By Piyush Verma
Energy for Billions: India’s Turnaround and the World’s Future explores the energy choices that can help realize the ambition of Viksit Bharat — a developed India — and the lessons other economies might draw from India’s achievements and unfinished work.
By Piyush Verma
The grid is more than a machine for moving electrons. It is a shared system of costs, responsibilities and reliability. As AI campuses bring their own power, the question is not whether they are on or off the grid, but what they owe it when they still depend on it.
Background Paper No. 40
By Udaibir Das and Pietro Zecca
Edited Volume
By Soumya Awasthi, Ishita Deshmukh, Sameer Patil, Kavya Wadhwa, Purushraj Patnaik, Pranoy Jainendran, Sameer Patil, Rahul Rawat, Debjyoti Chakravorty, Basu Chandola, and Tanusha Tyagi
Editor: Dhruva Jaishankar
By Udaibir Das
Policy-makers cannot prevent every shock, but they can influence how prepared the economy is to deal with them, by reducing exposures, protecting essential functions and preserving policy room. Asia built its first generation of financial defenses after a crisis. It should build the second before the next.
By Vasabjit Banerjee
China evidently recognises the Calcutta Port System as an economic force multiplier for India’s economic power in the region. The Indian government has recently advanced several solutions, from modernisation to expansion of the port system. Yet, more needs to be done by the Indian government and private investors to strengthen the port system to ward off Chinese influence.
By Udaibir Das
Two decades of relief and reform treated debt management as a capacity problem. In a low-income country, it is statecraft; the office must stand as an institution of the state, mandated, autonomous and accountable. Reforming it and holding the sovereign and parliament accountable for outcomes means the debt cycle finally has a circuit breaker.
By Udaibir Das
If the governor is the last port of call, choosing one is not a staffing decision. The question is no longer who is senior or who is loyal, but who can fight a fire, who can say no and whose word the market will trust at three in the morning. Independence can be hollowed without being repealed. The clause reads perfectly while the substance is gone.
By Udaibir Das
Drawing on the public sector balance sheet literature, the economics of sovereign self-insurance, and the Knightian distinction between risk and uncertainty, this paper argues that conventional sovereign asset-liability management is necessary but incomplete.
Edited Volume
By Rachel Rizzo, Clemens Chay, Kartik Bommakanti, Vasabjit Banerjee, Aleksei Zakharov, Soumya Bhowmick, Arya Roy Bardhan, Jhanvi Tripathi, and Samriddhi Vij
Editors: Sharon Stirling and Eszter Karacsony
By Udaibir Das
More moves of this kind should be expected, extending beyond energy into critical minerals, technology standards, industrial policy, and cross-border finance. The UAE’s decision is not an outlier. It is a marker — not of fragmentation, but of redefinition.
By Dhruva Jaishankar and Ylli Bajraktari
The United States and India now have a major opportunity to cooperate more closely on AI. But they must move beyond the rhetoric of shared values to building shared infrastructure.
By Udaibir Das
Fiscal space, financial space and institutional credibility are no longer separable policy domains. They are jointly binding constraints. The IMF flagships document their components but not the mechanism.
By Sujai Shivakumar, Hideki Tomoshige, and Jeffrey D. Bean
India is positioning itself as an increasingly important node in the global semiconductor ecosystem, building on its established strengths in chip design and deep pool of STEM talent. These efforts come at a time when global semiconductor supply chains remain highly concentrated, creating opportunities for India to contribute to diversification and resilience.
By Udaibir Das
Under conditions of armed conflict and state rupture, banking shifts away from decentralized intermediation towards directed, survival-orientated finance. Yet the policy conversation has concentrated on sanctions, commodities and trade — the institutional reorganization of banking under conflict remains less well examined.
By Udaibir Das
Adopted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not treat finance as a supporting function for economic growth. It treats finance as a strategic instrument of technological capability.
By Dhruva Jaishankar
For countries around the world — whether allies, partners, or competitors of the United States — there are important and immediate questions of how much and to what degree they will accommodate, or hedge against, the United States’ new approach to the world.
By Andreas Kuehn
Technology alliances are emerging as the decisive arena of AI competition, where leadership depends less on model breakthroughs than on the global diffusion of trusted infrastructure, standards, and ecosystems.
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is usually told as a liability problem: too much debt, the wrong currency, the wrong creditor, the wrong maturity. Those issues matter. But long-run sustainability is a balance-sheet question: is borrowing being converted into assets that raise the repayment base?
By Benjamin Tkach and Vasabjit Banerjee
While India-Taiwan collaboration on submarine technology would represent a step change from pre-existing economic cooperation, improving domestic production capacity necessitates pursuing mutual gains wherever possible.
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is not about waiting for easier global money. It is about whether domestic financial systems can absorb sovereign risk without amplifying internal fragility – and whether policy space purchased at 10% to 13% builds assets that justify the cost.
By Piyush Verma
Energy need not be a constraint on India's AI ambitions. It can be a competitive advantage. Encouraging data-centre locations that reflect grid readiness and renewable availability can reduce system stress while improving reliability. Expanding frameworks for round-the-clock clean power supported by storage and flexible resources can ensure AI growth strengthens climate goals rather than complicates them.
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