Author: Shivendra Saxena

Bengaluru: Everyone knew 2025 would be big for artificial intelligence. What caught Wall Street off guard was who would win. Not users. Builders. The AI data centre spending boom has become the defining investment story of 2025. Loud. Expensive. Slightly unsettling. And very real. For most of the year, investors sat glued to one chart: capital spending. Specifically, how much money was being funnelled into the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. Data centres. Chips. Power-hungry infrastructure that does not come cheap and does not move fast. Morgan Stanley started the year with a reasonable call. AI infrastructure spending would grow…

Mumbai: India’s quality gaurdian just rewired the system. The Quality Council of India has rolled out next-generation reforms that swap suspicion for trust and friction for speed. The announcement came on the eve of Sushasan Divas 2025, but the intent stretches far beyond symbolism. These QCI quality reforms are designed to reshape how India certifies, accredits and trusts its hospitals, laboratories, MSMEs and manufacturers, all in service of Viksit Bharat 2047. Inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governance vision and guided by Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, the reforms build on hard operational lessons rather than theory. The…

New Delhi [India], December 22: India didn’t tweak MGNREGA. It replaced it. The Viksit Bharat G RAM G Act 2025 is a hard reset for rural employment, designed for today’s villages, not 2005 nostalgia. Rural employment has always been more than wages. It’s stability, dignity, and survival when agriculture falters. For nearly two decades, MGNREGA carried that load. It delivered scale, inclusion, and a legal right to work. But systems age. Villages changed faster than the law governing them. Enter the Viksit Bharat G RAM G Act 2025. This is not cosmetic reform. It is statutory surgery. A Long Arc…

Washington, D.C.: The Pentagon just widened the gates. Again. The Golden Dome missile defense effort is now one of the largest defense competitions ever assembled. The scale is hard to miss. The Missile Defense Agency has selected another 1,086 companies to compete under the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense contract vehicle. SHIELD, for short. Add that to the 1,014 firms named earlier, and the Golden Dome missile defense effort now includes more than 2,100 awardees. This is not pocket change. The SHIELD contract vehicle carries a potential ceiling of $151 billion, making it one of the largest indefinite delivery,…

New Delhi: IBM AI is going long on India. Five million young people. AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing. Deadline: 2030. No slogans. Just scale. The Size of the Bet IBM says it will skill five million Indian youth in frontier technologies by the end of this decade. Pause there. Five million is not a round number you throw around casually. It forces logistics. It forces partnerships. It forces patience. The programme will run through IBM SkillsBuild, IBM’s digital learning platform, and will focus on Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. Students. Adult learners. Across geographies. Across institutions. The stated objective is…

Mumbai: Warrior Dividend: The checks are real. The name is new. The money was already spoken for. President Donald Trump went on television and told America that troops were getting a holiday surprise. Nearly 1.45 million service members. A flat $1,776 each. A nod to 1776, because of course it was. He called it the “warrior dividend,” said the checks were already moving, and let the moment hang. Pause there. Because what actually happened matters more than how it was announced. Warrior Dividend: The Dividend That Isn’t New This was not a fresh appropriation. It was not a windfall discovered…

New Delhi: China has stopped complaining quietly. It has gone to the WTO, accusing India of breaking trade rules through tariffs and solar subsidies. Paperwork, yes. But also pressure. What China Actually Filed On December 19, Beijing did what trade partners do when diplomacy stalls. It filed a formal dispute at the World Trade Organisation. The complaint targets two Indian policies. Tariffs imposed on information and communications technology products. And subsidies supporting India’s photovoltaic manufacturing sector. The announcement came from China’s commerce ministry, released as a short statement. No flourish. No charts. Just the accusation that India’s measures skew competition…

New Delhi: India did not inch forward in telecom in 2025. It accelerated. Hard. The Department of Telecommunications closed the year with scale, speed, and systems that actually worked. India Telecom Growth 2025 at a Glance The numbers tell the story, and they are not subtle. By September 2025, India’s total telephone connections reached 1,228.94 million. Tele-density climbed to 86.65 percent, up from 75.23 percent in 2014. Rural connections grew faster than urban, rising 42.9 percent compared to 24.11 percent in cities. That gap matters. It signals inclusion, not just expansion. Internet connections crossed the billion mark, hitting 100.29 crore.…

Mumbai: Zero-sum politics is no longer a fringe idea. It is the operating system of modern democracy, powered by slow growth, blocked mobility, and a growing sense that someone else is stealing your future. The Old Populism Story Is Broken For nearly a decade, politics in advanced economies was explained with a simple script. The populist right is rising. Brexit. Trump. Germany’s AfD. Anti-immigration parties in France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Borders hardening. Rhetoric sharpening. It was neat. Was it wrong? Over the past two years, voters have not just punished incumbents. They have swung hard in both directions. The…

Germany: Europe is holding its breath. After optimistic signals from US-led talks in Berlin, attention has shifted squarely to Moscow and its response to the Ukraine peace proposal. The diplomatic tempo around the Ukraine peace proposal has quickened. Not dramatically. Not triumphantly. But enough to matter. After two intense days of negotiations in Berlin involving Ukrainian and US officials, European leaders are cautiously optimistic. American negotiators claim that roughly 90% of the most difficult issues have been resolved. That number sounds impressive. It also hides the real problem. Russia wasn’t in the room. Now, Europe waits. Russia Awaits Briefing, Draws…