-share-attributed company value, not the full value of the companies or the founders’ personal wealth. That distinction is important. But once it is understood, the underlying story remains remarkable. 205 unicorns, most of them in America The index tracks 205 overseas unicorns with at least one founder who grew up in India. Of those, 187—or approximately 91%—are based in the

India’s 7.8% Growth Story: —and Why the Number Alone Is Not Enough At a time when the global economy is dealing with geopolitical tensions, expensive energy, disrupted supply chains and uncertain trade conditions, India has produced a number that naturally attracts attention: 7.8%. That is India’s real GDP growth in the first quarter of financial year 2026–27, covering April to June 2026. According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, real GDP was estimated at ₹81.36 lakh crore in the quarter, compared with ₹75.46 lakh crore a year earlier. Real Gross Value Added grew even faster, at 8.2%. The number is significant. But the more important question is not simply how fast India is growing. It is what is driving that growth—and whether it can continue. From a 7.4% outlook to 7.8% reality Earlier this year, APCO Worldwide’s India Outlook 2026 described India as one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies and projected growth of around 7.4% for 2026. Its analysis pointed to domestic demand, infrastructure investment, digital transformation, reforms and India’s growing international economic role. The actual first-quarter number has now come in higher. That does not mean the APCO forecast was “wrong” in any dramatic sense. A

UPI at 10: How India’s Digital Payment Revolution Became a Global Technology Story There was a time when paying for a cup of tea in India could involve searching for change, asking whether the shopkeeper had ₹10, and occasionally beginning a philosophical discussion about who had the correct amount. Then came UPI. Today, a customer can scan a QR code, enter a PIN and transfer money directly from a bank account in seconds. What began as a relatively modest digital-payment experiment has become one of India’s most important pieces of digital public infrastructure—and increasingly, a technology that India is taking beyond its own borders. In 2026, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) completed a decade of operation. The numbers behind that decade are extraordinary: annual UPI transaction volume reached 24,162 crore transactions in FY2025–26, while annual transaction value reached about ₹314 lakh crore. By July 2026, 741 banks were live on the platform. And July itself produced a record: 2,366 crore transactions in a single month, worth about ₹29.88 lakh crore. That is no longer merely a payment app story. It is a technology story. What exactly is UPI? UPI was developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) under

Indian Businesses in the UAE There was a time when the Indian presence in the UAE was discussed mainly in terms of workers, remittances and the millions of Indians building careers across the Gulf. That story is now incomplete. In 2026, another Indian presence is becoming impossible to ignore: Indian businesses. By the end of March 2026, 84,088 Indian companies were registered as active members of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, after 3,995 new Indian companies joined during the first quarter alone. Indian companies represented the largest foreign business community among Dubai Chamber’s members. That number is not simply an immigration statistic. It is a business statistic. And it says something important about how the India–UAE economic relationship is changing. Dubai is becoming more than a place to sell to For many Indian entrepreneurs, the UAE is no longer just an export market. It is becoming a regional operating base. Dubai’s location provides access not only to the Gulf but also to markets across the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe and Asia. That makes the UAE particularly attractive for companies that want to internationalise without immediately establishing offices in multiple countries. The strategy can be relatively simple: Build