₹6.81 lakh crore.

That’s what India spent last year on defence. Personnel salaries. Pensions. Equipment. Maintenance. Training. Procurement.

It is 1.9% of GDP. It is more than 1.5 times what we spent on education. It is over three times the central government’s healthcare allocation.

So the question deserves to be asked seriously, not dismissed: do we actually need to spend this much?

The World That Made This Necessary

Before answering, it’s worth stepping back from India for a moment.

Global military expenditure hit a record $2,887 billion in 2025, the 11th consecutive year of growth. The United States spent $954 billion. China spent $336 billion and is growing its defence budget at 7.4% annually. Russia, three years into the Ukraine war, is now spending 7.5% of its entire GDP on defence. NATO members across Europe are scrambling to hit the 2% GDP threshold they ignored for decades.

This is not an India story. This is a world rearming.

The world India grew up in, where great powers maintained a fragile peace and smaller countries could shelter under it, is over. Every major democracy is rethinking what it means to be secure in an era where the rules no longer hold and the assumptions no longer apply.

India’s ₹6.81 lakh crore is the response to a world that changed. Not a choice made in isolation.

The Trigger Closer To Home

“We live in perhaps the most troubled neighbourhood in the world,” former Home Minister P. Chidambaram once said.

That isn’t rhetoric. It’s geography.

India shares borders with two nuclear-armed adversaries, sits next to one of the world’s most unstable regions, and has watched political turmoil across South Asia spill into its own territory repeatedly over the last decade.

The most recent reminder came in April 2025: the Pahalgam terror attack. India’s response, Operation Sindoor, used combat aircraft, drones, and missile systems in a coordinated strike on Pakistan’s military and terror infrastructure. The cost: roughly ₹700 crore in ammunition, deployment, and operational expenses.

That ₹700 crore was a price paid for an outcome. No Indian lives lost on home soil, no property damaged on Indian streets, and a clear signal sent.

But none of it would have been possible without the years of spending that came before. The drones, the fighter jets, the anti-aircraft systems, the trained personnel, all of it sat ready because someone, somewhere in a budget meeting, agreed it was worth paying for in peacetime.

National security is the foundation everything else rests on. You cannot compound wealth, build companies, or run a growing economy in a country that cannot defend its borders. The economic ambition we celebrate every day depends on a layer of protection most of us never see.

But Here Is Where The Story Actually Changes

This is the part most people miss.

Defence spending in India used to mean money leaving the country. Rafale jets from France. Bofors guns from Sweden. Russian tanks. Israeli drones. We paid premium prices, gained no domestic manufacturing capability, transferred no technology, and granted foreign governments quiet leverage over us, because every spare part, every upgrade, every software patch had to come from them.

That model is being dismantled.

Defence production in India reached ₹1,54,000 crore in FY 2024-25, up from ₹46,429 crore in 2014-15. That is a 174% increase in a decade. It is not inflation. It is real industrial output, built domestically, by Indian engineers.

What’s being built has changed too. The Tejas fighter jet is operational. The Prachand light combat helicopter is deployed at altitudes above 5,000 metres. The BrahMos missile is being exported to the Philippines and Indonesia. The Akash air defence system is in active service. Operation Sindoor itself was executed using indigenous drones, indigenous air defence, and indigenous electronic warfare systems.

And here is the detail most readers will not know, the part that signals a genuine structural shift rather than a government talking point.

The private sector now contributes 45% of India’s defence exports. Tata. Larsen & Toubro. Mahindra. These are not state contractors filling forms. They are companies building real defence platforms competing in global markets. Over 16,000 MSMEs are now part of India’s defence ecosystem, supplying components, sub-assemblies, and specialised technology to the prime integrators above them.

India now exports defence equipment to 80+ countries, with exports reaching ₹38,424 crore in FY 2025-26, a 62.66% jump from the previous year and a roughly 56-fold increase from 2013-14.

The budget line still says ₹6.81 lakh crore. What sits behind that number has fundamentally changed.

The Honest Gap

This is also where the story has to slow down, because anyone who tells you India is now self-reliant in defence is selling you something.

According to SIPRI, India remains the world’s second-largest defence importer, accounting for 8.6% of global arms imports. For context, China has brought its share down to 1.3% from 4.3% in 2015. They have aggressively built what we are still constructing.

The gap shows up most clearly in research. China spends 14-15% of its defence budget on R&D. India spends 5-6%. That gap is not a footnote. It is the reason India’s Tejas fighter jets still fly on imported engines. It is the reason critical components in our drones, advanced semiconductors, and electronic warfare systems continue to come from abroad. We have learned to assemble and integrate. We are still learning to invent at scale.

India is winning the indigenisation story. It has not yet won the self-reliance story.

Those are different things, and the distance between them is still measured in billions of dollars of imports every year.

So Do We Need It?

The question deserves a real answer.

The India of 2005, which spent billions importing weapons from foreign capitals, created no domestic industry, generated no jobs, and gave other governments leverage over our supply chains every time we needed a spare part, probably deserved more scrutiny than it got.

The India of 2025 is spending the same kind of money, but doing something different with it. It is turning a national security expense into a domestic manufacturing renaissance. It is building 16,000 MSME suppliers across the country. It is exporting to 80 countries. It is creating engineers, factories, and capabilities that strengthen both the armed forces and the economy at the same time.

The answer is yes. But the more honest question is: are we spending it right?

And increasingly, the answer is yes.

Why This Matters For Investors

For decades, defence was the exclusive domain of government PSUs (HAL, BEL, BDL), companies with guaranteed contracts, predictable margins, and limited urgency to innovate. That structural setup has been broken.

The government has done something it rarely does: it has created guaranteed long-term domestic demand. Positive Indigenisation Lists now contain items that cannot be imported. They must be sourced from Indian manufacturers. The export target is ₹50,000 crore by 2029. Of the 193 defence contracts signed in FY 2024-25, the highest ever in a single year, 177 went to domestic players.

This is not a policy cycle that can reverse with the next election. It is a decade-long structural commitment that has bipartisan support, geopolitical necessity, and economic logic behind it.

The companies positioned inside this ecosystem, across manufacturing, electronics, aerospace, materials, and precision components, are building something with very few parallels in Indian industrial history: a government-mandated, domestically-sourced, globally-exported industry.

That is a different kind of moat than anything India’s previous growth stories produced. It cannot be undercut by cheaper foreign competition. It cannot be replaced by AI. It cannot be defunded by a change in administration.

This is the thesis behind our GDR smallcase, a curated portfolio of companies building India’s defence and strategic manufacturing backbone. Not the headlines. The supply chain behind them.

Explore the Green Energy, Defence, Railways smallcase.

The Closing Thought

₹6.81 lakh crore is a lot of money.

The question was never whether it’s a lot. The question was whether it’s being spent on something real.

For the first time in India’s post-independence history, a growing share of that number is being spent on factories built here, by engineers trained here, supplying armed forces that increasingly fight with equipment they own, and exporting the surplus to a world that is rearming alongside us.

That is a different country than the one that imported Bofors guns in the 1980s.

The budget line looks similar. What’s behind it has fundamentally changed.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

“We have to take a resolution-a resolution of using petrol and diesel sparingly, ‘’ PM Modi said in a recent speech. Along with this, he also encouraged Indians to revert back to the COVID-era Work From Home setup, besides dissuading Indians from buying gold.

For PM Modi, this request comes at a time when the government cannot shield us anymore from inflation. Oil prices have already risen more than 50% since the start of the hostilities between Iran and the US even as LPG supplies remain inconsistent.

Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) have had to eat up almost Rs.1,700 crores daily to keep petrol, diesel and LPG prices stable, with the total loss reaching almost Rs.1 lakh crore (and counting) since the prices rose following the war.

For India, oil remains the most vulnerable link to economic progress. Almost 85% of our oil is imported, and any sudden changes in oil prices can make inflation and recession a very serious threat that cannot be addressed in the short term.

Taking things for granted: The biggest feature of the ‘Rat race’

Over the years, our economic growth has been defined by how fast and how cheaply we can get things done. This has meant assembling iPhones at a lower cost than China, maintaining software for an MNC at one fifth the price or handling irate customers who were having trouble setting up their ovens.

We’ve been able to do all of this at a price much lower than other countries, and have been working to keep up that status in order to keep ourselves competitive. If input prices rise this becomes a problem, as this makes it harder for us to compete in the ‘rat race’.

The main condition to win the rat race? Assuming every variable associated with competing remains the same. But that isn’t meant to be. For the IT industry, the game changing AI tools have forced them to lay off thousands, especially as recurring work is now automated. Even as we boast of becoming the world’s second biggest smartphone exporter, we have been importing almost 80% of the components that go into the phones. We are competing primarily on cost and time optimization, but AI optimization offers a ceiling that will undercut these advantages, and we have to address this before it’s too late.

But there is another race that doesn’t compete on time and cost advantages. It is a race that has been in the works for quite some time, even though it is only now that it has come to the limelight.

Welcome to the ‘Green Race’

The intention behind it

Energy remains central to the growth of an economy. For us, most of this is derived from crude oil- to power our cars, trucks and buses, and coal, to power our homes, offices and factories. The growth of our economy depends on one fragile assumption- the oil and coal will keep coming forever. But it is not meant to be. Especially as we still depend on other nations for 85% of our oil. With the Strait of Hormuz blocking international oil shipments, this has effectively blocked economic progress, a vulnerability that we cannot afford to ignore.

We thus need to build our own energy resources without depending on exports. This is a self assigned goal that requires innovation and timely implementation, not just competition. It is a race where we push ourselves to fulfill demand so we don’t have to pay through our noses for this. We are already working on it, albeit out of necessity.This means offering a technology based solution that not only offers us consistent profits, but enhances the standard of living, welfare and health of everyone in society.

For a country obsessed with competing in a rat race, getting into the game that doesn’t depend on a daily grind, rather the outcome of our work, isn’t going to be easy, but will be rewarded well. Welcome to the ‘green race’ a race to wean ourselves away from imported fossil fuels to EVs and from polluting coal plants to generating and distributing clean, renewable energy.

Why the ‘Green Race’ Is Different From Every Other “India Growth Story”

This is a fundamentally different race that doesn’t depend on assumptions, prices or timing. It depends on ingenuity, logic, and developing infrastructure that helps meet our needs without depending on external sources.

Lets get into some facts on our Energy Security (Pun intended).

In 2015, just 6% of our energy came from renewables- primarily solar and wind. In 2025, it is close to 27%, and growing. Through sustained capacity additions, we have eliminated power cuts from 4.2% supply shortages to just 0.03% today, according to government sources.

Though this is a great achievement, China has been there, done that. Over the years, it has invested in upgrading its technology to meet rising demand for energy. This has meant adding new renewable energy capabilities while upgrading transmission and storage infrastructure simultaneously. It has meant investing in R&D to develop EV technology that substitutes fossil fuel vehicles to EVs, and to create a manufacturing capability in-house. Even as the world hopes for a ceasefire in the Middle East, China isn’t that worried, as it has gotten far ahead in the ‘green race’ to care for such geopolitical events. For India, this green race isn’t about keeping costs low, but about producing enough domestically while keeping prices within reach as the markets decide what to produce, how much to produce and how to produce.

Here we are solving challenges. That’s what makes the ‘Green race’ special. It depends on catering to solving problems for ourselves, not for others. This essentially means 3 things.

1. It cannot be outsourced. A solar plant in Rajasthan serves India. An IT project in Bangalore serves America. Renewable energy infrastructure is inherently domestic, the capacity built here, stays here, earns here.

2. It has a regulatory tailwind that won’t reverse. Every government, regardless of political stripe, needs cheaper electricity and energy independence. This is not a policy cycle. It is a structural imperative.

3. The demand curve is non-negotiable. India’s electricity consumption is growing at 4-6% annually, double the global average. That demand must be met. The question is only whether it gets met with coal or with wind and sun. The economics now favour the latter.

The Green Race Has Real Obstacles

Winning this race is not guaranteed. And pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

India’s renewable capacity has grown impressively on paper. But capacity installed is not the same as energy delivered. Solar and wind are intermittent, the sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t blow on demand. India’s grid infrastructure, built for coal’s predictable output, is not yet equipped to handle the variability that comes with 500 GW of renewables. Transmission losses remain high. State electricity distribution companies DISCOMs carry huge accumulated debt, making them unreliable buyers of the clean energy being generated.

Then there is the manufacturing gap. India’s solar capacity is booming, but a significant share of the components — cells, wafers, polysilicon still come from China. We are assembling the green future with someone else’s parts. True energy independence requires owning the supply chain, not just the installation.

And the target itself is ambitious to the point of demanding uncomfortable honesty. India needs to roughly double its annual renewable capacity additions to hit 500 GW by 2030. At current pace, the projected landing is closer to 378 GW. The gap is not insurmountable but it requires urgency that the grid, the financing ecosystem, and the manufacturing base are not yet fully delivering.

The Green Race is worth running. It is just harder than the headline numbers suggest.

Why the ‘Green Race’ is the next opportunity

The companies that will win India’s Green Race are not always the ones making the headlines. They are not just the solar panel installers or the wind turbine operators. They are the businesses solving the harder problems — grid modernisation, energy storage, power transmission, green hydrogen, and the electronics manufacturing that makes all of it work at scale.

These are companies that don’t depend on oil prices, foreign clients, or global cost arbitrage. Their market is India’s own rising electricity demand- a curve that no government will reverse and no technology will disrupt. That is a fundamentally different kind of business than anything the last four decades of Indian growth produced. At Greenportfolio, we have been tracking these companies through our dedicated Green Energy theme, even as more companies upskill themselves to meet the unique demands in the market.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

A friend of mine- a sharp IT guy, has been doing fairly well for himself. He has been steadily climbing the corporate ladder, and has been responsibly saving his money every month. One day, he explained how he has been very careful with his portfolio, and that he has worked to diversify it.

I asked him what he meant.

He said he has been investing in a large cap fund, a large and midcap fund, a flexi cap fund, a multicap fund, a midcap fund an ELSS fund, an international fund, a small cap fund and even two sectoral funds.

All of this for the ‘long term’

For him, ‘long term’ investments meant investing in ten funds. When asked why, he said he has balanced his ‘risk’ and felt confident that his funds will work the way they expected. To put that to the test, I pulled up all the 10 holdings of his large cap fund and flexi cap fund side by side. The results were shocking- eight out of the ten most prominent stocks were the same- Reliance, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Infosys, TCS. He was basically paying two different AMCs two different expense ratios, for the same portfolio-twice.

This wasn’t diversification. This was a lack of awareness.

The Scale of This Problem

India’s Mutual Fund industry has grown sixfold over the past 10 years. In 2026, the industry’s AUM crossed Rs.73 lakh crore with 10 crore SIP accounts. Much of this has been attributed to the Mutual Fund Sahi Hai campaign, while the rest has come from aggressive marketing and in-person advisory from your neighbourhood Mutual Fund advisor.

Today, there are almost 50 AMCs registered with SEBI. Collectively, they manage about 1,500 schemes, while in the United States, with one of the largest Mutual Fund industries, has fewer active equity funds comparatively.

For investors, this has resulted in the Paradox of Choice, a phenomenon put forth by psychologist Barry Schwartz. With so many funds to choose from (even within one asset class), most don’t know which one suits them best, and end up making the wrong decisions.

What this ‘Overdiversification’ Actually Does To Your Returns

Let’s get back to my friend we discussed earlier.

Just two of his funds have invested in eight of the same ten companies. But what about the other funds in his portfolio? With his investments in 10 funds, 10 different fund managers have been handling his investments, with each of them doing it in their own way.

And each of these funds charge differently to manage the money, known as the ‘expense ratio’. Though these vary based on the type of the fund, most of these are in the range of 0.5% to 1.5%. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume this expense ratio is 1%.

Now, if you are investing Rs.1,000 in 10 funds through SIP, that means you are effectively paying Rs.100 as fees to manage these funds. If this SIP was consolidated into just two funds, for example, you would be paying just Rs. 20 for the same.

But our friend here was aware of the expense ratio, but chose to ignore it, primarily because it was just 1% of the monthly investment.A fairly insignificant number to bother about. For your returns, this isn’t an insignificant charge, it is a significant overcharge that causes your portfolio to get overdiversified.

Three reasons behind the investment overdiversification

This has got to do about a system that makes it easy to add but hard to audit.

Reason 1: The SIP Trigger

A new financial year starts. Motivated to save more post increment, you choose to start one more SIP. Someone recommends a fund. You may agree, as the markets are doing well. This happens three, four, five times over as many years. The zeal to save makes you forget the long term implications of the SIP.

Reason 2: The Rating Trap

Five-star ratings feel like safety, just as we use them to gauge our electronics. Investors tend to pick the top-rated fund in each category. Large cap — 5 star. Mid cap — 5 star. Flexi cap — 5 star. What they don’t know is that star ratings are based on past performance, specifically the last 3 years. That remains the worst time to invest or enter a fund, as the market dynamics will keep changing, and the managers experience to maintain consistent returns will be tested.

Reason 3: Nobody Said Stop

Your distributor earns trail commission as long as you stay invested. Your app sends you a notification every time you can add a new SIP. Nobody in the system has a structural incentive to tell you that you already have too many funds, that three of them are redundant, that you are paying for complexity that isn’t helping you. So the portfolio keeps growing. And the investor keeps feeling responsible.

What A Good Portfolio Actually Looks Like

For investors, the SIP mode remains the best medium to save money for the long term. However, the difference is how you choose the funds and why you do so. Experienced financial experts recommend an optimal portfolio of about 4-5 funds to ensure optimal diversification, based on your financial goals. This could be retirement, education, personal expenses or even saving for a holiday.

Besides that, a 10% annual step up SIP will also match your rising income and inflation, even while keeping the 12% CAGR return assumption constant to build wealth. Most experienced financial planners will ask you such questions even before they ask you how much you earn or how much you aim to save.

So Where Does That Leave You?

Before you read further, answer this honestly: Can you name right now what each of your SIPs is specifically meant to fund?

Not “retirement” or “wealth creation.” Something specific. A corpus amount. A year. A purpose.

If you can’t, you’re not alone. Most investors can’t. And that’s not a personal failure, it’s a structural one. The industry sold you the instrument without helping you define the destination. This Is Exactly The Problem We Built Around. At Greenportfolio, The Roadmap Series is our attempt to answer the question this newsletter is asking kaunse aur kitne.

This is not a list of funds, nor is it 14 schemes across 8 categories.

These are goal-based mutual fund baskets built backwards from a milestone. It could be ₹25 lakhs, ₹50 lakhs or even ₹1 crore. Each basket tells you which funds to hold, in what proportion, and why. No redundancy. No overlap. Every rupee has a destination.

And because we operate on a flat subscription model, our recommendation doesn’t change based on your portfolio size. Whether you invest ₹1 lakh or ₹1 crore, the fee is the same. Which means we have no reason to tell you to add more funds than you need.

That is a harder thing to find in this industry than it should be.

If this makes sense to you, find out more more about it here: Build my Roadmap

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

On the morning of May 4th, 2026, a political era ended. From 215 seats in 2021 to 88 today. Fifteen years of entrenched power gone in one counting day. For a state that has typically been averse to change, this is a change that took 15 years of campaigning, rapport building and gaining trust to make it happen.

This has been a pattern that has repeated itself after years of anti incumbency. The Congress faced it and the BJP itself has been facing it at the Centre, as it has come to power with a weaker mandate.

Expectations for better outcomes motivates people to seek change. But when the same people have been around for too long and become familiar faces, that familiarity breeds contempt, if change isn’t delivered. And that starts a new cycle for change.

Why did it take 15 years for change?

The Trinamool Congress, in the 15 years it was in power, centered its governance approach on welfarism based on the centralised leadership of its party chief.

It ran a host of welfare schemes for the vulnerable sections of society, and hated the idea of land acquisition, even if it led to economic stagnation.

The beneficiaries of the welfare schemes did appreciate the handouts, but that doesn’t add up to the entire electorate. These schemes were targeted to farmers, women and children, but what about those who left home for work? What about those who wanted to work but couldn’t find any?

Economic Opportunities: The Primary driver for change

Though welfarism has been around for quite some time now, political leaders easily forget that this is a short term solution, and one that cannot sustain in the long run.

There is a popular saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”, that is conveniently ignored, even as economic opportunities and the hope for earning more is always remembered.

West Bengal has been a laggard state for about half a century now. It has historically been the most prosperous region in the country, with its textiles, metals and manufacturing industries being world renowned. For centuries, European nobles have been fascinated by Muslin cloth,with its lightweight feel that made it worth gold.

The state, endowed with fertile soil, expansive trading networks into Southeast and East Asia and its luxury goods,had been the gateway to the riches of India, and had remained since for years, up to the 1960s, where it remained one of the leading industrial powerhouses of India.

Since then, the state hasn’t been able to keep up with the rest of the country, even as millions of Bengalis over the years have chosen to move out for better opportunities.

What happens when the hope of change is lost?

When someone has been in power too long but hasn’t offered any hope for change, a new entrant is always appreciated, especially when they bring in something that hasn’t been experienced before.

And it is not just about politicians. Even established corporations that were once invincible have been humbled.

Before the Maruti 800 launched in India in 1984, the automobile market was dominated by Premier Padmini and Hindustan Ambassador. These cars were outdated, unreliable as they were based on older designs and technologies. They frequently broke down with both companies profiting from this as the spare parts companies were owned by family members of Premier and Hindustan Motors.

India was years behind the industrial revolution that had swept the West and the Maruti 800 was the solution every Middle Class Indian looked forward to. The car was affordable for the middle class and offered relevant technological upgrades for Indian road conditions. Maruti expected about 20,000 bookings in the first year, but got a waiting list of 1,50,000. Over time, both the Padmini and Ambassador became relics of the past, with modern car designs taking over the market.

For the Middle Class Indian, the Maruti 800 in the 1980s was their first hope for better days, as the old gave way to the new. The economic liberalisation of the 1990s solidified this change, with better, cheaper and value for money alternatives preferred over legacy brands that gave nothing in return.

In the case of Maruti Suzuki, the opportunity for change made all the difference, even as Premier and Hindustan Motors never bothered to address the challenges with their products, until it was too late.

Maruti, on the other hand, didn’t rest on its laurels. It continued innovating and offering new products for its customers, even as competition intensified. That has ensured that the value of its stock has skyrocketed from Rs.125 in 2003 to Rs.13,000 today, a more than 100x rise. Padmini and Hindustan Motors? They ceased production and are defunct now.

Whether it is the humbling of the 15 year old incumbent government or the established automobile owners who didn’t bother to understand the rumblings of the population, a new player will always be preferred if they offer a hope for something different.

Change, in any form, has remained constant, even though the time for that differed. A delay or aversion for hard decisions or the assumption of maintaining the status quo remained the most fatal mistake.

How markets work the same way

Across the stock markets, we see many such companies who chose not to innovate or decided to wait until it was too late. For years, Nokia held to its monopoly status in the mobile phone market, and saw their business wither in front of their eyes when Apple’s iPhone launched in 2007 and later, cheap Android phones from Samsung and other makers flooded the markets. Nokia could never regain lost ground and was eventually folded.

When entrenched power falls-corporate or otherwise- the rotation is sharp and fast. The black horse becomes the hero when the incumbent assumes he is invincible. When a certain strategy consistently fails to deliver, loyalty shifts to the one who can, and one who will go to any level to deliver.

Jio did it to Airtel. Zomato did it to offline restaurants. TMC looked invincible just 5 years ago. Markets, investors, and analysts make the same mistake — they extrapolate recent dominance into permanent leadership. Nifty leaders of 2010 aren’t the leaders of 2025. The fund that ruled for a decade is average today. Political and market cycles rhyme.

For those who are in power- how long will you need to understand that power and support is conditional? Because the longer you hold on to something past its expiry — politically or financially — the more violent the correction.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

Rakesh, 32, a well heeled, successful IT professional, has been consistently investing in Mutual Funds through SIPs for almost 10 years now. It all started when a relationship manager sat him down and explained why SIPs were important, and how they can help him secure his future. Convinced, he signed up for 4 monthly SIPs covering all asset classes between them worth Rs.10,000. .

Since then, he has seen his corpus grow over the years, compounding by about 12% CAGR on average, based on the average market returns in the last 15 years. He has been content with the returns he’s earned so far on his corpus of Rs. 18,00,000 for the ten years he’s been investing, even as the market witnessed its share of ups and downs.

How Mutual Funds are expected to work

For investors like Rakesh, the portfolio’s performance has mostly meant two things.

A. How much have I invested? and

B. How much have I made from these investments?

There are countless investors like Rakesh out there, who have booked good profits from their SIPs and continue to lay their trust in them. By continuing to trust his RM and the Mutual Funds Sahi Hai campaign, Rakesh continued with his SIPs, never bothering to question them. Only if he had known what to expect, and how much to expect, he could’ve got a better deal. His investments had the potential to grow faster and better, but the benefit of doubt still persists. And he will still not know that he could’ve earned more, if only someone had told him.

Why Mutual Funds fail at meeting expectations

For investors like Rakesh, Mutual Funds have always been the easiest way to invest in the capital markets, with advisors being the point of guidance in case of any queries. But not all investment advisors align their clients needs with their own, and many investors do not bother to ask the right questions.

In Rakesh’s case, this has meant a difference of about Rs.2-3 lakh. The reason? His advisor suggested a MF scheme that offered him the best commissions, and Rakesh readily complied.

The commission structure inherent bias: Up till then (and maybe even now) Rakesh didn’t know why he could have earned more. The secret lies in the two types of MF plans offered- Regular and Direct

• What a Regular plan is: When you buy a mutual fund through a distributor, in this case, through a financial advisor or a Relationship Manager, you are buying a Regular plan. The AMC pays the distributor a commission, called trail commission, every year. This commission comes from your fund’s expense ratio.

• What a Direct plan is: When you buy directly from the AMC or a SEBI-registered investment advisor, there is no distributor. No commission. The expense ratio is lower. The full return stays with you.

To make things easier to understand, here’s the maths. On a 15 year SIP with a corpus of Rs.18 lakh, this is the difference in returns considering an average CAGR of 12% the markets have given.

Now, this picture will get worse if you increase SIP amount, time or returns. If Rakesh knew about regular plans, he could’ve earned almost 11.8% more returns than he did- almost worth Rs. 2.13 lakhs. The 0.5% difference in expense ratio made all the difference here, and could’ve made a better difference if he had switched to a regular plan anytime earlier.

This is the challenge that millions of investors like Rakesh face everyday- the lack of proper guidance. Blame misselling or conflict of interest.

The inherent bias

With 50 Mutual Fund houses managing more than 1500 funds competing for your attention, the conflict of interest problem continues to plague the market. This is like the doctor who suggests medicines that get him the best commissions, even if cheaper alternatives are available. In this case, three things happen when your advisor is paid by commissions:

1. What they sell you may not be in your interest. The commission structure may dictate which funds they suggest to you, especially for regular plans. Sometimes, they may have a target to meet, and your SIP could be the last hurdle in meeting that.

2. They may not understand your risk appetite or choose to ignore it. Someone who is 28-year-old with a stable income and a 20-year horizon should be predominantly equity. But if a conservative debt fund pays a better commission this month, the nudge may go the other way. This is not always deliberate. Sometimes the advisor themselves is not trained to have this conversation. Either way, you bear the consequence.

3. They have no incentive to tell you when to exit. According to the latest SPIVA (S&P Indices Versus Active) India report for 2025, about 76% of large cap Mutual Funds have underperformed the S&P India Large and Midcap Index. Many of the funds have been merged with other funds or liquidated, and they no longer exist now.

A well intentioned advisor would review your portfolio periodically, and suggest you to switch funds if they have been underforming lately. Axis Large Cap Fund and Aditya Birla Sun Life Frontline Equity, once considered titans in the industry, are now at the bottom of the indices, as they have struggled to beat the returns. Yet many continue to invest in them by SIP, as their advisors continue to benefit from the status quo.

Though Mutual Funds now have star ratings for their risks- like those you get on your electronics to judge their energy efficiency- but most don’t know that these are based on data from the past 3 years, not the next 3.

Investor Checklist: Is this you?

Before you read further, answer these four questions

• Do you know if your funds are Regular or Direct plans?

• Can you name what each of your SIPs is meant to fund?

• Has your advisor ever told you to exit a fund?

• Do you know what your total expense ratio is across your portfolio?

If you answered no to more than two, this is for you.

The Solution

The SPIVA India report further states that most actively managed funds haven’t beat the index, yet investors continue to pay for them. Besides that, many funds hold the same stocks, affecting the efficiency of your investments. To address these, we built the Roadmap Series helping investors like Rakesh to have the right long term expectations. It recommends:

• Direct plans only. No distributor between you and your fund. No trail commission leaving your corpus. The full return is yours.

• Flat subscription model: Most investors don’t realise this, but the fact is that traditional advisors earn more as your portfolio grows. With a flat subscription model, the charges remain the same, whether you invest Rs. 1 lakh or Rs. 50 lakh- the only incentive is your outcome, not your corpus size.

• Goal-based baskets. Not a random collection of funds. Structured around milestones, so every rupee has a destination.

The unknown missed opportunity

For investors like Rakesh, asking the wrong questions has meant losing out on lakhs in missed returns. This could have been averted if he had the right guidance that has been missing for millions of investors across the country, most of whom continue to hold SIPs without understanding how they should work and could work.

Rakesh now knows what he missed. The question is whether you’ll find out the same way he did or before.

We want to talk about something that’s been all over the internet for the last two years, but that most people haven’t yet looked at from an investor’s lens.

You’ve seen Ozempic everywhere. On your Instagram feed, in celebrity interviews, in conversations at weddings and gyms and office cafeterias. It became one of those rare drugs that crossed over from clinical vocabulary into everyday language. People started referring to dramatic weight loss as “the Ozempic effect.” Influencers documented their journeys publicly. Demand built itself without any pharmaceutical marketing, which is genuinely extraordinary for a prescription drug.

What just changed is that the molecule behind all of this, Semaglutide, has gone off-patent in India.

Novo Nordisk’s monopoly on Ozempic is over, at least in India. Any Indian generic manufacturer can now produce, sell, and distribute their own version of the drug. Ten companies already have. And the market that’s about to be unlocked is, by any measure, enormous.

Nomura estimates the Indian semaglutide market will reach Rs. 12,000 crore within five years. That’s a CAGR of over 30% between FY26 and FY30. To understand why that number is credible, consider the addressable base: India has over 100 million diabetic patients and over 250 million people affected by obesity. Both conditions are chronically undermanaged. Both are now addressable with a single, clinically proven molecule that patients are already asking for by name.

The demand pull here is unlike a standard generic launch. Most generics take years to gain adoption because doctors and patients need to be educated about them. Semaglutide doesn’t have that problem. The patient walks in already knowing what they want. The only thing that was stopping broader adoption was price. And now that the patent wall is down, price is falling fast.

This is what makes the patent expiry a genuinely significant event for Indian pharma investors, not just for healthcare consumers.

What Our Research Found Before This Became a Headline

Of the ten Indian companies that have already launched semaglutide products, two were already sitting in our Pharma Select Tracker before the patent expiry made this a mainstream story. That’s not luck. It’s what research-led portfolio construction is supposed to do.

Here’s what we’re seeing from both:

1. The first is a large-cap pharma company with a significant existing presence in anti-diabetic therapy, where this category already contributes close to 10% of annual revenues. Rather than simply launching a generic, they engineered a delivery format specifically for the Indian market, a reusable, adjustable dose-pen with replaceable cartridges that makes long-term treatment meaningfully more affordable for patients. More interesting is what they did on distribution: instead of building commercial reach from scratch, they signed co-marketing agreements with two other major Indian pharma players, who will sell this company’s semaglutide under their own brands in exchange for a royalty. The result is revenue flowing in from three sales channels simultaneously, without tripling the cost base. This is a company compounding an existing strength, not making a new bet.

2. The second is a company that moved earlier than most. Development began in 2024, and they became the first Indian company to commercially launch semaglutide, in February 2026. Their current domestic focus is diabetes injections, but the pipeline tells the more important story. An oral formulation for both diabetes and obesity is in development for 2027, which matters because oral delivery is where the true mass market lies. And they have already filed for semaglutide in 45 countries where the patent expires next year, turning what looks like a domestic generic play into a coordinated global launch strategy. The groundwork is done. When those markets open, they’re ready.

   Both companies were identified and held before semaglutide became a mainstream investment conversation. That’s the nature of the research process behind Pharma Select.

First, they’re developing an oral semaglutide formulation, expected in 2027, targeting both diabetes and obesity. Oral delivery is where the mass market lies. Injectable drugs, even affordable ones, have natural adoption limits. Whoever gets oral semaglutide to Indian patients affordably will be in a structurally advantaged position.

Second, Dr. Reddy’s has already filed for semaglutide in 45 countries where the patent expires in 2027. That means when those markets open next year, they’re not starting from zero. The groundwork is done. This is a global commercial strategy, not just a domestic generic play.

If You’re Not in Pharma Select Yet

If you’re already in one of our other themes, you understand the core idea: find structural, long-duration opportunities in the Indian economy and hold them with conviction while the thesis plays out.

That same thinking applies here.

Pharma is a natural complement to most other themes. It’s defensive when markets get choppy, dollar-earning when the rupee weakens, and now sitting at the beginning of a category-defining commercial cycle driven by one of the most culturally significant drug launches in recent memory.

The research was done before the headline arrived. The portfolio was built before the opportunity became obvious.

If you want that kind of positioning working for you, Pharma Select is where it lives.

Explore Pharma Select Tracker

Already in Pharma Select?

Your portfolio was already there. The full breakdown of how both holdings are positioned and what the next 12 to 18 months could look like is on our blog.

Read the full analysis: Blog

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer/solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as on the date of publication and may change without notice. If any past performance or return figures are mentioned, they are for context only - past performance may or may not be sustained in the future. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

I read something last week that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

A newspaper article listed three reasons why Foreign Institutional Investors are pulling money out of India. One: India is no longer cheap. Two: growth isn’t lucrative considering PE valuations. Three: India has no breakthrough technology to show for itself.

The first two I could debate. The third one stopped me cold. No breakthrough technology. Really?

We are the country that supplies engineers to the entire world. The men running Google and Microsoft have Indian roots. Our IT sector contributes 7.5% of our GDP and nearly half our foreign exchange earnings. By every measure, India is the technology story of the last three decades. So why does that third point sting because somewhere, quietly, we know it’s true.

The Numbers That Made Us Proud

Let’s start with what India genuinely built. The IT sector employs over 5 million people directly. India is the world’s largest exporter of IT services, with roughly 90% of revenues coming from foreign clients. Sundar Pichai runs Google. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Shantanu Narayen runs Adobe. Arvind Krishna runs IBM. The most powerful technology companies on earth are, functionally, run by people who grew up here.

India produces more engineers every year than almost any country on the planet. By every surface metric, this is a success story. And it genuinely is. But here is what that success story was actually built on and why it matters for what comes next.

From the 1980s onward, India’s IT identity was built on one thing: cost arbitrage.

An Indian engineer costs 1/10th of an American engineer. That gap: stark, persistent, and scalable became India’s entire business model. TCS, Infosys, Wipro didn’t build the next Google. They built something arguably more commercially efficient: a machine that executed other people’s ideas, cheaper and faster than anyone else could.

The pyramid was elegant. A few senior architects at the top. An army of junior engineers at the base coding, testing, maintaining at a fraction of what the same work would cost in California. Since the 2010s, almost 50% of Indian developers were working on salaries of less than $10,000. A similarly skilled junior software engineer in the US would cost between $40,000-$80,000 depending on their specialization and education background and this allowed Indian IT firms to sustain operating margins of 26-34% for decades. It wasn’t innovation. It was industrial precision applied to someone else’s vision.

And for a long time, that was enough. But unfortunately, not anymore.

Fun with Numbers: Comparative IT Salaries (2018-2024 Context)

Then AI Walked In. And It Changed Everything.

Four years ago, ChatGPT launched and quietly began dismantling the foundation.

The pyramid- that beautiful, margin-generating pyramid was built on junior engineers doing repeatable tasks. Testing. Bug fixing. Documentation. Maintenance. These are precisely the tasks that AI now does faster, cheaper, and without visa requirements. The numbers are stark.

• Mass hiring of fresh engineers has dropped by nearly 75% in two years.

• India’s top five IT companies lost over $150 billion in market value in 2025 alone as investors began pricing in the obsolescence of the old model.

• Clients are demanding price cuts of up to 20%.

The FII was right. India’s core competitive advantage i.e., skilled, cheap, white-collar labour is exactly what AI undercuts. And here is the part that should bother us most: we still have no Nvidia. No OpenAI. No Amthropic. No foundation model that the world uses. No chip ecosystem. No AI research lab that is setting the agenda globally. We gave the world its best engineers. We watched them build these companies abroad. And now those same companies are building the tools that may replace the model we built.

For a moment, sit with that. Feels like a betrayal? Maybe Yes, Maybe Not. We are asking the wrong questions all this while. The conversation around India and AI has been fixated on the wrong race. Can India build the next Nvidia? Probably not, not in this decade. Nvidia required 30 years of patient, speculative capital, a chip ecosystem that took generations to build, and a research culture that India structurally never invested in.

But that is not the question that matters for investors, or for India’s next chapter. The right question is this: when AI scales globally, who benefits? And the answer to that question looks nothing like the question about Nvidia.

But First, how Does AI Actually Work?

Most people use AI every day without understanding what it costs to run it.

When you type a question into ChatGPT, something happens before the answer appears. Your query travels to a data centre, a warehouse-sized facility filled with thousands of specialised chips called GPUs. Those GPUs process your request at enormous speed, drawing anywhere between 20 to 100 megawatts of power just to keep the lights on. The response comes back in seconds. The infrastructure behind it has been running continuously, at massive cost, for years.

This is the AI value chain that nobody talks about:

The Model → built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. Requires years of research, billions in funding, and cutting-edge chip access. This is the layer India doesn’t have.

The Chips → designed by Nvidia, AMD, Intel. Fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. Decades of investment, impossible to replicate quickly. This is the layer India is beginning to build but is years away from competing in.

The Compute Infrastructure → the data centres that house those chips. Requires land, power, cooling systems, fibre connectivity, and engineering at scale. This is the layer that needs to be built everywhere AI is consumed. And this is where India comes in because consumption is exploding in India.

The Power Grid → data centres are among the most power-hungry facilities ever built. A single large data centre consumes as much electricity as a small city. Someone has to generate that power, build the transmission lines, and keep it running 24/7.

The Connectivity Layer → fibre optic cables, undersea cable landing stations, network infrastructure. Every query, every model call, every API request travels through physical cable. Someone lays it. Someone owns it.

The Enterprise Integration Layer → once AI models exist, businesses need help deploying them. Customising them. Training them on proprietary data. Maintaining them. This is where Indian IT’s existing capabilities find a new role — not as cheap labour, but as AI integration specialists.

Now look at that chain again.

India cannot compete at layers one and two today. Not meaningfully, not yet. But layers three, four, five, and six? That is where ₹27 lakh crore is already being committed. That is where Adani, Ambani, and a dozen infrastructure conglomerates are racing to build. That is where the government’s ₹76,000 crore India Semiconductor Mission is laying the foundation. That is where India’s existing engineering talent finds a second act, not running someone else’s code, but building the physical and digital backbone that every AI model in the world will eventually run on.

India isn’t the GPU. India is literally the grid. Think of it this way. During the California gold rush in the 1840s, the people who got rich weren’t always the miners. They were the ones selling shovels, denim, and food to the miners. The miners were famous. The shovel makers were wealthy. India is not going to be the gold. India is building the mine.

The data centres. The power infrastructure. The fibre networks. The semiconductor packaging. The enterprise software integrations. Every AI model running anywhere in the world will eventually need to run on or run through infrastructure that Indian companies are now positioned to build and own. It is a structurally more durable position- lower speculation risk, tangible assets, government tailwind, and a domestic demand curve that is only beginning.

The Investor Problem: How do you invest in the mine now?

Here is where it gets interesting and slightly complicated. These companies don’t announce themselves as AI stocks. They are listed as power companies. Infrastructure firms. Cable and fibre businesses. Data centre operators. Engineering conglomerates. Finding the ones that are genuinely positioned at the centre of India’s AI infrastructure buildout rather than on its periphery requires knowing exactly where to look.

That’s the research problem we’ve been working on.

We built the Bharat AI Tracker to map exactly this. Not the hype stocks. Not the companies that added “AI” to their investor presentations. The backbone of the companies building the physical and digital infrastructure that India’s AI decade will run on.

If the thesis in this newsletter makes sense to you, that’s where we’ve put it to work: Bharat Tech Infra Tracker

The Larger Point

India didn’t lose the AI race. It was never running the race that Silicon Valley designed. The IT services model is being disrupted, that is real, and the industry will be smaller and different in ten years. But the infrastructure opportunity that AI has created for India is arguably larger, more tangible, and more investable than anything the services era produced. The FII pulling out money sees India as a country without breakthrough technology. They may be looking at the wrong thing. The grid doesn’t make headlines. But it never goes out of business.

In the first week of April 2025, the Sensex lost over 3,900 points in a single session. The Nifty fell 5% at open. Nearly ₹8.5 lakh crore in market capitalisation was erased before lunch. The trigger was Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, a single policy announcement that sent global markets into simultaneous freefall. In that moment, every instinct an investor has screams the same thing: get out.

But the data tells a different story. Across every crash in the last 35 years, the investors who got out paid a price that compounded quietly for years. The ones who stayed, or better, invested more, eventually had numbers they could not easily explain to the people who had sold.

Every generation of investors faces at least one moment that feels like total annihilation. A crash so fast, so deep, and so globally synchronized that selling feels like the only rational response. It never is. Here is the evidence.

The Crashes, The Panic, and The Returns That Followed

The table below covers every major crash in living Indian market memory. What stands out is not just how deep each fall was, but how consistently the recovery followed.

A few of these numbers are worth sitting with.

The 2008 crash was -55%. It took 5 years to fully recover. But an investor who bought at the trough earned 76% in the very next year. The COVID crash was -29% in just 8 weeks, one of the fastest crashes in history. The recovery took 8 months. And an investor who bought into the Nifty at the peak of the Dotcom bubble in 2000, widely considered the worst possible time to invest, still earned 12% annualised over the following 25 years and grew their investment 18.8 times.

Every crash in this table looked permanent at the time. None of them were.

What Every Crash Has in Common

Each crash arrives with a story that explains why this one is different, why the recovery will not come, or will take so long it does not matter. The 2008 story was that the entire global financial system had broken beyond repair. The 2020 story was that consumer demand would never recover. The 2025 story is that globalisation is permanently reversing.

These stories feel completely true in the moment. They have never been correct in their permanence.

The most recent example makes this unusually clear. On April 2, 2025, Trump announced double digit tariffs on imports from a host of countries. The Sensex dropped 4,000 points. The Nifty fell below 21,750. By April 7, nearly ₹14.2 lakh crore of investor wealth had been wiped out in a single session. Brokerages estimate that approximately 2 million retail investors redeemed during this window, shifting money into gold and fixed income.

Then, on April 15, the US announced a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries. Markets recovered to pre-announcement levels within days. Investors who stayed through those two weeks saw gains of 19.3% in the Sensex and 18.7% in the Nifty by December 31, 2025.

The investors who exited locked in real losses. The investors who held recovered fully and then some.

This was a policy shock, which made it more reversible than a credit crisis or a pandemic. But the structure of the moment was identical to every crash before it: fear, a compelling narrative, and a recovery that arrived before the narrative changed.

The Psychology of Annihilation

Understanding why selling feels rational during a crash does not require dismissing the feeling. It requires understanding exactly where it comes from. There are four well-documented biases at work.

Loss aversion. Losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good. This is one of the most replicated findings in behavioural finance. A 10% loss genuinely hurts more than a 10% gain feels good. When losses are large and rapid, the psychological pain becomes so disproportionate to the financial reality that selling feels almost involuntary.

Availability heuristic. The most recent, most vivid information dominates our decision-making. During a crash, every headline, every alert, every conversation confirms the fear. Historical recovery data exists but it is abstract and distant. The crash is immediate and visceral. The brain naturally weighs the vivid present over the statistical past.

Herd behaviour. When everyone around you is selling, selling feels like the rational response. The social proof of mass exits creates a cascade where each person’s decision to sell signals to the next that selling is correct, independent of any fundamental analysis.

Narrative fallacy. Every crash gets a story. The story is always compelling, always specific, and always framed as something unprecedented. The stories are usually partly true. What they consistently get wrong is the assumption of permanence.

Recognising these biases does not make them disappear. But naming them in the moment creates just enough distance to ask a better question before acting.

The Real Cost of Leaving

The financial cost of exiting during a crash is not just the loss you lock in. It is also the recovery you miss.

Consider a $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 held untouched from 2003 to 2022. It grows to $64,844. Now consider an investor who tries to time the market and misses just the 10 best trading days over those 20 years. Their portfolio falls to $29,708, less than half. Miss the 60 best days and the $10,000 is worth $4,205 in nominal terms, a loss over two decades of investing.

The reason this matters is when those best days occur. Six of the seven best trading days in the last 20 years happened immediately after the worst days. The investor who exits during a crash to avoid further losses does not just miss the bottom. They almost always miss the single-day recoveries that follow directly after the worst sessions, because those are the days they are sitting in cash waiting for clarity.

The DALBAR study, which has tracked actual investor returns against index returns for over 30 years, puts a precise number on this. The average US stock fund investor earned 3.7% annually over 30 years. The S&P 500 returned 11.1% annually over the same period. That 7.4 percentage point gap, compounded over three decades, was driven almost entirely by emotional entry and exit decisions. The market did not take that money. Behaviour did.

The Framework: Three Questions Before You Decide

Before making any portfolio decision during a crash, three questions are worth asking honestly.

Has my financial situation changed, or has the market’s story changed?

If your income is intact, your time horizon is unchanged, and your goals are the same, then the only thing that has changed is the price at which you can buy the same assets. A crash means those assets are cheaper than they were six months ago. If nothing about your life has changed, the case for changing your allocation needs to be stronger than a falling index.

If I sell today, what is my re-entry plan?

This question matters more than the sell decision itself. Most investors who exit during crashes plan to re-enter when things settle down. But things settle down after prices have already recovered, which means they sell at a low and buy back at a high. If you cannot articulate a specific, rules-based trigger for re-entry before you sell, the decision is not a strategy. It is a reaction.

Can I hold this investment for at least five years?

Every five-year holding period on the Nifty 50 beginning from a crash trough has delivered positive returns. SIPs started during or just before the 2008 crash delivered 23% CAGR over five years and 21% CAGR over ten years. The base rate for long-term investors staying invested through crashes is consistently positive. The base rate for investors timing their exits and re-entries is consistently negative.

A note on SIPs during crashes. A systematic investment plan does not require any particular courage during a downturn because it removes the decision entirely. Every month, regardless of price, units are purchased. During a crash, the same monthly amount buys more units than it did six months earlier. For a long-term SIP investor, a falling market is not a risk to be managed. It is the mechanism through which future returns are built.

The Investor Who Stayed: A Worked Example

Investor A put ₹10 lakh into a Nifty index fund in January 2008, right at the peak, just before the worst crash in Indian market history. By November 2008, the portfolio was worth approximately ₹4.5 lakh. A 55% loss on paper. In December 2008, Investor A sold and locked in that loss.

Investor B held. In 2009, the Nifty returned 76%. By 2013, the index had fully recovered its 2008 peak. By 2018, ten years after the worst possible entry point, the original ₹10 lakh had grown to approximately ₹32-35 lakh.

Investor A locked in a 55% loss. Investor B tripled their money from a peak entry.

The only difference between them was not skill, information, or intelligence. It was a single decision made in December 2008, one of the most psychologically difficult months in a generation of Indian investing.

What To Watch. What To Ignore.

Not all information is useful during a crash. Some of it actively works against good decision-making.

Ignore: daily Sensex and Nifty levels during high-volatility periods, FII daily flow data (it is noisy and not directional), headline narratives about why this crash is different, and any market prediction circulating on WhatsApp.

Watch: India’s domestic consumption data, which tells you whether the real economy is impaired or just the price of its assets. The RBI’s reserve position and policy response. Corporate earnings trajectory, specifically whether fundamentals are actually deteriorating or whether only prices have moved. And the GIFT Nifty for opening direction on key sessions.

Annihilation Is the Setup

The feeling of total annihilation is part of the design. Markets create exactly the conditions in which selling feels like the only intelligent response, and in doing so, they transfer wealth from those who act on that feeling to those who do not. The data across 35 years of Indian market history, across every crash this generation has lived through, is not ambiguous. Long-term investors who stayed invested came out ahead. The ones who waited for clarity bought back at higher prices. The ones who never came back paid the highest price of all. Annihilation is the setup. Staying invested is the edge.

Same market. Completely different reactions.

Two numbers came out this week that sit right next to each other and tell you everything about where investors go wrong.

Mutual fund cash levels dropped 12% in March to Rs 1.86 lakh crore, a 16-month low. Out of 49 AMCs, 29 actively deployed cash into equities during the correction. HDFC MF, SBI MF, Quant, PPFAS, Aditya Birla, BOI MF. Some of the biggest names looked at the same falling market everyone else saw and bought.

Meanwhile, NSE lost a record 35 lakh active investor accounts in FY26. Zerodha down 10 lakh. Angel One down 8 lakh. Upstox down 7.6 lakh. Retail investors on direct platforms saw that same market and walked away.

Same uncertainty. Same headlines. Two completely opposite moves.

It is not about being smarter. It is about having a process.

Professional fund managers are not sitting on a crystal ball. Nobody has one. What they have is something far more valuable and much less glamorous. They have structure.

When markets fell through FY26, valuations looked stretched, FIIs were selling, crude was rising, and brokerages were cutting targets, the environment genuinely felt uncertain. That kind of backdrop makes anyone want to step back.

35 lakh investors did.

29 AMCs did the opposite. They had built up cash reserves for exactly this moment. When prices fell, they put Rs 24,000 crore to work in equities over one month. Not because they called the bottom perfectly. Because their process said a market at these levels offered better expected returns than cash over their time horizon.

One group reacted to the moment. The other group followed their system. That is the difference.

Mutual funds make discipline easier.

For long-term investors, mutual funds have always been one of the best ways to stay invested through full market cycles. They are not perfect. But they solve the hardest part of investing, which is not picking the right scheme. It is staying allocated when staying allocated feels wrong.

The average retail investor underperforms mutual funds by 3-4% annually, not because they pick bad funds, but because they make emotional decisions at emotional moments. They pause when markets fall. They chase when markets rise. They change strategy when they should be staying the course.

Mutual funds reduce that burden. SIPs invest whether you feel good about markets or not. Rebalancing happens on rules, not reactions. The structure keeps you in the game through the periods when most people want out.

Green Portfolio’s Wealth Roadmap series.

The Wealth Roadmap series takes mutual fund investing one step further. It is not a list of schemes. It is a curated basket built around specific milestones.

Every fund in the basket has a defined role. Growth funds for capital appreciation. Debt funds for stability. Hybrids for balance. International funds for diversification. The selection goes deeper than standard screening. We look at consistency through cycles, manager track records in down markets, portfolio construction during stress periods, and alignment with the milestone timeline.

The basket rebalances on predefined triggers, not market noise. When equity allocations drift too high after a rally, we trim. When they fall too low after a correction, we add. The process stays consistent even when sentiment does not.

Right now, with AMCs deploying cash at 16-month lows, the case for structured mutual fund exposure feels stronger than it has in years.

Investing well means staying in when others lose conviction.

The gap between institutions buying in March and retail investors leaving in FY26 was never about information. Both saw the same research. The gap was process. One side had it. The other side was reacting live.

Long-term wealth goes to the investor who can keep capital deployed while others pause. Mutual fund baskets like the Wealth Roadmap series exist for exactly that reason. Not to predict markets. To keep you positioned for them.

That is the entire point.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

The value of convenience has never mattered more than it does today. Everything from your dinner to your household repairs to your groceries is being handled by a ‘contractor’. And that single word is doing an enormous amount of legal and financial heavy lifting for the platforms that employ them. Labelling gig workers as contractors, rather than employees, is what allows these platforms to keep their cost structures intact, their margins defensible, and their path to profitability credible. That assumption is now showing signs of cracking. And when it breaks, it will not show up as a headline. It will show up as a line item in a quarterly result.

Across India, more than 8 million gig workers are contracted on a daily basis, squeezing in as many deliveries and service calls as possible to earn more. They are the backbone of an industry built on borrowed VC money and the promise of infinite scale.

The Platforms That Sell You Convenience

Post-pandemic, Indians have gotten used to paying for convenience. These organized gig platforms have taken that to a level not seen before. You know most of them, but their business models are not all the same:

• Pronto: On-demand household help, aiming to organise the highly decentralised domestic help market. Currently unlisted, operating in select metros and growing fast.

• Snabbit: Home services and hyperlocal delivery, positioned on worker quality and reliability over pure speed. Unlisted.

• Urban Company (UC): Home services marketplace covering beauty, repairs, and cleaning. Has deliberately moved toward a partner and franchise model rather than pure gig. Unlisted, but the most instructive business model in the sector.

• Zomato and Swiggy: The listed anchors. High delivery volumes, thin margins, and the most exposed to any structural shift in worker classification.

The Assumption Beneath Every Delivery

Each gig worker on these platforms is paid on a per-gig basis. The cost structure is built on one foundational idea: labour is variable, not fixed.

• A delivery partner costs the platform roughly ₹60–80 per delivery in effective payout including incentives, with no obligation for PF, ESI, gratuity, paid leave, or minimum wage protection

• When order volumes fall, labour costs fall automatically. The platform carries no fixed payroll obligation

• Contribution margins, EBITDA paths, and investor projections all assume this structure holds

If workers become employees, the entire stack changes:

• PF contribution: 12% of wages (employer share)

• ESI: 3.25% of wages

• Gratuity accrual after 5 years

• Paid leave entitlement

• Potential minimum wage floor application

Conservative estimates suggest employment classification could raise effective per-delivery labour costs by 25–40%. At Swiggy and Zomato’s current delivery volumes (hundreds of millions of orders per quarter) this is not a rounding error. It is a structural margin shift.

Why This Is Being Tested Now

This is not one incoming policy shock. It is three pressures arriving simultaneously.

1. Policy direction
The Code on Social Security 2020 includes provisions for gig and platform workers. Rajasthan has passed its own gig worker protection law, though implementation is still pending. Karnataka attempted legislation and partially retreated. The direction of travel is clear even if the timeline is not. This is a 2-3 year risk, not a next-quarter one. But platforms that are still building as if this pressure does not exist are making a bet that is getting harder to justify.

2. Platform competition driving up worker costs
With Pronto, Snabbit, Zepto, Porter, and others competing for the same pool of delivery and service workers, effective worker earnings are rising anyway through incentives, bonuses, and retention schemes. Formalisation may end up formalising costs that are already climbing informally.

3. Worker supply tightening
As awareness of gig work’s limitations grows among workers, acquisition and retention costs are rising. The era of abundant, cheap gig labour willing to work for minimal incentives is ending.

What This Means for Zomato and Swiggy Investors

This is where the story hits the listed markets directly.

• Both platforms’ path to sustained profitability relies on contribution margins holding as order volumes grow — the operating leverage story

• If labour costs rise 25–40% through formalisation, that operating leverage story changes materially

• The market is not pricing this risk explicitly yet — there is no visible formalisation risk discount in how either stock trades

• Watch the delivery cost per order in quarterly results. That single line is the clearest barometer of whether compliance costs and worker classification pressures are already feeding through

The Outlier: Urban Company

Urban Company offers the most honest answer to formalisation in the sector, and it has been building toward it for years.

• UC moved deliberately toward a partner model: workers invest in their own tools and kit, complete UC’s training and certification, and operate more like franchisees than employees

• UC partners carry higher upfront investment, more ownership of their earnings, and more skin in the game

• The tradeoff is real: worker acquisition is slower and more expensive. But churn is lower, service quality is higher, and the formalisation question looks structurally different because the relationship is already closer to a business partnership than a contractor arrangement

The question for the broader sector is whether UC’s model becomes the direction everyone else is forced to move toward — willingly or not.

Who Is Most Exposed

Most vulnerable to formalisation cost risk:

• Zomato and Swiggy: high volume, thin margins, pure delivery model

• Any new platform competing on price rather than worker quality

Better positioned:

• Urban Company: partner model already absorbs the regulatory direction

• Pronto and Snabbit: if their quality-first, higher-earning worker model is genuine, they may be structurally closer to what survives regulation

The sector-level trigger to watch:
If one major platform moves to voluntarily offer PF or ESI to workers as a competitive differentiator, it forces every other platform’s hand — and reprices the entire group.

The Margin Reckoning

The gig economy is not going away. But it will be repriced — gradually, unevenly, and mostly invisibly — through a combination of policy pressure, worker competition, and the quiet cost creep that comes when you build a business on labour that was always cheaper than it should have been. The platforms that have already started absorbing that repricing will come out the other side with defensible models. The ones still betting on the old cost structure will face a margin reckoning. The question for every investor watching Zomato’s quarterly result is simple: is the delivery cost per order going up, and why? The answer, increasingly, is the same: because the real cost of a 10-minute delivery was never ₹70.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

But between last night and Monday morning, the US markets will have opened and closed, crude will have moved, the rupee will have traded, and the GIFT Nifty will have priced in whatever the world decided to do while India was on holiday. By the time the markets reopen, your portfolio will have a view on all of it. Whether you were paying attention or not. Market holidays are not pauses. They are windows where information accumulates without giving you a chance to react. Here is how to use that to your advantage.

What Actually Moves When the Markets Close

The global nature of the markets, along with the various time zones that see trading distributed across the world, actually plays a big role in the behaviour of the Indian stock markets, even after trading hours. For FIIs, the trading never stops, given the interconnectedness of largecap companies, indices and currencies with the global markets. Here is what makes a difference:

• Trading continues through SGX/GIFT Nifty: In order to make the markets accessible to global investors, the SGX Nifty, listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, has offered extended trading hours for FIIs. Now rebranded as the GIFT Nifty and relocated to India, this index allows FIIs to take positions outside market hours on the Indian stock market.

  

• US and European markets: Global indices, including the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, see their own volatilities during their trading hours, which eventually affects the Indian markets. If the markets react to any geopolitical or economic threat, there is a high probability that this could spillover to the Nifty when it opens. Typically, a 1% fall on the S&P has shown a corresponding 0.4-0.7% fall on the Nifty on early trades.

  

• Currency: The Rupee also continues to trade in the global markets after the Indian stock markets close for the day. Sharp movements during holidays on the BSE/NSE can affect equity prices, especially IT and oil linked stocks, when they open the next day.

  

• Crude Oil: Brent Crude Futures trade throughout the day. If any news or rumour affects market sentiments, crude oil’s volatility can affect OMCs and aviation stocks immensely, spilling over to the next day.

  

Given how quickly news flows through online mediums, an unwelcome development in one part of the world can cause a spillover effect across global markets within hours, even though this could be a temporary phenomenon. The challenge arises when retail investors reacting to sentiment mistake these short term market changes and let greed, fear or panic take over, even though things could return to normal later that day.

The Gap Open Problem

When the markets open for trading, there are times when stocks or indices open significantly higher or lower than their previous close, even if there are no trades in between. This happens as a reaction to global cues, with the GIFT Nifty reacting first to the news, especially since the Western indices remain active when India’s markets close down. For traders, this gap open matters as it can widen their stop losses, especially at times when you do not immediately know why the markets are behaving the way they are. Usually, these open gaps come in two forms:

Filled gaps, when the price moves back toward the previous close during the day — mostly due to the markets reacting to sentiments rather than genuine fundamental changes. The gap opened, but by end of day, prices gravitated back toward where they started.

Unfilled gaps, when the price stays at a new level or extends further — a direct consequence of a genuine macro shift, like when the Sensex crashed 1,800 points on March 23-24 due to escalating tensions in the Middle East. The fundamental reason was real, so the gap held.

Many times, this gap is caused due to sentiments, but this is usually the least reliable period to make trading decisions. Unfortunately, the sudden change in prices sometimes causes panic reactions in retail investors, affecting their trading decisions. Institutional investors, on the other hand, usually do not take these gaps that seriously — instead, they use it to adjust their hedges before making their bets.

How to Use the Holiday Window

Though initial gaps caused due to sentiments remain a temporary phenomenon, a savvy investor can use it to their advantage, if you keep your eyes and ears open for developments that could affect your holdings. Here is what you need to do:

Before the holiday closes:

• Check your open positions for any earnings announcements, macro data, or geopolitical events scheduled during the holiday window that could move your holdings

• If you have a stop-loss order active, understand that gap opens can breach stop-loss levels and execute at much worse prices than intended — consider whether your stop is still appropriate

• For options holders: time decay (theta) still runs over holidays. A two-day holiday can meaningfully erode the value of short-dated options even if the underlying does not move

During the holiday:

• Track GIFT Nifty as an early signal of opening direction

• Watch US market close and any overnight macro data (US CPI, Fed minutes, etc.)

• Note crude, DXY, and any major FII-relevant news

Before the open:

• Check GIFT Nifty at 9:00 AM for the gap signal

• Do not place market orders at open — use limit orders

• Wait 15 minutes before making any new position decisions

The Stocks Most Affected by Holiday Gaps

Not all stocks face the same challenge with holiday gaps. Some, which are directly exposed to the international markets, have a direct bearing on the markets. Some stocks are much more affected than others:

• IT stocks (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL): Highly correlated with Nasdaq. A Nasdaq move of 1%+ during a holiday almost always moves these at open

• Oil and gas (Reliance, ONGC, OMCs): Brent crude price movements can affect these stocks, with holiday gaps making them worse

• Aviation (IndiGo): Both crude and currency sensitive — double exposure during long holiday windows

• Metal stocks (Tata Steel, Hindalco, JSW): Linked to LME metal prices and China commodity demand signals, both of which move during Indian holidays

• Least affected: Domestic consumption names (consumer staples, utilities, telecom) with limited global linkage. These gap less and fill gaps faster.

The Holiday Gap: A Reason to Pay Attention

The markets will be closed on Tuesday, March 31 due to Mahavir Jayanti, and the next holiday is scheduled for Friday, April 3 due to Good Friday. The latest holiday gap between Friday, March 27 and Monday, March 30, saw the Nifty and Sensex fall by 270 and 1,000 points respectively, as the weakening Rupee and rising Brent crude prices impacted the markets during the weekend.

These ongoing developments are expected to impact forthcoming holiday gaps as well. As an investor, opening gaps can indicate market direction, but they do not paint the entire picture. Letting panic or greed drive your reaction to a gap open is usually the worst decision you can make in that moment. A market holiday is not a reason to stop paying attention. It is a reason to pay a different kind of attention — to the signals that will determine where your portfolio opens the next morning. The investors who get blindsided by gap opens are not unlucky. They just assumed the world paused when the NSE did. It did not.

The Rupee has quietly weakened to ₹93 to a dollar. In 2011, it was ₹45. That is a 48% depreciation over 15 years, even as the economy grew five times over. And yet, for most Indian households, it has barely registered. No single moment of shock, no obvious change in daily life. That is exactly what makes it worth understanding. Because the rupee’s slide is not invisible. It is showing up in your EMI timeline, your grocery bill, your travel budget, and your investment portfolio. You just have not been told where to look.

What is Actually Happening Right Now (Without you noticing)

The Rupee has depreciated to around ₹93 against the dollar in March 2026. This comes at a time when the Middle East war led oil import disruption has strengthened the dollar globally, making imports dearer for all.

But for India, this hasn’t been a one-off situation- the Dollar has strengthened almost 9% in the last one year. Throughout 2025, FIIs have been liquidating their domestic investments, directly impacting the steady decline in the Rupees strength against the dollar.

Though this has been going on for quite some time now, the RBI hasn’t been too concerned, with just a few interventions aimed to stabilizing the Rupee to arrest volatility.

Even though almost 86% of our imports are invoiced in dollars, India’s forex reserves remain adequate enough to arrest any extreme price shocks, a meaningful buffer that protects you from unrestrained price rise.

India’s forex reserves have been our most handy tool, strengthened by consistent inflow of remittances from abroad- that gives us about $709 billion, about the size of the entire economies of Ireland or Sweden.

Currently, the Rupee has depreciated beyond the ₹90 mark, crossing the sentimental mark that the government would generally defend more aggressively. Given the current scenario in West Asia, the RBI hasn’t announced any further interventions to defend the Rupee’s value.This signals the RBI’s wait and watch policy that could change once further clarity is achieved.

Why the RBI May Be Fine With This

The rupee crossing ₹90 is not a failure of policy. It may be the policy. The RBI has the firepower to defend the rupee more aggressively — it has $709 billion in forex reserves to prove it. The fact that it has chosen not to is a signal worth reading carefully. A gradually weaker rupee serves several objectives at once, and the RBI knows it.

• Export competitiveness: A weaker rupee makes Indian goods cheaper in dollar terms. With global trade disruption creating new sourcing opportunities for India (China+1, supply chain shifts), the timing of a slightly weaker rupee offers textiles, pharma, engineering goods, and IT exporters an opportunity to get richer valuations.

• Current account management: A weaker rupee discourages unnecessary imports, helping compress the current account deficit without requiring direct import restrictions.

• Real effective exchange rate: India’s REER (Real Effective Exchange Rate) that measures the Rupee’s performance against a basket of global currencies, adjusted for inflation, has historically been overvalued. If the nominal depreciation is lower than its peers this could be a positive sign, even as the nominal exchange rate stays the same.

• Dollar reserve conservation: By allowing gradual depreciation instead of aggressive defence, the RBI preserves reserves for when they are genuinely needed — a large sudden shock, not a slow grind

Over the years, the RBI has been keeping a watch on the Rupee, while ensuring it has control over the market in uncertain conditions like this. For now, the primary objective is within reach, allowing the RBI room to fight the right battles.

How could this affect you?

Though you may not immediately notice it, a weaker Rupee affects your expenses and budgets in more ways than you think.

The EMI Connection

When the Rupee rises, so do your EMIs, eventually. When the Rupee weakens, it takes more to buy the same barrel of oil, immediately rising transportation costs, resulting in higher prices for everything from vegetables to online deliveries.

This inflation forces the RBI to increase the Repo rate ( at which it lends to banks), eventually passing on this cost to your home, car or personal loan EMI. This could mean longer loan tenures, with each 25 basis points (bps) rate cuts increasing the EMIs by about ₹1200-1500 per month for a Rs. 50 lakh loan.

Higher travel, education costs

If your son is studying abroad, the devalued Rupee could mean shelling out more for the same amount of dollars. A $50,000 loan sanctioned at ₹83 will now require about ₹5 lakh more to repay for the same amount of dollars.s

If you’re just getting ready to go abroad, this could mean additional costs for the same trip, scuttling your budget.

The inflation tax

There are certain invisible taxes attributed to the rising rupee as well. India currently imports most of its edible oils, electronic components and fertilizers, all of which become expensive with a weaker rupee. Some companies or government PSUs eat the losses, but not always. This eventually results in sustained inflation over a longer period, with your grocery bill, your gadget upgrade or your kitchen appliance cost rising over 6-12 months.

Who gets hurt the most, who benefits the most

Though inflation and rising demand naturally devalue the Rupee, global geopolitical tensions can accelerate these challenges, which can hurt some, while benefitting others.

Those who benefit:

• IT exporters (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL): every 1% rupee depreciation adds approximately 40–50 bps to operating margins, before hedging

• Pharma exporters: similar dollar-revenue, rupee-cost structure

• Textile and leather exporters: direct price competitiveness gain

• Engineering goods exporters with dollar contracts.

Those who lose:

• Oil marketing companies (IOCL, BPCL, HPCL): import crude in dollars, sell in regulated rupee prices — margin squeeze unless prices are raised

• Aviation (IndiGo, Air India): dollar-denominated aircraft leases and fuel

• Corporates with unhedged dollar debt

• Import-dependent manufacturers: electronics assembly, specialty chemicals

What to Watch

Even though the West Asian war shows no sign of slowing, other factors could affect the Rupee’s trajectory in the near future.

• If India’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) stays above 4.5%, there could be lesser room for the Rupee to strengthen, dimming hopes for cheaper EMIs.

• FIIs pulled out a record ₹1.58 lakh crore (approximately $18 billion) from Indian equities across the full calendar year 2025, the largest annual exit ever recorded, surpassing even the previous record of ₹1.21 lakh crore set in 2022.

• If the US Dollar Index (DXY) softens, this could stablise the Rupee further, without the RBI needing to make any further interventions.

• Even after the war, if crude stabilizes below $95, this could help tilt the scales in the Rupee’s favour.

The crisis that has to be managed

The rupee at ₹93 is not a rupee in crisis. It is a rupee being managed through a difficult global moment by a central bank that is picking its battles carefully. The panic in the headlines is overdone. But the consequences on your EMI timeline, your import bill, your travel costs, your portfolio’s sector exposure are real and worth tracking. The difference between an investor who understands this and one who does not is not whether they worry about the rupee. It is whether they know which rupee story to actually worry about.

We want to step back from the research format for this edition and talk directly.

Over the last few weeks, we have been publishing pieces on portfolio clutter, vague goals, SIP pauses, and behavioural mistakes. The response has been consistent. Readers recognising themselves in the case studies. Investors forwarding editions to friends with “this is literally my portfolio” in the message.

That pattern is not a coincidence. It is the exact conversation that led us to build what I am about to tell you about.

The Conversation That Kept Repeating

For years, the most common question Green Portfolio gets from retail investors is not “which fund should I buy.”

It is “am I on track?”

Not on track relative to a benchmark. On track relative to their own life. Their own number. The corpus they are quietly building toward without ever having written it down or built a structure around it.

The second most common question is a variation of the same problem. “I have SIPs running everywhere. I do not know what they are building. How do I fix this?”

We answered these questions one investor at a time, in calls, in consultations, in emails. And at some point it became obvious that the answer needed a product, not a conversation.

What We Built

The Wealth Roadmap is a curated basket of mutual funds built around a specific milestone.

You pick the number. Rs 25 Lakh. Rs 1 Crore. Rs 5 Crore. We build the portfolio structure designed to reach it. We select the funds, monitor performance, and rebalance when the process calls for it. Your money stays in your own account, under your own name. We handle everything in between.

Three milestones. Each one built differently. Because the portfolio that gets you to Rs 25 Lakh is not the same portfolio that protects and grows Rs 5 Crore. The fund selection, the risk posture, and the discipline required are all different at each stage.

This is not a fund recommendation service. It is not a generic SIP plan. It is a milestone-matched portfolio structure managed by the same research process that Green Portfolio applies to over Rs 1,000 Crore in AUM across 65,000 investors.

Why We Are Doing This at 99% Off

We are opening The Wealth Roadmap to the first 100 subscribers at 99% off the full subscription price.

The honest reason is this. We want the first cohort to be investors who are genuinely building toward something, not people who found a deal. Four editions into this newsletter series, the readers still here are not casual. They read carefully. They forwarded these pieces. They checked their own portfolios against the frameworks we described.

That is exactly who The Wealth Roadmap was built for.

The 99% off is not a promotional tactic. It is a way of saying: if you have been paying attention, this is for you, and we want to remove every reason not to start.

What Happens After the First 100

The early access price closes. Permanently.

There is no waitlist. No second cohort at this price. No “we will bring it back for a limited time.” When the 100 seats are filled, the price moves to its full subscription fee and stays there.

Several seats have already been claimed across the previous editions of this series. The remaining slots are genuinely limited, not as a marketing device, but because we want the first cohort to be a manageable size that we can support well.

One Thing to Do Right Now

If you have been reading this series and thinking “I need to sort out my portfolio properly,” this is the moment that thinking becomes something real.

The Wealth Roadmap is open. The first 100 seats are 99% off. The price closes when they are gone.

Start here: The Wealth Roadmap

If you are not ready yet, that is fine. Keep reading. We will keep publishing. But if the last four editions have been describing a problem you recognise in your own portfolio, the answer is now available at a price that makes waiting the more expensive option.

More coming soon.

Disclaimer: Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing. This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Every year, millions of Indian investors spend hours researching mutual funds.

Star ratings. Expense ratios. Alpha. Sharpe ratios. Rolling returns. Fund manager track records. Category rankings. They go deep, they compare carefully, and they make what feels like an informed decision.

And then they undo most of that work with six behavioural mistakes that no fund selection process can protect against.

The uncomfortable truth is this: for most retail investors, the gap between what their funds returned and what they actually earned is not a fund quality problem. It is a behaviour problem. The fund did its job. The investor did not let it.

Why Fund Selection Is the Wrong Starting Point

Fund selection matters. It is not irrelevant. But it is the fourth or fifth most important variable in long-term wealth creation, not the first.

The most important variables are upstream of fund selection entirely. How long you stay invested. Whether you pause during corrections. Whether you have a target that keeps you from switching. Whether your portfolio has a structure or just a collection of individual bets.

Get those wrong, and the best fund in the category will not save you. Get those right, and a decent fund in the right structure will compound reliably over time.

At Green Portfolio, we call the system that governs these variables the 6-Rule Discipline Protocol. It is not a checklist for picking funds. It is a framework for not undermining the funds you have already picked.

Here is what it covers.

The 6-Rule Discipline Protocol

Rule 1: Start with a milestone, not a market view.

Every investment decision should be anchored to a target amount and a timeline, not to what the market is doing today. The milestone determines fund selection, SIP size, and review frequency. Without it, every market movement becomes a decision trigger it should not be.

Rule 2: Never pause a SIP during a correction.

A falling market is not a reason to stop investing. It is the mathematical best time to continue. The rupee cost averaging benefit of a SIP is most powerful precisely when markets feel worst. Pausing destroys compounding leverage at the moment it is most valuable.

Rule 3: Review once a year. Not once a quarter.

Frequent portfolio reviews produce frequent changes. Frequent changes produce tax drag, exit load costs, and the consistent human tendency to exit at lows and re-enter at highs. An annual review with a structured process is not laziness. It is the discipline to let compounding do its job.

Rule 4: Evaluate underperformance over a full cycle, not a calendar year.

A fund that underperforms for 12 months is not a broken fund. It may be a fund whose style is out of cycle. The decision to exit should be based on process integrity, not recent returns. Most switches made on 12-month underperformance are made at exactly the wrong time.

Rule 5: Hold fewer funds than you think you need.

Four to six funds across genuinely different categories covers most investors at most stages. Beyond that, you are adding overlap, not diversification. Complexity is not sophistication. It is a liability that compounds quietly over years.

Rule 6: Never let a new theme override an existing structure.

Defence is hot. Manufacturing is the next decade. AI-linked funds are gaining traction. Every year produces a new narrative that feels like a compelling reason to add a fund. The question is never whether the theme is real. The question is whether it belongs in your portfolio given your milestone, your timeline, and your existing structure. If the answer requires more than two sentences, the answer is probably no.

The Number

SEBI data consistently shows that the average Indian mutual fund investor significantly underperforms the funds they are invested in. The gap is not explained by fund quality. It is explained by entry and exit behaviour, most of which violates at least two of the six rules above.

The fund is not the problem. The investor is working against the fund.

What to Watch in Your Own Portfolio

Run your own portfolio against the six rules. For each rule, ask a simple yes or no.

Do you have a milestone anchoring your current portfolio? Have you paused any SIP in the last two years? Did your last portfolio review produce more than two fund changes? Have you exited a fund within 18 months of starting it? Do you currently hold more than six funds? Have you added a thematic or sectoral fund in the last year based on a market narrative?

If more than two answers make you uncomfortable, the portfolio has a behaviour problem, not a fund problem.

One Thing to Do This Week

Pick the one rule from the six that you have most consistently violated. Write it down. Treat it as the single constraint to fix before your next review. One rule corrected and held is worth more than six rules understood and ignored.

A Note Before You Go

The 6-Rule Discipline Protocol is not a theoretical framework. It is the behavioural backbone that The Wealth Roadmap is built around.

The milestone-based structure keeps Rule 1 intact by design. The rules-based rebalancing process handles Rules 3 and 4 so you do not have to rely on willpower. The curated basket of four to six funds per milestone handles Rule 5 from the start. The process-triggered review cadence handles Rule 6 every time a new theme starts trending.

The point is not to make discipline harder to maintain. It is to build a structure where discipline is the default, not the effort.

Green Portfolio is opening The Wealth Roadmap to the first 100 subscribers at 99% off the full subscription price.

Full access. The same research, the same process, the same fund selection framework behind Rs 1,000 Crore in AUM and 65,000 investors.

When 100 are gone, this price closes. No waitlist. No exceptions. No second round at this price, ever.

If the six rules above made you realise your portfolio has a behaviour problem worth fixing, this is where you fix it:The Wealth Roadmap

More coming soon.

Disclaimer: Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing. This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

It was a reasonable decision at the time.

The market was falling. The news cycle was loud. Work was uncertain, or expensive, or both. You told yourself it was temporary. Four months, maybe five. Just until things settled.

And then things did settle. You restarted the SIP. You moved on.

What you did not do was calculate what those four months actually cost you. Not just the money you did not invest. The money that money would have made, compounded across the years that followed.

That number is almost always larger than people expect.

The Case Study: Two Investors, One Difference

Consider two investors. Same age, same fund, same monthly SIP of Rs 10,000. Both start in January 2015 with a 15-year horizon.

Investor A never pauses. Every month, without exception, the SIP runs.

Investor B pauses for four months during a market correction in year three. It feels insignificant. Four months out of 180. Less than 3% of the total investment period. She restarts in month five and stays consistent for the remaining twelve years.

At a 12% annualised return, Investor A ends with approximately Rs 49.9 lakh at the end of 15 years.

Investor B ends with approximately Rs 47.1 lakh.

The gap is Rs 2.8 lakh. From four paused months. On a Rs 10,000 SIP.

That is not the missed Rs 40,000 in contributions. That is what Rs 40,000, invested at the right point in the compounding curve, would have grown into over twelve years of uninterrupted growth.

Why the Math Hits Harder Than It Looks

Compounding is not linear. The growth in the final years of a long investment horizon is disproportionately larger than the growth in the early years.

This is the part most investors understand intellectually but do not feel until they see the numbers.

In a 15-year SIP, roughly 60% of your final corpus is built in the last five years. Not because you invest more then, but because the earlier years of contribution have had the longest runway to grow. Every rupee invested in year three has twelve more years to compound. Every rupee you did not invest in year three had that same runway, and it went undeployed.

The four months you paused were not mid-journey months. They were high-leverage months. The cost of pausing in year three is structurally higher than pausing in year twelve, even though the SIP amount is identical.

At Green Portfolio, we call this one of the core principles inside the 6-Rule Discipline Protocol. Consistency is not a virtue in investing. It is a compounding mechanism. The investor who stays invested through the uncomfortable months is not being stubborn. They are protecting the leverage that time gives early contributions.

The Other Cost Nobody Calculates

There is a second cost to the pause that does not show up in any calculator.

When you pause during a market correction, you also miss the recovery.

Markets do not send a calendar invite when they bottom out. The four months you are on the side lines are often the months that do the most work. Missing the ten best trading days in a fifteen-year equity investment can reduce your final corpus by nearly 50%. Those ten days are almost never in a calm market. They are in the middle of the exact conditions that made you pause in the first place.

The pause feels like protection. The math says it is the opposite.

The Number

Missing just the 10 best market days in a 15-year SIP can cut your final corpus by nearly half. Those days almost always fall during periods of peak uncertainty, which are the same periods most investors choose to pause.

One Thing to Do This Week

Check your SIP history for the last three years and note any months where a payment was skipped or paused. Then ask yourself honestly: did you restart because the market improved, or because you had a plan that told you to? If it was the former, the next correction will produce the same pause.

A Note Before You Go

The investors who build real wealth are not the ones who timed the market well during corrections. They are the ones who had a structure that made pausing feel more expensive than staying in.

That structure is what The Wealth Roadmap is built around. A milestone that gives every SIP a destination. A portfolio built to hold through full market cycles. A rebalancing process that is triggered by rules, not by how the market feels on a Tuesday morning.

You do not need to be fearless during corrections. You just need a portfolio that gives you a reason to stay.

We are opening The Wealth Roadmap to the first 100 subscribers at 99% off the full subscription price.

Full access. The same process, the same research, the same fund selection framework that Green Portfolio applies to over Rs 1,000 Crore in AUM across 65,000 investors.

The 100 seats are not a marketing number. Several have already been claimed since the last edition. When they are gone, this price closes permanently. No waitlist. No second round. No exceptions.

If the math in this edition made you uncomfortable about your own SIP history, that discomfort is worth acting on: The Wealth Roadmap

More coming soon.

Disclaimer: Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing. This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Every investor has a goal.

Ask them what it is and you will hear variations of the same answer. Build wealth. Secure the future. Grow my money. Save for retirement.

These sound reasonable. They feel responsible. But they are not goals. They are directions. And investing with a direction instead of a destination is one of the most expensive mistakes a serious investor can make.

The Difference Between a Direction and a Destination

A direction tells you which way to walk. A destination tells you when to stop, how fast to move, and whether you are on track.

“Build long-term wealth” is a direction. It has no number behind it. No timeline. No way to measure whether this month’s SIP is doing its job or not.

“Reach Rs 1 Crore in 9 years” is a destination. It tells you exactly how much to invest monthly. It tells you which funds belong in the portfolio and which do not. It tells you when a down market is a problem and when it is simply noise.

The goal is not a motivational exercise. It is the structural input that every downstream decision depends on.

Without it, your portfolio is a collection of reasonable individual choices that add up to no particular outcome. With it, every decision has a filter. Every market movement has context. Every review has a clear question to answer: am I on track, and if not, what changes?

What Vague Goals Actually Produce

The investor without a milestone does not invest less. They often invest more. More funds, more schemes, more themes, more switches.

Because without a destination, the only feedback mechanism available is comparison. You compare your funds to benchmarks. You compare your returns to your colleague’s. You compare your portfolio to last year’s top performers. And you act on those comparisons, usually at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.

Vague goals do not produce inaction. They produce the wrong action, repeated consistently over years, with genuine conviction.

The outcome is a portfolio that has been actively managed into mediocrity. Not from laziness. From the absence of a number.

Why a Milestone Changes Everything

At Green Portfolio, we call this the Milestone Method. The idea is simple: pick a target amount first, then work backwards to a monthly investment. The number is not aspirational decoration. It is the load-bearing structure of every portfolio decision that follows.

When you have a milestone, a market correction becomes a cheaper entry point rather than a reason to pause. An underperforming fund is evaluated against the portfolio’s destination, not last quarter’s peer rankings. A new fund recommendation either earns its place in the structure or it does not get added.

The milestone does not make investing easier. It makes the right decisions obvious and the wrong ones harder to justify.

Three milestones cover most investors at most stages. Rs 25 Lakh for investors building their first meaningful corpus. Rs 1 Crore for investors with scattered portfolios who need a clean core. Rs 5 Crore for investors with significant capital who need structure and protection in equal measure. Each one requires a different portfolio posture, a different fund selection logic, and a different discipline set.

They are not arbitrary numbers. They are the points at which wealth changes what it can do for you.

The Number

Research on goal-setting in financial behaviour consistently shows that specific, written financial goals produce materially better outcomes than general intentions. Investors with a defined target amount are significantly less likely to pause SIPs during market corrections, the single most costly behaviour in long-term investing.

The number is not just motivational. It is protective.

One Thing to Do This Week

Write down the one number your portfolio is currently building toward. Not a range. Not “around Rs 50 Lakh or so.” One specific number, with a year attached. If you cannot write it down in under 30 seconds, your portfolio does not have a destination yet.

A Note Before You Go

The investors who reach meaningful milestones are not the ones who picked the best funds. They are the ones who started with a number and built everything around it.

That is the entire premise behind The Wealth Roadmap. You pick the milestone, Rs 25 Lakh, Rs 1 Crore, or Rs 5 Crore. We build the portfolio structure, select the funds, monitor the drift, and rebalance when the process calls for it. Every rupee in the portfolio has a destination. That is what makes it a portfolio rather than a collection.

We are opening Green Portfolio Roadmaps to the first 100 subscribers at 99% off the full subscription price.

Full access. Not a trial. Not a limited version. The same structure, the same process, the same research that manages over Rs 1,000 Crore in AUM across 65,000 investors.

The reason we are doing this at 99% off is straightforward. We want the first cohort to be investors who are building toward something real, not people who clicked on a discount. If this edition made you think about the number behind your own portfolio, you are exactly who this is for.

There are 100 seats. When they are gone, this price does not come back. No waitlist. No exceptions. No second round.

If you have been meaning to look at this properly, now is the time: Portfolios

More coming soon.

Disclaimer: Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing. This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

You have SIPs running.

Maybe three. Maybe seven. Maybe more than you can name off the top of your head right now.

Each one started with a reason. A market dip that felt like the right entry point. A fund your colleague mentioned at lunch. A recommendation that made sense in the moment. A sectoral theme that felt inevitable.

Over time, the list grew. And somewhere along the way, the original question got buried: what is all of this actually building toward?

The Portfolio That Looked Serious on Paper

Consider a salaried professional. Eight years of investing. Fourteen mutual funds across large-cap, mid-cap, flexi-cap, sectoral, and hybrid categories. A monthly SIP habit that never broke.

On the surface, this looks like discipline. It looks like diversification.

A closer review told a different story.

Over 60% of the holdings overlapped. The same stocks appearing across six different schemes. The same market movement dragging everything down at once. The portfolio was not diversified. It was duplicated, running the same underlying bet through fourteen different expense ratios.

The returns after eight years of consistent investing? Broadly in line with a simple index fund. Despite paying active management fees on fourteen separate schemes. Despite hours spent making switches, adding funds, and second-guessing allocations.

This is not a story about one careless investor. It is a pattern. Most equity mutual funds already hold between 40 and 70 stocks each, with 55 to 70% overlap in top holdings across popular fund categories in India. Once you hold more than four or five funds in the same broad category, the diversification benefit flattens. What keeps growing is complexity, and the anxiety that comes with it.

Why This Keeps Happening

The fourteen-fund portfolio did not happen because the investor was careless. It happened because there was no milestone anchoring the decisions.

Without a target amount, every correction becomes a reason to add a safer fund. Every top performer becomes a reason to switch. Every new theme becomes a reason to add one more scheme. The portfolio does not grow toward anything. It just grows.

And the investor ends up with a collection of funds rather than a portfolio. A collection is a set of individual decisions made over time, each reasonable in isolation. A portfolio is a structure built to reach a specific destination. Most investors in India have the former. Very few have built the latter.

The Mechanism Behind the Mess

At Green Portfolio, we call this the Milestone Method. The idea is straightforward: pick the number first, then work backwards to build a portfolio sized, structured, and disciplined enough to reach it.

The milestone does something no amount of fund research can do on its own. It gives you a reason to stay still. When your SIP is pointed at a specific number, a market correction is no longer a threat. It is a cheaper entry point. An underperforming quarter is no longer a reason to switch. It is a data point in a multi-year process.

The milestone creates the filter. Without it, everything passes through.

The Number

In one documented case, an investor holding ten mutual funds discovered all of them shared the same eight stocks in their top holdings. The estimated return lost to duplication over five years was Rs 2 lakh, not because the market failed him, but because complexity quietly cancelled out his own gains.

That is the cost of a portfolio without a destination.

One Thing to Do This Week

List every mutual fund you currently hold and check how many share the same top five stock holdings. If more than two funds overlap by over 50%, you are not diversified. You are running the same bet multiple times and paying for the privilege.

A Note Before You Go

The investors who reach meaningful milestones are not the ones who picked the best funds. They are the ones who started with a number and built everything around it.

That is the entire premise behind The Wealth Roadmap. You pick the milestone, Rs 25 Lakh, Rs 1 Crore, or Rs 5 Crore.

Green Portfolio builds the portfolio structure, selects the funds, monitors the drift, and rebalances when the process calls for it. Every rupee in the portfolio has a destination. That is what makes it a portfolio rather than a collection.

Full access. Not a trial. Not a limited version. The same structure, the same process, the same research that manages over Rs 1,000 Crore in AUM across 65,000 investors.

The reason we are doing this at 99% off is straightforward. We want the first cohort to be investors who are building toward something real, not people who clicked on a discount. If this edition made you think about the number behind your own portfolio, you are exactly who this is for.

There are 100 seats. When they are gone, this price does not come back. No waitlist. No exceptions. No second round.

If you have been meaning to look at this properly, now is the time: Portfolios

More coming soon.

Disclaimer: Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing. This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Almost 60% of India’s LPG comes from the Middle East. With the US-Iran hostilities refusing to die down, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. For Indians used to taking their cooking gas for granted, this has meant a cooking gas scarcity at scale that India has not experienced in decades. This has forced kitchens, both commercial and household, to answer a question they never considered: what do you cook on when the LPG cylinder runs out?

The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And the business implications are more interesting than the headlines suggest.

The Vulnerability India Took for Granted

LPG consumption in India grew nearly 28-fold over the past two decades, from 32,600 barrels per day to over 923,000 barrels per day by 2023. That growth was deliberate policy. Successive governments pushed LPG as a cleaner, more efficient alternative to kerosene and biomass, with the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) distributing subsidised LPG connections to rural households under the banner of women’s empowerment, eventually reaching nearly every household in India.

It was a genuine public health and policy success. But it was built on a quiet assumption: that Middle Eastern supply would remain uninterrupted. With 33 crore LPG connections and 60% of supply transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, that assumption is now being tested in real time.

India’s Position: Uncomfortable, But Not a Crisis. Yet.

Here is the part the panic headlines are missing. As of mid-March 2026, India is not in an LPG emergency. A fresh shipment has arrived, strategic reserves are holding, and the government has been managing supply allocation across states with a degree of competence that reflects years of emergency planning.

India also holds a diplomatic card that most of its peers do not. Unlike the US, the EU, or even most Gulf-aligned nations, India has maintained functional, non-hostile diplomatic relations with Iran throughout the conflict. That channel, quiet as it is, gives India a degree of back-channel optionality on energy flows that does not exist for countries that have aligned more explicitly with either side.

The contrast with India’s neighbours is stark. Pakistan and Bangladesh, both of which lack strategic LPG buffers and import diversification, are already experiencing severe shortages. Fuel rationing, price spikes, and supply disruptions are hitting households and commercial kitchens hard. Sri Lanka, still recovering from its 2022 economic crisis, is similarly exposed.

India is not them. Not today. But the gap between “managing fine” and “acute shortage” in an energy crisis can close faster than governments plan for. The current comfort is real, but it is not a reason to declare the risk resolved.

For investors, the honest framing is this: India’s LPG exposure is a medium-term structural risk, not an immediate earnings crisis. The companies most exposed to supply disruption (LPG importers, downstream distributors) deserve monitoring, not panic selling. The companies best positioned to benefit from accelerated alternatives investment (PNG distributors, induction and cookware players, gas infrastructure) deserve attention, not euphoria either.

What Should Work, But Usually Doesn’t: Alternatives for Indian Households

Induction cooktops

In parts of Europe and the US, 30% and 19% of households respectively have moved to induction cooktops. TTK Prestige, Hawkins, and various consumer durable players have been advertising induction cookers as an alternative. But the product faces structural barriers that advertising alone cannot solve.

There are three reasons why induction has not worked for Indian home cooks:

1. Cooking style: Indian cooking, whether dals, rotis, curries, or rice, requires manual manipulation of the vessel, with a visible flame used to control heat and char. Phulkas and rotis are directly roasted on flames. Slow, even heat distribution, which is what induction does well, is a Western cooking preference, not an Indian one.

2. Additional investment: Indian cookware is designed for curved-bottom vessels that maximise heat transfer from a flame. Induction requires flat-bottomed vessels. For a household already owning a full set of cooking vessels, this is an unwelcome and often non-trivial additional cost.

3. Electricity requirements: Entry-level induction cooktops draw 1,200W; high-performance models draw up to 2,500W. Using a standard 5-amp socket is a fire hazard. Nearly 47% of Indian homes lack a single high-capacity 15-amp or 20-amp plug, and the ones available are typically occupied by a geyser or refrigerator. Add routine load shedding, and the reliability argument collapses entirely.

One underrated household alternative that deserves mention: the electric pressure cooker. Models from TTK Prestige, Bajaj, and Havells work on lower-wattage draws, require no flat-bottom vessel investment, and directly suit Indian dal, rice, and curry cooking. This is a more realistic short-term household alternative than induction, and largely absent from the public conversation.

What Works for Commercial Kitchens: Charcoal and Industrial Induction

Commercial kitchens face a different set of constraints. For establishments with tandoors and open-fire cooking, charcoal is not a new idea. It has always been in partial use, and the flavour advantage is real: the aroma and char that charcoal produces in a tandoor is absent from a gas-based one. In a shortage, commercial kitchens simply buy more charcoal and extend their cooking timelines.

For commercial kitchens with 3-phase electrical connections, commercial-grade induction equipment is a viable alternative. The vessel and power constraints that make household induction difficult largely disappear at commercial scale. But neither charcoal nor commercial induction fully replicates the temperature control, speed, and flexibility of a gas flame, and both involve operational trade-offs that kitchens would prefer to avoid.

What Will Actually Work, But Is Not Yet Widely Available: PNG

There is a third alternative that meets Indian cooking requirements, is as effective as LPG, is cheaper in many configurations, and is not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz. Piped Natural Gas (PNG) is the structural answer. It is just not available to most Indians yet.

Currently, only about 4% of urban households are connected to a dedicated PNG distribution infrastructure. PNG is lighter than LPG, offers more calorific value, and burns cleanly on a standard cooking stove with minor modifications. More importantly, India does not depend on the Middle East for its natural gas in the same way it does for LPG. Domestic natural gas production runs at approximately 90 million standard cubic metres per day (mmscmd), and imports can be sourced from Russia, Australia, and the US. Supply diversification is structurally easier for PNG than for LPG.

For the government, expanding PNG infrastructure reduces import dependency and keeps more cooking energy supply within domestic control. The economics work. What has been missing is urgency. The current crisis may provide exactly that.

What to Watch: The Companies in This Story

Gas utilities and PNG distributors (IGL, MGL, Gujarat Gas):
This is where the structural opportunity sits. A prolonged LPG shortage is the strongest political and economic argument for PNG expansion India has seen in years. Watch for: government fast-tracking of City Gas Distribution (CGD) network expansion under the 12th CGD bidding round, new geographical area authorisations by PNGRB, emergency PNG rollout announcements in LPG-shortage-affected cities, and capex guidance from IGL, MGL, and Gujarat Gas on pipeline investment timelines.

Cookware and consumer durable companies (TTK Prestige, Hawkins, Bajaj Electricals, Havells):
Induction cooktop sales will likely spike short-term on panic buying. The question is whether this converts into sustained adoption. Watch for: whether companies bundle flat-bottom cookware with induction cooktops to reduce the vessel investment barrier, electric pressure cooker sales data, and commentary on commercial kitchen order pipelines.

Electricity distribution and generation companies:
A household switching from LPG to induction adds roughly 1.5 to 2.5 kW of peak demand. At any meaningful scale, this becomes a grid management problem. Watch for: state government peak demand advisories, load shedding escalation in cities with acute LPG shortages, and any emergency power procurement by distribution companies.

LPG importers and downstream distributors:
These are the most directly exposed to supply disruption. Margin pressure from procurement cost spikes, allocation constraints, and potential price cap conflicts with government subsidy policy all warrant monitoring. Watch commentary from IOCL, BPCL, and HPCL on LPG import cost pass-through and subsidy receivables.

The Bottom Line

India is managing the LPG situation better than its neighbours, and better than the crisis headlines suggest. Strategic reserves, import diversification, and functioning diplomacy with Iran give India more room than Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka currently have. For investors, this is a “watch closely” situation, not a “sell everything” one.

But the infrastructure vulnerability this crisis has exposed is real and permanent. India built 33 crore cooking connections on the assumption that Middle Eastern supply would never be disrupted. That assumption is broken. Whether this shock accelerates the PNG rollout, drives induction adoption in commercial kitchens, or simply adds political pressure for energy diversification in the kitchen as much as in the power grid, the cooking habits of 1.4 billion people are quietly under negotiation.

The cylinder may refill. The question will not go away.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

Approximately 20% of global crude supply has been halted as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz grinds to a near-standstill. Crude oil is above $100 a barrel. The IEA is considering its largest-ever strategic reserve release of 300 to 400 million barrels. And countries that did not build supply buffers are already rationing fuel.

This is not just a geopolitical event. It is an economic stress test, one that is separating countries that built energy resilience from those that did not, and one that may permanently accelerate the one structural shift that oil-dependent economies have been deferring for years: the move to electric vehicles.

The Strait of Hormuz: The World’s Most Dangerous Chokepoint

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, roughly 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Through it flows nearly 20% of the world’s oil and a significant share of global LNG. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, and Qatar all depend on it as their primary export corridor.

Since the US-Iran conflict escalated, tanker movements have been near-totally disrupted. Unlike the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which was a deliberate supply restriction affecting primarily the West, the 2026 Hormuz closure simultaneously disrupts transit and directly threatens Gulf production infrastructure. Attacks on Saudi, Qatari, and UAE facilities have compounded the shock in a way the 1970s crises did not.

The result: a supply disruption that, in scale and speed, has no modern precedent.

Lessons from 1973 (That Most Countries Did Not Learn)

This is not the first time the world has been here. In 1973, the Arab oil embargo followed the Yom Kippur War. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution produced a second shock. Both events sent crude prices spiralling, triggered recessions in the West, and forced a fundamental rethink of energy policy.

The policy response then was instructive. Western governments mandated fuel efficiency improvements, with average fuel economy in the US improving from 13.1 miles per gallon in 1975 to 27.2 mpg by 2024, a more than 100% gain driven almost entirely by regulation and engineering investment following the crisis.

But the demand lesson went unlearned in much of the developing world. Global oil demand has doubled from 50 million barrels per day in 1975 to 103 million barrels per day in 2023, driven almost entirely by Asia and the Middle East, even as OECD demand peaked and declined after 2005. The dependency did not shrink. It shifted.

Why India Is Not Pakistan or Bangladesh

In our immediate neighbourhood, the human cost of unpreparedness is already visible. Bangladesh and Pakistan are experiencing petrol shortages, fuel rationing, price spikes, and work-from-home mandates as supply chains buckle. Both countries relied heavily on Hormuz-transiting crude without building adequate strategic buffers.

India’s position is structurally different, and that difference did not happen by accident.

India currently holds approximately 250 million barrels in combined strategic and commercial reserves, providing a buffer of roughly 74 days. That buffer includes strategic petroleum reserves, commercial inventory held at refineries and ports, and floating storage. Beyond stockpiles, India has spent a decade diversifying its import base. It now sources crude from 40 countries, up from 27 a decade ago. Only 40% of India’s crude currently arrives through the Strait of Hormuz, with the remaining 60% arriving via Russia, West Africa, the Americas, and Central Asia.

Russia remains India’s largest crude supplier as of February 2026. India negotiated a 30-day US Treasury waiver to continue purchases during the sanctions period, giving it continued access to discounted supply while the conflict runs its course. India has also opted out of the IEA-coordinated strategic reserve release, choosing instead to manage its own buffer independently.

Additionally, India’s ethanol blending programme is now displacing approximately 44 million barrels of crude annually, a meaningful domestic demand offset that most peer economies do not have.

The Risk India Is Underplaying: Fertilisers

Oil is not the only commodity at risk. The same Hormuz corridor that carries crude also carries urea and other fertiliser inputs critical to India’s agricultural supply chain. With the Rabi season already underway, any sustained disruption to urea imports poses a food security risk that sits entirely outside the oil conversation but deserves equal attention.

India’s policymakers are aware of this. Watch for emergency procurement, price support measures, or domestic fertiliser production incentives in the coming weeks as a second-order policy response to the oil crisis.

Could This Be the Shock That Finally Forces Emerging Markets Toward EVs?

Every major oil shock in history has been followed by a wave of renewed interest in alternatives. The 1973 crisis built the case for fuel efficiency. The 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict accelerated European energy diversification and heat pump adoption. The 2026 Hormuz crisis may do the same for EV adoption in emerging markets.

The conditions are more favourable now than they were in any prior shock. In 2024, plug-in vehicle sales in developing nations surged 60%, with countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Djibouti importing 75% or more of their vehicle value as EVs. EV price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles in the two-wheeler and three-wheeler segment, the most critical for developing markets, is already a reality in India.

For countries now staring at $100-plus crude and empty fuel stations, the calculus is changing. The barriers to EV adoption in developing markets have always been range anxiety, underdeveloped charging infrastructure, and upfront cost. The oil shock directly attacks the cost comparison, making EVs cheaper to run in absolute terms even before subsidies.

But adoption does not happen from economics alone. It requires policy (subsidies, mandates), infrastructure (charging networks, battery swapping), and financing (affordable credit for two-wheeler buyers). Countries that move quickly on all three will capture the demand shift. Those that do not will simply pay more for petrol for longer.

Who Could Win From This

Indian EV two-wheeler and three-wheeler makers are positioned for their next growth phase. Players like Ola Electric and Ather Energy, along with established brands that have pivoted to EV, have already captured 60% of India’s three-wheeler market and 6.6% of the two-wheeler market. The domestic market is maturing. The real opportunity now is export-led growth into fuel-starved emerging markets across South and Southeast Asia.

Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, both experiencing energy stress, have already shown appetite for Indian EV products. The crisis accelerates this conversation from “pilot markets” to “urgency markets.”

Indian refiners may also benefit in the medium term if India can position itself as a refined product supplier to Europe and parts of Asia, as it did during the Russia-Ukraine sanctions period. Watch for commentary from Reliance, HPCL, and BPCL on refining margins and export volumes.

Fertiliser companies and food-sector supply chains face risk, not opportunity. Watch this space closely.

What to Watch

• Strait of Hormuz timeline: Any ceasefire signal, naval de-escalation, or humanitarian corridor agreement that restores tanker movement.

• IEA strategic reserve release: Size, timing, and whether 300 to 400 million barrels proves sufficient to stabilise prices or only buys a few weeks.

• India’s Russian oil waiver: The 30-day US Treasury waiver duration, and whether it is renewed as the conflict extends.

• Fertiliser supply chain: Urea import disruption, domestic buffer levels, and government procurement response.

• Crude price trajectory: Sustained above $100 is the historical threshold that materially accelerates EV adoption decisions by both governments and consumers.

• EV order signals from South and Southeast Asia: Inquiry trends, policy announcements, and export orders from Ola, Ather, and TVS in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

• Gulf production capacity: Whether attacks on Saudi, UAE, and Qatari infrastructure create production loss that outlasts any Hormuz reopening.

The Bottom Line

In 1973, the world was caught off guard. In 2026, some countries were better prepared than others, and India’s energy diversification strategy is genuinely being tested and, so far, holding. The short-term cost of preparation is paying off in stability.

But the bigger question is not whether India survives the next 74 days. It is whether this shock finally forces the structural transitions, in EVs, in energy diversification, in fertiliser security, that policymakers have been deferring. History suggests that the most durable changes in energy systems come not from foresight but from pain. The pain, for many countries, is now very real.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Views expressed are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication and may change without notice. Please consult a qualified financial adviser before making any investment decision.

Gold has always been associated with one value: Scarcity. Central Banks hold it, Households hold it, ETFs track it and jewellers sell it, because no one can make more of it cheaply. A Silicon Valley Startup has made an announcement that disrupts this status.

How was this achieved?

Marathon Fusion, an American company, has succeeded in creating gold artificially by converting mercury isotopes into gold using highly advanced nuclear fusion technology. This technology depends on fusion reactors and immense amounts of energy, and has meant that lab grown gold remains possible in theory.

Marathon Fusion was founded by Adam Rutkowski, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer, in 2023. The company claims that this technology could lead to the production of almost 2 to 5 metric tons, using a 1 gigawatt fusion plant, as per the company’s arXiv’s research paper.

The paper has been posted to arXiv, a preprint server, and has not yet been peer-reviewed by independent scientists.

Separately, Chinese researchers have announced the creation of what they call ‘hard pure gold,’ a 24-carat gold engineered at the atomic level to be significantly harder than conventional gold. Unlike Marathon Fusion’s nuclear transmutation approach, this is a materials innovation, not a supply creation story. The gold is still real Au (atomic number 79), but its crystalline structure has been modified to alter its physical properties. No methodology or independent verification has been published, and this does not represent new gold supply entering the market.

Could this become a gamechanger?

It could, only if the experiments can actually lead to commercial reality. Currently, this remains a conceptual design based on unproven technology, complex materials engineering and unresolved questions on engineering feasibility and viability.

Besides, the claim is yet to be peer reviewed, and as per Marathon Fusion’s own research paper, the gold produced would be radioactive, requiring at least 17.7 years to be safe for commercial use.

If Marathon Fusion can address these challenges (which remain formidable and unresolved) it could disrupt gold’s current status as the timeless asset class that every Central Bank, Domestic Investor, Jeweller and household seeks to own.This would also make the centuries old dream of converting base metals into gold into reality, recalling centuries-old Indian alchemical traditions, including Nagarjuna’s documented experiments with mercury transmutation.

The increased interest in this development remains understandable, as the demand for gold continues to rise, even as gold mining remains increasingly challenging as ore qualities deteriorate, yielding just 1–5 grams of gold per tonne of ore. According to various estimates, almost 86% of the total gold available in the world has already been mined, most above-ground gold now circulating in secondary markets.

In the near term, the scarcity of mined gold means that recycled gold, mostly from old jewellery (almost 90%) and e-waste remains a viable alternative to mined gold. So far, recycled gold has been a viable source of supply for the market, and will continue to remain so in the foreseeable future, until this disruption can actually make an impact in the sector.

Could this go the Lab Grown Diamond Way?

Many in India are drawing parallels to the way Lab Grown Diamonds(LGDs) are slowly replacing mined diamonds worldwide. These manufactured diamonds, which commanded just 5% of the total diamond jewellery market in 2018, will reach almost 20-25% by the end of 2026, as these diamonds are almost 80% cheaper than mined diamonds.

The diamond processing industry clustered around Surat initially scoffed at the idea of using LGDs, but have been forced to manufacture them themselves as the demand for LGDs has replaced that of mined diamonds over the past decade.

Though imitation diamonds had existed long before mined diamonds became commercially available, LGDs offered customers a reason to buy cheaper diamonds even as most didn’t care that they were manufactured not mined.

Diamonds remain a consumer product, with their values remaining largely cultural and emotional. If Lab grown gold could go the same way as Lab grown diamonds, this could fundamentally alter gold’s status as the world’’s most reliable monetary asset. Central Banks that hold 35,000+ tonnes of the yellow metal, would be forced to rethink their holdings, if the intrinsic value of gold plummets due to an increase in supply. This would threaten the economics behind investments, with gold’s scarcity-driven appreciation under threat for the first time in history.

The gap this aims to address

Currently, the gold supply, is limited to about 3,500 tonnes of mined gold every year. Recycled gold adds another 1,200 tonnes, totalling about 4,700 tonnes of annual supply. Marathon Fusion’s simulations project between 2 and 5 metric tons of gold per gigawatt of thermal power per year, depending on reactor configuration.

But this claim remains just that-a claim. As there are no commercially operational reactors that can be used to manufacture gold on an industrial scale. Additionally, according to Marathon Fusion’s own research paper, the gold produced will need 17.7 years to become commercially usable, as the gold produced will be radioactive.

And even if Marathon Fusion’s most optimistic projections hold, 5 metric tons of additional supply represents less than 0.1% of annual gold supply. That does not move markets.

There is also no clarity yet on the cost per gram of lab-produced gold, making commercial comparisons with mined gold impossible at this stage.

For now, this remains just an announcement, as further details will be needed to quantify this as a disruption to the old ways.

Should investors be worried?

For the near term? No commercial threat. At least for the next 5 years, production will remain at atom-scale quantities,as there’s no working reactor that could hypothetically produce gold. Add to that the cooling time of 17.7 years, gold’s scarcity remains intact so far.

For the medium term (between 5-15 years), further clarity on cost per gram data, working reactor milestones and regulatory responses from the Central Banks or the World Gold Council could make an impact before supplies actually make it to the market.

For the long term (15+ years), the scale of the supplies based on the fusion reactor capacity and cooling timelines could affect the financial markets, fundamentally altering gold’s role in global financial markets. That is if supplies actually affect gold’s scarcity factor.

For now, Lab-grown gold is real science. It is not yet a real supply. The 17.7-year cooling time, the missing commercial reactor, and the enormous gap between 2 metric tons of simulated output and 3,500 tonnes of annual mining demand make near-term disruption unlikely. What it does change, perhaps sooner than the technology itself, is the conversation around gold’s scarcity premium. And in markets, narratives often move faster than fundamentals.