The article titled “India may go slow on trade deal till US mid-term polls” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
India may go slow on trade deal till US mid-term polls
ON HOLD. Any change in the composition of Congress could restrain the President on tariffs
Amiti Sen New Delhi
India is likely to play for time in its trade talks with the US and wait for the dust to settle in Washington soon, as it looks to the upcoming US mid-term elections to provide clarity on the American legislative landscape, sources said.
Following the US Supreme Court prevailing over President Donald Trump’s recent 10 per cent tariff on Indian steel and aluminium, the Trump administration for a 90-day period has been on a temporary floor that India does not want to negotiate until the “end game” numbers are settled.
KEY MID-TERMS India would want to continue to talk, but obviously it would want to see where it stands before it gives any concession. Any negotiation before the mid-term elections without some clarity of tariffs is tied to how the Trump regime fares, a source explained.
The mid-term elections, held at the midpoint of a President’s term, are crucial as they could lead to a significant shift in the composition of Congress. Currently, all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and about a third of the 100 seats in the US Senate are up for vote on November 3.
If Democrats take the House, the President’s ability to pass major legislation, including free trade deal agreements or tariff reforms, would largely come to a halt.
The US, however, wants India back at the negotiating table. US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor recently underlined in a social media post that a trade deal between the two had been previously agreed to, noting that an Indian delegation is expected in Washington later this month.
Gor was referring to the preliminary India-US interim bilateral trade deal framework announced on February 2, 2026. Under the framework, India agreed to eliminate or lower tariffs on most industrial goods and agricultural products, while the US agreed to lower reciprocal duties on about 80 per cent of items from 25 per cent.
The country's stand is no longer settle on those specific terms as the landscape shifted dramatically following the Supreme Court’s ruling, which struck down the legal foundation for the broad reciprocal tariffs.
Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal recently emphasized that India must secure preferential access over its exports, as was agreed to in the initial framework.
Since India only signed a framework and not a final legal treaty, it has no obligation to proceed under the old terms. “If the Trump administration returns weaker after mid-terms, its negotiating power will weaken, allowing New Delhi to push for greater concessions,” the source said.
PLAN B As a “Plan B”, the Trump region has initiated Section 301 investigations against several countries, including India. While this allows the executive to impose penalties without Congressional approval, it requires the US Trade Representative to prove a foreign government is engaging in unfair acts, which is difficult for country to country.
The article titled “63 moons’ cybersecurity arm pilots GPS-spoofing solution at Indian airports” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
63 moons’ cybersecurity arm pilots GPS-spoofing solution at Indian airports
Our Bureau Mumbai
63SATS Cybertech, the cybersecurity business unit of 63 moons Technologies, is collaborating with two airports to deploy a proprietary combat GPS-spoofing solution, addressing a major threat to the aviation industry, a top official in the cybersecurity firm said.
“We have a solution from Israel that we are actively piloting with two airports in India,” Srinivas L, Joint MD & CEO of 63SATS Cybertech, told BusinessLine, adding that Indira Gandhi International Airport is among its customers.
SIGNAL SPOOFING Srinivas explained that GPS spoofing works by transmitting a fake navigational GPS signal that is stronger than the genuine satellite signal. Aircraft normally rely on weak signals from satellites thousands of kilometres away, but when a stronger, false signal is broadcast, the system cannot distinguish between the two.
As a result, the aircraft may interpret its position incorrectly, believing that it is in a different location than its actual one. This could also mislead air traffic control, which may see the aircraft positioned somewhere it is not. Last December, GPS spoofing was detected at major airports, including Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The proliferation of connected devices, particularly in homes, and increasing threats because of war has prompted 63SATS to develop solutions under its CYBOX arm, Srinivas said. “It is about convenience versus security. That’s the toughest piece to solve,” said Srinivas. “In the next two to three years, you will see a lot of IPs coming out of our stable,” he added.
The company has rolled out its upgraded version of CYBOX, positioning it as an all-in-one solution. The new version integrates multiple security layers, ranging from encrypted calling and Wi-Fi protection to defence against over 100 attack vectors. Srinivas said the app was seeing good traction, clocking 750,000 downloads and blocking nearly 1.4 million cyberattacks within a month of its launch in August 2025.
Headquartered in Mumbai, 63SATS operates across Europe and West Asia and segments through its Cyber Tower and Cyber-on-Device platforms. The company is also working with several State government bodies for securing the energy infrastructure network and providing AI cybersecurity solutions, he said, adding that talks were on with the governments of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Tamil Nadu.
“Initially, we focused on the energy sector and the telecom sector, specialising in operational technology security,” he added. In its enterprise business vertical, the firm partners with global brands such as Palo Alto, Check Point and Fortinet for providing cybersecurity solutions to sectors such as BFSI, manufacturing, automotive and critical infrastructure.
The article titled “How India is funding Silicon Valleys” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
How India is funding Silicon Valleys
THE GREAT DRAIN. Every time we use AI, we add to a hidden “Token Tax” that drains value from India’s economy
NISHANT SAHDEV
Silicon Valley’s earnings calls are already answering the most important question about artificial intelligence: where the money ends up. There’s an undeniable sense of triumph in India’s tech ecosystem right now, but we might be celebrating a digital victory we haven’t actually won.
If you look across the country, the physical transformation is staggering. We are investing massive capital in hyper-scale data centre parks in Navi Mumbai, and optic-fibre cables are weaving AI into enterprise networks and digital public infrastructure. The government has stepped in to subsidise tens of thousands of GPUs (graphics processing units) for start-ups. We are doing everything right on the hardware front.
But beneath the ribbon-cutting and the applause lies an uncomfortable economic reality: India’s much-hyped AI boom is directly funding Silicon Valley. Every time an Indian company calls a model through an API, it pays what I call a “Token Tax.” Every single time a developer in Bengaluru uses an AI coding assistant, or an e-commerce app generates a shopping feed, or a local bank automates a customer query in Hindi, a micro-payment flows out of the country. We are pouring concrete, laying the fibre-optic cables, and buying the capacity and long-term contracts. But the cognitive engine running on top of that infrastructure is almost entirely foreign-owned.
We are building the toll roads, but someone else is collecting the toll.
You can already see this imbalance playing out on global balance sheets. While we celebrate our domestic infrastructure, the royalties that flow to the world’s leading tech giants will pull trillions out of the Indian economy. The rapidly growing share of that wealth is being extracted from countries exactly like ours — markets that are adopting AI at breakneck speed, but failing to own the underlying models. The global cloud monopolies aren’t threatened by our large-scale hardware investments; they are banking on them.
THE PERPETUAL UTILITY BILL
To understand how we got trapped, you have to look at how the fundamental business model of software has shifted. Back in the 2000s, Indian IT firms operated in a world of ownership. You bought a database or software, put it on your servers, and built an empire of services around it. It was a predictable, one-time capital expense. You owned the car. Today, you don't own it; you rented it. You rent it by the token.
Indian companies now do the hardest, most unglamorous work in the digital economy: acquiring customers, cleaning data, navigating complex local regulations, and concentrating on sales. Yet, the cream — the highest-margin layer of the entire value chain — the API for the core intelligence itself — flows immediately outward. India is no longer just exporting software services. We are importing intelligence, one API call at a time.
MATH DOESN’T WORK AT SCALE
The usual pushback I hear from tech leaders is predictable: Why not just rent? Renting a frontier model from a US tech giant is cheaper than building a model from scratch. It’s faster to focus on building great local apps and let California handle the heavy lifting? The answer is simple: that model mathematically cannot survive Indian economics.
Our market is defined by enormous volume but incredibly tight margins. The average revenue per user (ARPU) here is a fraction of what companies earn in the West. You simply cannot serve hundreds of millions of users while paying a dollar-denominated, per-token tax to Silicon Valley for every interaction.
Consider an agri-tech startup offering AI-driven crop advice to farmers in Marathwada for a ₹50 monthly subscription. If every complex question that farmer asks requires a round-trip to a foreign AI model costing a few cents, the math collapses. The more successful your product becomes, the more money it bleeds.
This is why so many brilliant Indian AI startups are currently stuck in “pilot purgatory.” The product works, the local demand is real, but scaling it destroys their balance sheet. That isn't a healthy tech ecosystem. It's a dependency loop.
A UPI-STYLE PLAYBOOK FOR AI
The solution isn't some idealistic push to build everything domestically at once. It’s recognizing that India’s ‘National AI Reserve’ will eventually be as critical as the railway system that the private sector ignores. But we have navigated this exact kind of bottleneck once before. A decade ago, India flat-out refused to outsource its payment infrastructure to global incumbents like Visa and Mastercard. We built the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). India built the democratic, shared ownership of the core system, and let private companies innovate on top of it. We desperately need a similar playbook for AI.
The government’s role shouldn’t be to build the models, but to underwrite the immense compute required for a consortium of private Indian firms, researchers, and startups to develop competitive, sovereign models. Simultaneously, corporate India needs to move beyond providing just workflow or document-processing task layers on top of a foreign trillion-parameter global model. Enterprises need to pivot towards Small Language Models (SLMs) that can be trained on their own proprietary data and run safely on local servers. This keeps costs down, protects privacy, and entirely cuts the external gatekeepers out of the transaction. In this new era, data gravity — keeping your data and computation local — is the only real defence against algorithmic rent.
THE INVISIBLE DEFICIT
We obsessively track our trade deficit in oil and our dependence on foreign electronics. We know exactly what physical imports cost our economy. But we are completely blind to our “Compute Deficit.”
India spends roughly $130 billion a year on oil imports. If our current adoption continues on this path, the cost of relying on foreign AI APIs could dwarf that within a decade. Millions of daily API calls are already draining liquidity just as AI infra and massive outflow is practically invisible in our national accounting.
For three decades, India exported human talent to power the global digital economy. But in the generative AI era, selling human effort is a depreciating asset. Intelligence itself is becoming the commodity, and right now, we don't own it.
Globally, other nations are waking up. France is heavily backing Mistral AI to ensure European sovereignty. The UAE is pouring billions into the Falcon models. China has insulated its entire ecosystem from external reliance. India is the only major digital economy that defaults to pure import for its cognitive engine.
Innovation is no longer a choice. We can continue subsidising hardware and exporting talent for a century, but without ownership, Or, we can do the harder work of shifting from adoption to control. Because the arithmetic is unforgiving. If nothing changes, by 2030, India’s most expensive import won’t be Arabian oil or Chinese electronics. It will be intelligence. And we won’t just be buying it — we will be renting our own future.
The writer is a philosopher at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a columnist on AI, infrastructure and global systems.
The article titled “Prime Minister opens ₹12,000-crore Delhi-Dehradun economic corridor” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
Prime Minister opens ₹12,000-crore Delhi-Dehradun economic corridor
KEY INFRASTRUCTURE. Expressway to cut travel time, reduce logistics costs and support tourism and jobs
Rohit Vaid New Delhi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday inaugurated the Delhi-Dehradun Economic Corridor, describing it as a key infrastructure milestone for Uttarakhand and the north Indian region. Speaking at the inauguration, he said the corridor will improve connectivity, reduce travel time and lower fuel consumption and freight costs, while facilitating employment generation.
FOR CONNECTIVITY The project forms part of the Centre’s broader push to expand infrastructure across road, rail and air networks. The Prime Minister stated that India’s annual infrastructure spending had increased more than four-fold since 2014, with over ₹12 lakh crore in projects worth more than ₹2.25 lakh crore currently underway in Uttarakhand.
LOGISTICS PUSH Besides, the corridor is expected to support regional economic activity by improving access to key cities including Ghaziabad, Baghpat, Baraut, Shamli and Saharanpur. Further, the Prime Minister added that the project will open opportunities in trade, logistics, warehousing and industry, while also benefiting farmers and livestock owners through faster market access. In terms of operations, the project has seen an investment of about ₹12,000 crore and has generated employment for thousands of labourers and transport workers.
Additionally, tourism connectivity to Dehradun, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Mussoorie and the Char Dham circuit is set to improve. Modi said that rising tourist inflows, including winter pilgrims, will provide a boost to local economic activity across sectors, such as hospitality and transport. In addition, the project incorporates environmental safeguards, including a nearly 12 km elevated wildlife corridor to minimise disruption to animal movement. According to the Prime Minister, the government expects the corridor to provide sustained momentum to Uttarakhand’s development while balancing infrastructure expansion with environmental conservation.
KEY FEATURES The key features of the corridor include a six-lane access-controlled highway which will reduce the travel time between Delhi and Dehradun from about six hours to nearly 2.5 hours. The project includes 25 interchanges, three railway overbridges, four major bridges and multiple wayside amenities to enable smoother and safer movement of passengers and goods. It also connects with major expressways such as the Delhi-Meerut, while also linking upcoming corridors.
The article titled “Footfalls at Asia’s largest tulip garden decline amid West Asia conflict, security concerns” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
Footfalls at Asia’s largest tulip garden decline amid West Asia conflict, security concerns
Gulzar Bhat Srinagar
Asia’s largest tulip garden in Srinagar will close to the public from the evening of April 16 as the season comes to an end with bloom numbers this year significantly lower than last season.
The decision to shut the Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip Garden was taken following recommendations by the Tulip Committee and a team of experts, according to a senior official in the Directorate of Floriculture, Gardens and Parks, Kashmir.
Stakeholders attributed the decline in footfalls to the ongoing conflict in West Asia and the lingering impact of last year’s militant attack in Pahalgam, which they said had dampened tourist inflows.
Just about 3.4 lakh tourists visited the garden between March 16 and April 13 this year, against 4.55 lakh during the same period last year. “Despite the lower turnover, the garden remained a key attraction during the spring season,” the official said.
MORALE HIT Spread over an area of 30 hectares at the foothills of the Zabarwan range overlooking Dal Lake, the garden features around 70 varieties of tulips and was established in 2008 to extend Kashmir’s tourism season beyond the summer months and has since become a major draw for visitors during spring.
Qazi Tauseef, spokesperson for the Kashmir Economic Alliance, a coalition representing more than a dozen trade bodies, said geopolitical tensions were weighing on the tourism sector.
“The Iran conflict has led to a reduced inflow of tourists from overseas, with airlines having to adjust flight paths. Also, high ticket prices to Srinagar have made Kashmir less accessible at a time when affordability plays a crucial role in travel planning,” he said.
The article titled “‘AP is building deep-tech ecosystem’” from the April 15, 2026, edition of The Hindu BusinessLine is reproduced below:
‘AP is building deep-tech ecosystem’
G Naga Sridhar Hyderabad
Andhra Pradesh is building a deep-tech ecosystem, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said.
He was speaking after inaugurating India’s first open access Quantum Reference Facilities (Amaravati 1 & 2) has been set up at SRM University, Amaravati, while QBiT Tech’s facility (Amaravati 1Q) is at Media Towers, Visakhapatnam. “The SRM facilities in Amaravati was a successful case study for technological convergence,” Naidu said. A strong national technological consortium, including different institutions with different capabilities, provides an indigenous supply chain to set up a network of quantum.
INDUSTRY LINK The Chief Minister inaugurated the facility on the SRM University campus, and the Gannavaram facility was opened virtually.
“The two systems will strengthen the academic ecosystem for quantum skills and the industry interface,” he added.
Venkat Subramaniam, Founder of QBiT Force, said QBiT is working on indigenous computing testing facilities, and they had the support of the State government and academic institutions which supplied all Made-in-India components, the facilities could be delivered in record time of four months.
Governor Justice Abdul Nazeer said Amaravati Quantum Valley was reflecting the vision of the State to develop technologies for the future. It had all the potential to become a hub for quantum tech and skill training. The Centre has supported 300 startups with ₹450 crore for creating a quantum ecosystem, he said.
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