BasisPoint Insight @91basispoints

India has some of the world's richest cultural, historical, and natural attractions. Yet millions of travellers continue to choose destinations such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Sri Lanka instead. Why? The challenge may run deeper than infrastructure, marketing campaigns, or visa policies. From safety and sanitation to overcrowding, sustainability, and the everyday experience of being a visitor, the question is whether India is making tourism easier—or more exhausting. Can India become a global tourism powerhouse without first fixing the experience on the ground? Read the full analysis by @SharmilaChavaly for BasisPoint Insight: Beyond the Taj basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/bey… #IndiaTourism #SustainableTourism #TravelPolicy #Tourism

Kevin Warsh’s doctrine carries unmistakable echoes of Alan Greenspan: data-driven discretion over forward guidance, and faith in productivity as a brake on inflation. Alan Greenspan’s ability to “dazzle and puzzle” by extracting insight from often obscure pieces of data was one reason so many macro watchers tried to stay ahead of the markets at all times. If Greenspan’s legacy was discretion in the face of uncertainty, Warsh appears intent on reviving that tradition—this time with artificial intelligence, rather than the internet, reshaping the economic landscape. Read the full story by V. Thiagarajan: Warsh and Greenspan: The Maestro’s Playbook for the AI Age on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/war… #KevinWarsh #AlanGreenspan #FederalReserve #AI

In its June 2026 policy meeting, the RBI left the repo rate and stance unchanged despite acknowledging heightened geopolitical uncertainty and upside risks to inflation. Instead, it unveiled a host of measures to encourage capital flows, focusing on non-resident Indians, while reiterating that future policy directions would remain data dependent. However, it seems, the policy decision was mostly based on hope rather than reality. If, in developed countries the interest rates start rising, will the FCNR(B) scheme be as lucrative? While hedging allows us to lock in the dollar outflows, a depreciation of the rupee in the future would mean that every dollar of outflow in the future will require more rupees to fund it. This, in turn, would lead to an increase in money supply domestically, leading to inflation. Read the full essay by Smita Roy Trivedi and Abhiman Das: RBI’s Capital Flows Strategy Faces Risks in a Rising Rate World on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/rbi… @akshmita #RBI #FCNRB #Rupee #MonetaryPolicy

A weak start to the monsoon does not necessarily determine how the season will end. But it does raise an important economic question. With reservoirs depleted, kharif sowing off to a slow start, and El Niño expected to strengthen, the bigger concern may not be agricultural output alone—it may be food inflation. History suggests that deficient rainfall tends to push prices up far more sharply than surplus rainfall pulls them down. If the monsoon underperforms, could the real test be not how much rain falls, but how quickly the shortfall shows up in food prices? Read the full analysis by Shubhada Rao, Vivek Kumar, and Yuvika Singhal For BasisPoint Insight: Weak Monsoon has an Inflation Bias basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/wea… @ShubhadaRao, @VK_2021, @yuvika_singhal, @Quant_Eco #MonsoonWatch #FoodInflation #ElNino #RBI

India may soon become the world’s third-largest economy. But the rupee is asking a harder question: has India become stronger, or merely larger? GDP rankings measure scale. They do not show whether citizens are more prosperous, jobs are more secure, growth is broad-based, or institutions command confidence. A large population can produce a large economy. It does not automatically produce a strong one. That is why the rupee matters. A currency is also a vote on productivity, competitiveness, policy credibility and trust. India may climb the GDP table. The bigger test is whether that climb brings rising incomes, better jobs and broader economic security. Otherwise, the rupee will keep asking questions GDP rankings cannot answer. Click on link to read former Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram’s column for BasisPoint. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/the… @MayaramArvind #Rupee #IndiaGDP #EconomicGrowth #IndiaMacro

Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 and became the world’s most famous central banker. He was celebrated as the “Maestro” during an era of low inflation, strong growth, rising productivity and booming markets. But his larger legacy is more complicated. After the 1987 stock market crash, the Fed moved quickly to calm markets. Over time, investors came to believe that whenever markets fell hard enough, the central bank would step in with lower rates, liquidity and reassurance. That belief became the Greenspan put. It helped markets survive crises. It also changed behaviour. If investors believe the downside will be cushioned, they take more risk. If every small fire is put out, the forest eventually carries more fuel. Greenspan admired Ayn Rand and spoke the language of free markets. Yet he helped build the modern rescue habit that made markets less free than they looked. The 2008 crisis came after he left office. It would be unfair to blame him alone. But the intellectual climate he helped create made risk-taking easier and caution less fashionable. That is the paradox of Greenspan’s legacy. The man is gone. The safety net he normalised still shapes markets. Read Vivek Kaul’s column for BasisPoint: Alan Greenspan (1926–2026): The Godfather of the Modern Bubble basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/ala… @kaul_vivek #AlanGreenspan #GreenspanPut #FederalReserve #Markets #GlobalFinancialCrisis

Why Markets, Policymakers And Businesses Need Humility A common thread runs through many of the major stories today: the willingness to rethink old assumptions. The RBI is placing greater emphasis on growth, the debate on rupee internationalisation is gathering momentum, banks are adjusting to new funding realities, and India's AI and startup ecosystems are entering a phase where sustainability matters as much as scale. At the same time, policymakers are rethinking industrial incentives, economists are pushing for more granular GDP data, and the Fed is challenging long-held conventions around monetary communication. For more insights on the week gone by, check out the newsletter: basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/why… @apirk16, @jrvarma, @SVenkat_Delhi, @gaurasengupta, @kaul_vivek, @AbheekBarua, @csoyantar, @rakeshkhar, @IndiaEconomists, @aabgsh, @rajeshramand #IndianEconomy #Markets #RBI #Banking #AI #Policy #Investing #Geopolitics

Each of the Indian Big IT is publicly committed to model-agnostic partnerships with foreign frontier labs: TCS to Anthropic, Mistral, Google Cloud and NVIDIA, Infosys to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini, and Wipro across the hyperscaler stack. The cheaper alternatives, from a BharatGen partnership to open-weights fine-tunes, solve the public-flag problem at low cost but give no Big IT firm a foundation model unambiguously its own. The move that does is training from scratch, and the firm best placed to do it is TCS. Start with the data moat. TCS BaNCS is the core banking platform behind a good share of the world's banks, and Diligenta, the UK life and pensions arm, processes business for 22 million customers. Customer-level data is fenced off, but what is trainable, and exclusively TCS's, is the operational layer above it: BaNCS code, workflow schemas, claims and underwriting logic, fraud patterns, anonymised tabular flows and the synthetic distributions that can be generated from them. Read the full analysis by Dev Chandrasekar: TCS is Best Primed for India Big IT’s Next Sovereign-AI Move on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/tcs… #TCS #SovereignAI #GenerativeAI #IndiaAI

India's R&D ambitions are growing. Its private-sector R&D intensity is not. As major economies increasingly use tax incentives to encourage business innovation, India has moved in the opposite direction, relying more heavily on direct funding mechanisms. The result raises an important policy question. If innovation ultimately depends on businesses taking risks and investing in research, what is the most effective way to encourage them to do so? Read the full analysis by Sharmila Kantha: India Needs a Tax-Led Push to Revive Private Sector R&D basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/ind… @IndiaEconomists #RandD #Innovation #TaxIncentives #IndiaGrowth

Technology is no longer a support function sitting behind finance. It is part of the financial system itself, and when large segments of the sector depend on the same cloud providers, software platforms or technology partners, an operational failure can quickly become a systemic one. For India, the question of how effectively regulators internalise this shift within their own regulatory architecture has acquired greater urgency. The financial system is large, more interconnected and functionally diverse. Financial activity now flows through networks linking banks, NBFCs, fintech firms, technology providers, payment systems and digital public infrastructure. In such an environment, financial stability transcends beyond the strength of individual institutions to resilience of the networks, information flows, technological dependencies and institutional linkages. Read the second part of a two-part series by Anupam Sonal: Why RBI must move from Prudential Oversight to Stewardship on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/why… #RBI #FinancialStability #Fintech #BankingRegulation

India's pivot to Russian crude delivered significant savings. Now it faces a different test. As G7 sanctions move closer to the logistics, shipping and financial infrastructure supporting Russian energy exports, attention is shifting from the price of oil to the resilience of the supply chain behind it. If the conditions that enabled India's rapid expansion of Russian imports are changing, is the bigger challenge no longer energy security—but concentration risk? Read the full analysis by Public Policy Researcher Sagari Gupta for BasisPoint Insight: India’s Russian Oil Bet Faces a New Geopolitical Stress Test basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/ind… #RussianOil #EnergySecurity #G7Sanctions #IndiaMacro

The monsoon still has weeks to recover. But with kharif sowing lagging, El Niño risks looming, and food inflation already showing signs of firming up, policymakers may have little room for complacency. India has built important safeguards—from grain stockpiles and import flexibility to fiscal and administrative tools. The question is whether they will be enough if rainfall disappoints over the next few critical weeks. Could a weak monsoon trigger a broader policy response spanning trade, fiscal, administrative and monetary measures? Read the full analysis by G.Chandrasekhar for BasisPoint Insight: Weak Monsoon Threat Raises Prospect of Wider Policy Intervention basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/wea… #MonsoonWatch #FoodInflation #ElNino #RBI

The cement industry, built on physical volume, must now adapt to a world increasingly shaped by resource productivity and carbon efficiency. The network moat, the orchestration layer, ownership concentration and new materials such as calcined clay are not separate themes. They are interconnected components of a single strategic puzzle. The ultimate question is whether future value creation will be determined by traditional asset scale or by the ability to extract more value from every tonne of resource, every kilometre of logistics and every unit of carbon consumed. The future leaders of Indian cement may ultimately be distinguished not by the scale of the assets they own, but by the sophistication with which they connect, optimise and reinvent them. Read the full essay by Chandrika Soyantar: Why Cement's Next Battle Won't Be About Capacity on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/why… @csoyantar #CementIndustry #Logistics #CarbonEfficiency #InfraGrowth

India's first start-up decade was a story of scale, funding rounds and unicorn valuations. The second may be judged by something far less glamorous. From BYJU'S to BluSmart, recent years have forced a difficult reckoning with the gap between valuation and business strength. As new unicorns emerge in AI, defence and space technology, the real question is no longer how quickly companies can scale. Can they build businesses that last? Read the full analysis by Rakesh Khar for BasisPoint: After the Unicorn Rush, India's Start-ups Face a Reality Check basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/aft… @rakeshkhar #StartupIndia #Unicorns #ProfitableGrowth #FundingWinter #VentureCapital #AI #DefenceTech #SpaceTech

In an environment of rising inflation risks, slowing growth, geopolitical uncertainty and global policy tightening, many expected the RBI to follow the crowd. It didn't. The decision to hold rates was not simply a pause. It was a judgement about the nature of the shocks confronting the economy and the risks of overreacting to them. When does policy credibility come from action; and when does it come from restraint? Read the full analysis by Sparsh Chhabra for BasisPoint Insight: When the Strongest Move Is Not to Move basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/whe… @SparshChhabra6 #RBI #RBIPolicy #OilShock #ElNinoRisk #Inflation #RatePause #IndiaMacro

Markets have responded to the US-Iran agreement with relief. Oil prices have fallen. Equity markets have rallied. Expectations for further interest-rate hikes have eased. But is the optimism running ahead of reality? While the agreement may mark an important diplomatic breakthrough, the path from a memorandum of understanding to a durable peace remains filled with political, technical and operational challenges. Can diplomacy overcome the obstacles that still threaten energy supplies, inflation and global economic stability? Writes Mohamed A. El-Erian for Project Syndicate: The US-Iran Agreement Is a First Step basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/the… @ProSyn #USIran #StraitOfHormuz #OilMarkets #Geopolitics

For over three decades, the Basel framework developed by the BIS and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision provided the organising logic of international banking regulation. Each successive accord emerged in response to weaknesses exposed by financial crises, progressively strengthening the prudential architecture governing banks. The challenge today, however, is that the financial architecture these standards were designed to safeguard has evolved profoundly. Financial intermediation has become increasingly diversified and dispersed, extending beyond traditional banks into market-based finance, investment funds, and hybrid entities. The regulatory question is thus no longer confined to whether banks hold sufficient capital and liquidity. It increasingly concerns whether the wider system within which they operate remains stable, intelligible and governable under stress. Read the first part of a series that examines how India's regulatory framework is responding to this shift and what further steps may be required to move from alignment to leadership by Anupam Sonal: From Prudential Sufficiency to System Stewardship on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/fro… #BaselIII #FinancialStability #SystemStewardship #BankingRegulation

Telegram did not cause the NEET leaks, and banning it won’t prevent the next one. In the AI age, platform bans are blunt instruments that distract from harder questions of accountability and institutional failure. India’s aspirations are twenty-first century. Its responses must be too, writes @ssmumbai Read: basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/tel… #TelegramBan #NEET #DigitalGovernance #Accountability

If peace returns to West Asia, prices of oil and commodities linked to it will fall, helping lower demand for dollars, thus placing less pressure on the rupee. While this is good news for the Indian economy, there is one major area that has sucked up a lot of dollars over the years and where nothing seems to have been done. FDI repatriation has risen sharply over the years. A significant portion of this repatriation has been carried out by venture capitalists and private equity firms cashing out their holdings in loss-making startups when these companies listed on Indian stock exchanges at extremely lofty valuations. There is no selling without buying. The constant inflow of money into equity MFs through SIPs and other routes has financed the huge selling of Indian stocks by foreign institutional investors. It has also allowed investment bankers to price IPOs at atrocious levels and get away with it. Read the full article by Vivek Kaul: India Should Discourage Excessive Investments in Equities on BasisPoint Insight. basispointinsight.com/Story/Home/ind… @kaul_vivek #Financialisation #SIP #RupeeWatch #CapitalFlows