New Delhi: As India pursues ambitions to become a developed country and major world force, it faces challenges on multiple fronts, with global media writing that where the country stands depends on how it navigates these headwinds.
In an article titled “The bureaucratic misery of India’s voter revision”, the Financial Times writes on how the voter roll revision has left many to question if they could vote, and in some cases, even their citizenship.
The article adds that even for the people who were born in India, have an Indian passport, pay taxes and have a unique digital identity are finding that their Electors Photo Identity Card (Epic) number now ceases to exist. Krishn Kaushik, the author of the article, says he is one of them.
The Election Commission has described these cases as “logical discrepancies”, says the article, but reports that “re-enrolling is proving difficult for those who were wrongly ejected”.
The article gives the example of a former newspaper editor R Rajagopal who was denied a passport because “his name did not feature in West Bengal’s revised voters’ list”. The Editors Guild of India said the case “highlights the misery that millions of Indians are being put through”.
The report notes the Indian opposition’s claim that the exercise was done on the orders of the ruling party, and writes that courts may potentially take “more than 20 years” to clear appeals.
The revision is a reminder that “no rights can be taken for granted”, it writes.
Declining rupee
In a separate report titled “India raises $40bn from diaspora to support sagging rupee”, the Financial Times writes that India is encouraging Indian nationals who are now living outside of the country to keep their money in Indian banks.
“The Reserve Bank of India said at the weekend that $40.8bn had come into the country since it announced a campaign in June to lure foreign exchange from India’s overseas citizens,” notes the report.
But this is not the first time, rather the fifth, that India has made such an appeal since 1990, the publication writes.
According to the article, what prompted the move was a “sharp rise in energy costs from the war in Iran”, rupee weakening 6 per cent against the dollar this year—which makes the Indian rupee ‘one of Asia’s worst-performing currencies’—and India being on “track for its third straight fiscal year of a balance of payments deficit.”
The article also adds on how the inflow increased after the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman “pressed India’s State-owned banks to step up outreach to the diaspora.”
But the article warns that the inflow of $40.8 billion “have yet to translate to a similar rise in India’s foreign exchange reserves.” The article notes that some economists and traders believe that the RBI might have used some of the dollars to defend the rupee instead of just adding to its reserve.
Economists also warn that it is too early to judge whether this scheme is a success or not and quotes Miguel Chanco of Pantheon Economics saying that “the jury was still out” and that the “ultimate test” would be whether the “flows helped stabilise India’s foreign exchange reserves.”
‘Surviving’ AI
An article in The Economist—titled “India’s IT sector is surviving artificial intelligence”—writes on the impact of AI on India’s IT industry and how it is changing it.
There is “not much of a dent” in overall employment yet, but the headcount at major IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys have declined since the “release of ChatGPT in late 2022”, says the report.
The Economist estimates that the headcount has declined from “from 1.71m in 2023 to 1.66m at the end of June”.
But at the same time, the article notes, that the jobs in the global capability centres (GCCs) “has risen from 1.4m in 2019 to 2.4m this year, Nasscom estimates”.
The article also focuses on the graduate-job market crisis.
The situation in India is becoming difficult for graduates as now the number of students in India has grown but the number of entry-level salaries in IT consulting have still remained unchanged for many years.
But the article adds a ray of hope: students who build specialised AI skills can earn much more, noting that graduates from top Indian universities who have completed specialised AI programmes can earn twice as much as those studying general computer science.
The Economist concludes by saying, “AI has not eaten India’s software services yet. But it is eyeing it hungrily.”
An article titled “Build, Not Buy: The Semiconductor Lesson that Indian AI Experts Must Learn” by Carnegie India writes that the country should focus on building its own AI infrastructure instead of being dependent on imported technology.
The article says that the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) “promised chips, cleanrooms, and committed capital. And it delivered”. The article then points out that while India did assemble “around 38,000 GPUs by late 2025”, which is a genuine progress, the question that remains is whether “acquiring GPUs is the same as building an AI future.”
The article further notes that while the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) over the last couple of years has released many papers related to AI infrastructure and governance, “compute is only mentioned as something to be procured, not built or manufactured.”
The article also adds that the current strategy of India for AI is to assume that the global infrastructure for it will remain accessible but this is an assumption that the article says “may not” hold in the future.
The article cites two recent examples of the US exporting control and restrictions on access to frontier AI models, which the article says should be a “a wake-up call” for India.
The article ends with asking India to identify the technology which “the world will need”.
Challenge to India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor
An article published in the Financial Times—titled “Saudi-Israel tensions could frustrate India’s IMEC dreams”— writes that the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEEC) which was announced during the 2023 G20 Summit is now facing major issues because of the changing politics in West Asia.
IMEEEC was shown as “a rival to China’s Belt and Road Initiative” and was also expected to turn “Israel into an economic bridge between the Gulf and Europe” which would reduce the transit time by 40 percent when compared to the Suez Canal route. However, the article notes that now the “progress has slowed”.
Israel’s military actions after the October 7 attacks by the Hamas on Israeli civilians in 2023 have made it difficult for Saudi Arabia to “pursue normalisation”, writes the article. “Three years is a long time in a restive region.”
The article then adds that this creates additional challenges for India too as it has invested heavily in its ties with Israel and “will find it difficult to abandon a key defence ally.”
The article mentions that while Indian officials believe that Europe is very, very keen on IMEEEC, an EU official said, “The full achievement of IMEC requires a number of conditions that are not yet fully present in the region in terms of peace, stability and predictability.”
The article adds that unless the US persuades Saudi Arabia to support the original plan, the IMEEEC could become “a patchwork of bilateral digital transport and energy links” rather than the major alternative to China’s BRI that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had once envisioned.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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