Results (775 found)

StartupsMay 25, 2026

"Burn It All": The Sugarcane Farmer Who Stood at the Edge of Ruin—And the Wife Who Whispered "Vinegar"

There is a moment in every story of ruin when the person at the centre of it stops fighting. Not because they are weak, but because the arithmetic of survival has turned against them and no amount of effort can change the numbers. For Sabhapati Shukla, that moment arrived in 2003, in a sugarcane field in a village called Macha, in the Basti district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. He stood among the stalks he had planted, irrigated, and watched over for months, and he calculated that the price the market would pay for them was less than the cost of harvesting them. He was in debt. He had a wife and children to feed. He had a loan of ₹50,000 from a local bank—money he had borrowed to start the farm, money that was now gone, absorbed into a crop that was worth less than nothing. "I won't sell at this rate," he told his wife Shakuntala. "I'd rather burn my crop than sell it."

StartupsMay 25, 2026

"Indian Food Can't Scale": The IIM-A Professor Who Told Divya Rao It Was Impossible—And the ₹60 Crore Dosa Empire She Built to Prove Him Wrong

In a classroom at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, one of India's most elite business schools, a professor once told Divya Raghavendra Rao something she has never forgotten. She had just presented a case study on scaling a South Indian food brand—her dream, her obsession, the idea she had been nursing through two years of gruelling coursework. The professor listened, nodded, and then delivered his verdict with the casual finality of someone who believes he is doing a student a favour. "Indian food can't scale like McDonald's or KFC," he said. "It's too complex. Too regional. Too dependent on the hands of the cook."

StartupsMay 25, 2026

"Yeh Toh Roti Hai": The 5-Year-Old Boy Who Became His Deaf-Mute Parents' Voice—and Built Mohali's Most Beloved Tiffin Service

The video begins the same way every day. A small boy, barely five years old, stands before a phone camera in a modest kitchen in Sector 66A. Behind him, his mother gestures silently toward a pan of vegetables. The boy watches her hands, then turns to the camera with the steady confidence of a child who has been doing this his entire life. "Yeh toh roti hai," he says, pointing. "Ye toh aloo-gobhi hai." His father stands beside him, smiling, as the boy continues through the day's menu: dal, chole, rice, sometimes poori, sometimes a sweet. The video is simple. The boy is Sukhmehar Singh. And he is the voice of his parents, Vanshpreet Singh and Anmol Kaur, both deaf and mute since birth, who run a vegetarian tiffin service called Quietly Delicious that has captured the hearts of thousands.

StartupsMay 25, 2026

The 48-Year-Old Chennai Homemaker Who Became India's 'Millet Queen': How S. Adhieswari Turned an Ancient Grain Into a Restaurant Empire—With Her Husband as CEO

In 2015, S. Adhieswari was 48 years old, an electronics engineer by training who had spent most of her adult life as a homemaker, raising children and managing a household in Chennai. She was not a chef. She was not a businesswoman. She had never run a restaurant, never managed a payroll, and never imagined that her love of cooking would lead anywhere beyond her own kitchen. But her body had begun to send her signals she could no longer ignore. Her energy was flagging. Her digestion was sluggish. The refined rice and wheat that formed the backbone of the South Indian diet were taking a toll she could feel but not name. She began experimenting with millets—the ancient grains that her grandmother had served as a matter of course, and that her generation had largely abandoned in favour of polished rice and factory-milled flour

FundingMay 25, 2026

₹28,000 Crore Later, ‘Womaniya’ Is Turning Government Procurement Into A Bigger Story About Women, Opportunity And Economic Access

India’s Womaniya initiative is becoming a larger story about women-led businesses, procurement access and how economic participation is expanding at scale.

FundingMay 25, 2026

Breaking the Financial Ceiling: Inside Delhi’s ₹10 Crore Credit Revolution for women SHGs & startups

To dismantle deep-seated financial disparities, the Delhi Government has launched an ambitious initiative providing collateral-free loans of up to ₹10 crore for women-led startups and Self-Help Groups (SHGs). By acting as the direct guarantor, the state eliminates the prohibitive need for property or personal asset pledges that traditionally block women from scaling their ventures. Accompanied by commitments to offer prominent retail spaces within premium city malls, this policy bridges the gap between grassroots local manufacturing and elite consumer markets, paving a smooth path toward financial independence.

TechMay 25, 2026

The Physicist Who Quit IBM to Build India's First Quantum Computer: How Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja Is Racing to Take His 25-Qubit Machine Public—Before the Americans and Chinese Lock Up the Market

In 2019, Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja was a senior quantum scientist at IBM Research, working on some of the world's most advanced superconducting quantum processors at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He had a comfortable salary, a prestigious position, and a front-row seat to the development of the hardware that would eventually power the world's largest quantum computing network. He was exactly where any ambitious quantum physicist would want to be—and he was restless. The machines he was building would be deployed everywhere except the country he came from. India, with its deep pool of scientific talent and its virtually nonexistent quantum hardware industry, was invisible in the quantum computing revolution. Nagaraja could not change that from Yorktown Heights. So he quit.

TechMay 25, 2026

The Two Dropouts Who Spent a Decade Building a Battery Nobody Believed In: How Gegadyne Energy Just Launched a Lithium-Free Power Pack That Charges in Minutes—and Is Already on European Factory Floors

In 2014, two mechatronics engineering students at Mumbai's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies set out to build an electric vehicle for their final-year project. Jubin Varghese was a car enthusiast. Ameya Gadiwan was a hard-tech tinkerer. Together, they combed through Mumbai's junkyards, collecting spare parts, convinced that they could assemble a working EV from the discarded remnants of the internal-combustion age. They built the chassis. They built the drivetrain. And then they discovered that the battery required to power their creation would cost three times as much as everything else combined. They dropped out of college soon after and started Gegadyne Energy in 2015. They began with lead-acid batteries, which were cheap but charged painfully slowly. They switched to lithium-ion, which charged faster but degraded with every cycle. They experimented with supercapacitors—quick to charge, long-lasting, but low on energy density. Nothing worked. "There was scope to build incremental battery tech instead of creating something from scratch," Varghese said. "Since India doesn't have an established battery supply chain, we decided to work on materials that are widely available in nature."

ImpactMay 25, 2026

PM Modi’s UAE Visit Is Becoming A Bigger Story About Trade Corridors, Energy Security And India’s Global Ambitions

Recent agreements included defence cooperation, strategic oil reserves and UAE investment commitments into India.

TechMay 25, 2026

The Software Company That Bet 8 Years on a Battery: How KPIT Built India's First Indigenous Sodium-Ion Power Pack—and Handed It to a Manufacturer to Take on Lithium

In December 2023, a publicly listed automotive software company with no prior history in electrochemistry unveiled a battery technology that it had been developing, quietly and without fanfare, for eight years. The company was KPIT Technologies, a Pune-headquartered mobility solutions firm with a market capitalisation of roughly ₹45,000 crore, over 12,000 employees, and a client roster that includes some of the largest automakers on Earth. It was not a battery startup. It was not a research laboratory. It was a software company that had decided, in 2015, that India's electric vehicle revolution would never reach scale unless someone built a battery that did not depend on lithium—and that it was willing to be the company that tried.