₹1.9-lakh-cr boost for phone manufacturing, chipmaking
CRUCIAL MOVE. Cabinet approves ₹62,500-cr MPMS and ₹1.27-lakh-cr Semicon 2.0
Dalip Singh New Delhi
The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved a new financial incentive structure for the electronics and semiconductor manufacturing sector over a four-year period.
Slated to run from financial year 2026-27 through 2029-30, the new incentive scheme for mobiles succeeds the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) for Large Scale Electronics Manufacturing (PLI-LSEM), which ended on March 31, 2026.
With this revamped framework, the government is targeting a cumulative production of ₹39 lakh crore over the next four years, and transition the country from a volume-based exporter to a high-value technology hub.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also approved "Semicon 2.0" for the development of a semiconductor design and manufacturing ecosystem, with a total budget outlay of ₹1.27 lakh crore.
PLI ISSUES ADDRESSED
Sources said concerns raised around the previous PLI-LSEM scheme, including its inability to scale up value addition in manufacturing, had been addressed in the new scheme finalised after eight months of consultations with stakeholders, especially the industry.
IT & Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, "The Mobile scheme will be spread over five years, from FY2026-27 to 2030-31. We aim to make India a mobile phone hub, not just for assembly, but for a mobile phone ecosystem, from design to branding of Indian brands."
To encourage localisation of sourcing, which is key to creating an ecosystem, the scheme provides additional incentive of up to 1.5 per cent linked to domestic sourcing of key components and sub-assemblies.
"The scheme also aims at building Indian brands to achieve technological sovereignty, capture large economic value and create Indian patents in design and R&D," a government statement said.
Beyond localising components, the most significant departure from the past is the scheme's focus on building indigenous technology. To cultivate home-grown global brands and end-to-end architecture, it introduces an additional 3 per cent incentive on eligible sales for product design and research and development.
To systematically dismantle the assembly-only model, the new scheme introduces a three-tiered payout structure. While baseline incentives are pegged between 2.25 per cent and 5 per cent on incremental sales, those who meet the target for local design and research and development will be eligible for a tiered payout structure.
SEMICON 2.0
Announcing the ₹1.27 lakh crore "Semicon 2.0" scheme to holistically build India's chip ecosystem, Vaishnaw said it will span the entire value chain across six pillars, starting with a heavy focus on the domestic design of indigenous chips.
The six key areas include chip design, semiconductor equipment and materials, fabrication facilities, advanced packaging and testing, research and development, and talent development.
Cyber leak exposes Kudankulam, other Reliance Infra projects’ data
Vallari Sanjgiri Mumbai
Ransomware group World Leaks recently released files relating to infrastructure projects of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group (Reliance ADAG), most prominently India’s largest nuclear power plant at Kudankulam, sources told businessline.
The leaked data included blueprints and firm-level details of parts of the Kudankulam facility and supplier details. Beyond this, businessline confirmed exposed data of other projects such as the Sasan Coal Power project, Mumbai Metro Line 4, a solar hut-road project on one of the Himalayan border states, and the Krishnapatnam Thermal Project. While the company did not confirm details on the breached data, it described the ransomware attack as “unsuccessful”.
While Reliance ADAG independently confirmed a partial breach, sources told businessline that the files had been floating on the dark web for a couple of weeks.
‘BID UNSUCCESSFUL’
“A cyber security incident of an unsuccessful ransomware attack resulting in a limited system impact was detected on one of the servers of the system integrator (Yotta Data Services) of the Mumbai Metro project. There is no impact on operations. No ransomware execution, encryption or data loss occurred. The services were restored successfully. The incident has not impacted the core systems and operations of the project,” a spokesperson of ADAG in a stock exchange disclosure said.
Yotta, which provides third-party data centre services to Reliance Infrastructure, said its security controls on May 29 detected suspicious activity on some servers in its Navi Mumbai infrastructure. “We acted immediately to investigate the extent of the impact, and as a precautionary measure, we took the affected servers off-line, which prevented the suspected ransomware from ever executing,” a spokesperson said.
Reliance Infra in a private letter, while Yotta confirmed encryption of 1,200 GB of data. For now, the incident has been reported to CERT-In.
CAFE-2 norms: TaMo opposes BEE proposal to sell carbon credits
S Ronendra Singh New Delhi
Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles has formally objected to the Bureau of Energy Efficiency's (BEE) proposed changes in the carbon credit mechanism under the CAFE-2 regulations. The BEE had proposed allowing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to sell carbon credits to other OEMs failing to meet the corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFE-2) norms.
NEUTRAL NO MORE
Tata Motors argued that by stepping into the market as a seller, BEE would compromise its neutral status as an independent regulatory body and disrupt fair price discovery for carbon credits among automaker’s submissions.
A carbon credit trading mechanism would permit defaulting carmakers to purchase credits from more efficient companies to avoid statutory penalties and diluting the drive to invest in cleaner technologies.
The submissions came after the BEE, under the Ministry of Power, invited comments from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to send their suggestions/feedback on the proposed amendments to Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE-2) norms.
BEE made public the draft of the market mechanism, proposing to give OEMs the option to purchase credits from it at ₹2,500 per g/CO2 km (per unit) for the years from FY 2022-23 to FY 2026-27.
In its response to Power Ministry, an official from Tata Motors said, “BEE should regulate, verify and monitor the market mechanism, but should not itself become a seller of credits. The price of the credit should represent actual, fair-market value based on compliance, and should not be a fixed price available in unlimited quantities merely upon payment”.
CREDIT PRICING
Tata Motors said such a mechanism should be such that non-compliance is not made cheaper than compliance.
Tata Motors said such a step raises a fundamental question on the BEE’s institutional and structural integrity. “A market can command confidence only if there is a level-playing field and neutral arbitrator. If BEE itself supplies the credit, it cannot, at the same time, the regulator, the monitor, the arbitrator, the price-setter and a counter-party in the very market that it supervises,” it said.
TVS Venue’s Home Credit India acquires Varthana for ₹967 crore to deepen lending play
Our Bureau Chennai
TVS Venue’s Home Credit India has approved a share purchase agreement to acquire Varthana Finance in an all-cash deal worth ₹967 crore, expanding its financial services portfolio and strengthening its presence in specialised lending segments.
The acquisition complements the group’s existing financial services business that includes micro-finance, retail and commercial lending businesses under TVS Credit Services and TVS Holdings, while marking its entry into education-focused lending. Varthana, a Bengaluru-based education-focused finance company, will retain its brand and continue its operations independently under the new ownership.
"The group saw the acquisition as aligning with its long-term strategy of building high-quality financial services businesses that cater to India’s evolving consumer, retail and commercial segments. It also expects to leverage synergies across companies to enhance risk management through better credit underwriting and risk management," said a source.
CREDIT ACCESS
Founded in 2013, Varthana provides loans to over 11,000 schools across India through education-focused financial services. It aims to help underserved schools continue to provide quality education, infrastructure and improve access to quality education.
Backed by TVS Venue, it expects to expand its reach, offer better financing terms and further its mission of improving the quality of education in the country.
Commenting on the acquisition, Steve Goertzen, Chairman, TVS Motor Company said: "The acquisition of Varthana in the financial services sector continues to offer significant opportunities for value creation driven by rising financial inclusion, expanding credit access and the increasing need for technology-driven financial solutions".
Subject to regulatory clearances, including approvals from the RBI, the transaction is expected to close after the fulfilment of customary closing conditions.
Perils of unchecked cybercrime
LETHAL THREAT. India must pursue bilateral, multilateral engagement to dismantle scam networks, as in South East Asia.
Amitabh Ranjan
In 2025, India lost a whopping ₹22,495 crore to cybercrime, according to 28.15 lakh reported cases, representing a 24 per cent surge in complaints over 2024. A year prior, in 2024, losses had already witnessed an over 200 per cent year-on-year increase to ₹22,845 crore.
Can a nation haemorrhage over ₹22,000 crore a year from its digital economy and credibly aspire to be Viksit Bharat by 2047?. Digital transformation is a genuine achievement, with UPI processing over 13 billion transactions a month and Aadhaar redefining identity at scale. However, for Digital India, this sprawling digital ecosystem is also what drives the country’s development ambitions and vulnerability.
THE SCAM FACTORIES
This vast architecture of crime is transnational, operating across the Golden Triangle—the tripartite border area of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand—and in Cambodia. Organized syndicates, many with Chinese backing, have built "scam factories" along the Cambodia-Thailand border.
Young Indians, lured by fraudulent job offers, are trapped and tortured in these compounds, then scripted and deployed as callers running investment scams and Digital Arrest frauds targeting people globally. The digital arrest scam is among the most psychologically brutal financial crimes, where callers pose as law enforcement officers to place victims under a “video surveillance arrest” and systematically drain their savings. Reported cases of these scams climbed from roughly 40,000 in 2022 to nearly 1.24 lakh in 2024, with cumulative losses reaching ₹2,800 crore by early 2025.
In January 2026, Delhi Police’s Special Cell dismantled a Taiwan-linked scam network that defrauded citizens of nearly ₹100 crore by posing as Anti-Terrorist Squad officers. More recently, over 100 Chinese battery management apps were found to be causing massive losses, leading the government to order their removal from app stores.
SYSTEMIC VULNERABILITIES
Cybercrime is a cross-border enterprise with sophisticated supply chains and geopolitical enablers. State defence mechanisms have repeatedly proven vulnerable, such as the November 2022 ransomware attack on AIIMS, Delhi, which paralyzed services for days and compromised the records of an estimated 3-4 crore patients.
Financial losses from cybercrime grew roughly 41-fold in four years, from ₹551 crore in 2021 to over ₹22,800 crore in 2024. Investment-related scams alone now account for over three-quarters of the money lost. Every fraudulent transaction erodes household savings, disrupts productivity, and raises the cost of capital for firms seeking foreign investment.
FIVE-POINT PLAN
While India’s institutional response has begun—with the I4C helping freeze over ₹8,931 crore in fraudulent transactions—the scale of the challenge demands a "quantum jump":
- National Security Priority: Cybersecurity must involve real-time coordination between I4C, CERT-In, RBI, intelligence agencies, and state police.
- National Cyber-Hygiene Movement: Cyber-hygiene should be embedded in school curricula and employee training to teach digital defence alongside financial literacy.
- Forensic Talent Pipeline: India must expand its cyber-forensic talent to address acute shortages at the investigative level.
- Defensive AI Deployment: Systems must use AI to flag and filter behavioural anomalies in real-time to counter scammers using the same technology.
- Diplomatic Pressure: India must pursue sustained bilateral and multilateral engagement to dismantle the scam-compound ecosystems in South-East Asia and elsewhere.
The notion of Viksit Bharat rests on trust—trust that hospital servers are safe and that digital identities cannot be weaponised. Securing this digital frontier must receive the same attention as building highways, ports, and factories.
The writer is Registrar, Indian Institute of Public Administration. Views are personal.
Surrendering early gains, Nifty, Sensex end flat
Anupama Ghosh Mumbai
The markets ended virtually unchanged on Wednesday in a volatile session that saw early gains evaporate in the face of concerns over high oil prices, a weakening rupee and renewed West Asia tensions that dampened sentiment, even as a solid start to the Q1 earnings season provided some support.
The Nifty 50 closed at 24,078.50, up by 3.45 points after touching an intra-day high of 24,195.80. The index had reflected gains of over 100 points in early trade but witnessed a sharp afternoon sell-off wiping out most of those gains. The Sensex mirrored the trajectory. Broader markets fared better, with the Nifty Midcap 100 and Smallcap 100 advancing 0.3 per cent and 0.7 per cent, respectively, driven by stock-specific buying.
“Wednesday proved that in a results-heavy week, volatility spikes when indices reach record levels,” said Ankit Aggarwal, head of research at a Mumbai-based brokerage. “Earnings are doing the heavy lifting,” said Sarvam Goel, Founder, Pocketful.
Among sectoral indices, IT was the top gainer, rising 1.8 per cent. PSU banks added 1 per cent and chemicals gained 0.7 per cent. Financials drew support from softer-than-expected US Producer Price Index data, which boosted hopes for a possible Federal Reserve tightening pause. On the flip side, metals dropped 1.1 per cent, Oil shed 0.7 per cent, and FMCG slipped 0.5 per cent. Metal stocks were weighed down by disappointing China GDP data.
Innovation gathers pace in India’s lifesciences sector
Our Bureau Mumbai
With about 10 novel drug approvals in as many years, the momentum is building in India’s innovative pharmaceutical and lifesciences sector, says a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).
While gaps in the funding, infrastructure, and policy environment for innovation need to be fixed, it points out that there are already multiple pathways to compete globally, the report said, adding to Glenmark’s out-licensing deal with AbbVie that brought in an upfront $102-million payment and could see up to $1.2 billion in milestones; and indigenous CAR-T therapies developed by ImmunoAdoptive Cell Therapy (ImmunoACT), among others.
India’s innovation pipeline expanded appreciably from 300 assets in 2015 to more than 1,095 across drug discovery programs across 195 companies, while pharma patent filings originating from India climbed from 1,180 in 2015 to 2,995 in 2024, lifting India’s share of global pharma patents from 3-4 per cent to about 10 per cent, the report said, adding that the shift was qualitative.
Four enabling features contributing to this shift included, the $5-billion biopharma industry; research-academia-industry-technology-transfers; regulatory reform collapsing the time for clinical trial nod from 180–270 days to 60–90 days; and a research infrastructure such as Genome Valley and C-CAMP, the report said.
“Early proof points of lab-to-market translation are already visible, including India’s first indigenous CAR-T therapy (ImmunoACT’s NexCAR19), priced at ₹40-lakh-a-visit, which is significantly lower than comparable overseas CAR-T therapies,” it added, noting that India's pharmaceutical market grew at a CAGR of 8.8 per cent since 2015 to reach $55 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $130 billion by 2030.
R&D SPENDING
India currently only about 4 per cent of global clinical trials, and annual pharmaceutical R&D spending remains at $2 to $3 billion compared with $70 to $75 billion in the US, said Amitabh Guha, Senior Managing Director and Senior Partner, BCG India and Leader of its Life Sciences (Healthcare Practice).
While there was a shift in ambition from “re-engineering” to “innovation” and from process excellence to “science,” there was a shift in ambition to move away from "generics" and "process excellence" toward "science-led innovation".
Ajay Mahipal, Co-founder and Managing Director, Healthquad, said, “India is at an important juncture where vantage by combining cost, data and scientific talent in ways few countries can match”.
The report was based on 30-plus interviews with leaders of pharmaceutical executives, investors in India and overseas, together with analysis of patents, venture investments, innovation pipelines and global data-sets.
Tatas to invest $1bn in shipbuilding
The Tata group has sought approval to invest ₹10,000 crore ($1 billion) in shipbuilding in Kerala, Kerala Chief Minister VD Satheesan said in an interview in Thiruvananthapuram. “We are going to provide the land,” he said, and the State government is favourably considering the proposal and is likely to approve it within a month, he added.
The investment will add a new line of business for the $160 billion conglomerate that already makes coffee to luxury cars and steel and provides IT services.
A Tata Group representative did not immediately comment on the proposed investment, Bloomberg.
Crude oil prices rise as W. Asia hostilities escalated
Reuters London
Global oil extended gains as the US said it had begun a new wave of strikes against Iranian military installations on Wednesday, aiming to disrupt the state’s ability to strike commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Washington earlier reiterated that Iranian-backed Houthi forces and launched anti-ship ballistic missiles at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to threaten to close the “Strait of Hormuz,” corridors that benefit the US and its allies.
SUPPLY FEARS
Brent crude futures gained 18 cents to settle at $84.31 a barrel at 1214 GMT. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) rose 26 cents, or 0.3 per cent, to $79.60 a barrel.
Crude oil prices settled up 2 per cent at a one-month high on Tuesday as the market exacerbated a supply disruption in the Red Sea, through which about a fifth of the world’s seaborne liquefied natural gas passed before the war’s outbreak.
Iraq and the US reignited talks on the future of the US-led international military coalition in the country after several months of fighting. The Iranian-supported military said it had hit several merchant ships in the area near the strategic waterway and Iranian coastal areas in the last few days.
In response, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday it struck the headquarters of the coalition, including in Bahrain, according to state media. The military said its fresh strikes on Wednesday against Iran's base was “a response to the cruise missile storage and military facilities used to further degrade military capabilities,” which it said have used to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
RED SEA
Houthi allies in Yemen have been signalling it may use its Bab el-Mandeb waterway to the Red Sea, opening a new front in the Israel-Gaza tension and putting two of the world's most vital shipping arteries at risk. Further spikes in oil prices could follow a US naval blockade of ships coming and going to Iranian ports, said IG analyst Giovanni Staunovo.
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