Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

For more than two decades, consecutive U.S. administrations have seen India as a counterbalance to China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. But the current U.S administration’s stances seem to favour Beijing while punishing India. This week, I unpack how the U.S.-China summit could impact New Delhi’s equation with Washington.

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India, whose significance to the U.S. foreign policy has been shaped by frictions between Washington and Beijing, will be keeping a close eye on the meeting between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

When the summit between the world’s top two economies begins later in the day, India will be hoping that Trump’s softening stance toward China does not lead to a bargain that diminishes New Delhi’s role in the Indo-Pacific, experts said.

If Trump prioritizes a bilateral grand bargain with Beijing, India will have “reasonable concerns that the United States will treat China as the central negotiating partner in Asia rather than as the central strategic challenge,” Ronak D. Desai, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, told CNBC.

Therefore, “India will need to make its strategic value harder to overlook,” Desai said, adding this would mean the U.S.-India relationship must lead to more tangible outcomes in sectors like defense, maritime security, critical minerals, energy, and manufacturing.

Trump and Xi last met in Busan, South Korea, in November, where the U.S. president called Xi “a very tough negotiator,” and said that the two sides had “always had a very good relationship.” Meanwhile, Xi urges Beijing and Washington to be “partners and friends.” It was during this meeting that Trump also referred to China and the U.S. as G2.

“He [Trump] favors strong-armed leaders,” Nirupama Rao, former Indian ambassador to the U.S., China, and Sri Lanka, told CNBC’s “Inside India” on Monday, hinting at Trump’s conciliatory stance toward Xi in the recent past.

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

Rising incomes and a large population base make India a key market for global consumer-focused companies. But now, celebrity endorsements and wide distribution are not enough to reel in customers. Viral social media videos are influencing consumer choices — and brands are responding.

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Social media influencers are ushering in a massive change in India’s packaged food and beverages space, as they urge consumers to read labels, pushing big brands to make healthier products or risk being replaced by new entrants.

One of the world’s largest packaged food and beverages companies, PepsiCo, is the latest to respond to changing customer preferences.

“Today, more than 50% of our beverage portfolio in India comprises low- to no-sugar offerings,” said Nitin Bhandari, vice president and general manager of beverages at PepsiCo India, adding that the company aims to “scale low- and no-sugar options to 90% of our beverage portfolio over time in India.”

PepsiCo gathers consumer insights through engagement forums, social media, as well as its WhatsApp-based consumer loyalty platform, PepGenie, Bhandari told CNBC in an email.

In the next five years, India’s income per capita is expected to grow at the highest rate among the top five emerging markets for consumer products, including China, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, according to Bain & Company, making it a priority for global consumer product companies.

Global companies already dominate the world’s fastest-growing major consumer market across 20 product categories from soft drinks and spirits to savory snacks, detergents, and diapers, the report said.

Indian market opportunity, however, comes with the pressure to pivot strategy based on consumer preferences. And social media has emerged as a key platform for public advocacy over the past few years, raising awareness around food safety and mislabeling in India.

Celebrity endorsement-driven brand trust has shifted to “community-verified trust,” because of social media influencers, said Shamik Kumar, a veteran food safety expert who has worked with multinational companies in India.

Social media influencer Revant Himatsingka, who goes by Food Pharmer on social media, has millions of subscribers, and has faced pushback from consumer companies, says his content makes people read labels and, as a result, companies are making better quality products.

Over the past few years, several brands, including Mondelez-owned Bournvita and…

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Over the past two decades, India’s IT sector has been driving a consumption boom that has in many ways anchored the India growth story. But as AI forces IT companies to shift away from volume hiring, it exposes a critical gap that risks hampering economic growth: a lack of quality jobs.

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Few global events have dented India’s fabled growth story.

Even as the conflict in the Middle East disrupts global supply chains, the IMF earlier this month reaffirmed its forecast that India will remain the fastest-growing large economy in 2026.

But last week, global equity research firm Bernstein wrote an open letter to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, warning of a deepening employment crisis in the country, especially as artificial intelligence threatens quality jobs in the information technology sector.

Those jobs with relatively high wages and productivity have had spillover effects across real estate, education, and services, making white-collar employment a key pillar of the country’s economic growth.

For the past two decades, 10 million to 15 million Indians working in IT services and the business process outsourcing industry have anchored the “aspirational middle class—buying homes, taking flights, driving consumption,” Bernstein said. “Gen AI now challenges that template.”

India’s IT sector used to outcompete global peers as the vast talent pool at relatively low cost gave it an edge, experts said. But AI has tilted this equation in favor of tech arbitrage, from labor arbitrage earlier. The lack of quality jobs will stress-test the India growth story, which relies on the demographic dividend and domestic consumption.

“Without job creation, India’s consumption-led economy will struggle to grow, limiting investment demand at a time when the export growth-led model is at risk globally,” Shumita Sharma Deveshwar, chief India economist at GlobalData TS Lombard, told CNBC.

“India has struggled to raise the share of manufacturing in the economy to shift labour from farm to factories,” she said, adding that the AI boom now poses a threat to jobs in both manufacturing and services.

Close to 45% of India’s workforce continues to depend on agriculture, which only contributes 15%–16% of its GDP, according to Bernstein.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18 during the AI Summit earlier this year, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s IT minister, acknowledged that disruption to jobs in the tech sector was a “real challenge,” but stressed that the solution was in “upskilling and reskilling the workforce.” The Indian government expects AI to reinvent the country’s IT sector.

“Not all jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI,” said Alexandra Hermann Prasad, lead…

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Indian consumers’ desire to shift away from gasoline-based cars should have been Tesla and BYD’s moment to shine in the world’s third-largest auto market. But legacy carmakers that have dominated the Indian market for decades have an ace up their sleeve — hybrid cars.

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The demand for electric vehicles is surging worldwide, but Indian consumers are choosing a different ride — hybrid cars that don’t need external charging.

Hybrid cars are expected to reach 10% of total car sales in India in the financial year ending March 2027, while EVs are expected to account for 5%, according to a report by Indian research firm Care Ratings.

Cost-conscious consumers who were previously buying diesel vehicles have started shifting to hybrids, Puneet Gupta, director at S&P Global Mobility with a focus on the Indian market, told CNBC.

Hybrid vehicle sales have risen nearly fourfold in the world’s third-largest auto market to 362,866 units in the financial year ending March 2026, from 98,010 units in the financial year ending March 2020, according to Care Ratings.

Meanwhile, annual sales of electric vehicles were 131,865 units in the year to March 2026, the report, based on the Indian government’s vehicle registration data, showed.

“It’s clear that hybrid cars are gaining traction [in India] faster than EVs in the passenger car segment,” Diwakar Murugan, senior automotives analyst at Omdia, said in an email to CNBC. He added it was “remarkable” that hybrids are punching above their weight, having achieved strong growth with just eight models in the market so far, compared to more than 40 EV models.

The shift away from internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicles should have ushered global EV companies like Tesla and BYD into India, but it turns out that Japanese manufacturers, who already dominate India’s auto space, are set to deepen their grip on the market by offering hybrid cars instead of pure EVs.

Tesla has sold fewer than 400 cars while BYD has sold less than 7,000 in India since 2025, according to government data.

Even in the EV space, automakers Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Motors, which primarily sell ICE cars, are the leading players. That’s a stark contrast to BYD and Tesla’s global dominance: in 2025, BYD became the world’s top EV seller with 2.26 million units, while Tesla sold 1.64 million.

In hybrids, Japan’s Toyota and Maruti Suzuki — the Indian subsidiary of Suzuki Motor — are the top manufacturers in India, with popular models including the Toyota Innova Hycross and Maruti Grand Vitara, said Arun Agarwal, vice president of fundamental research at Indian brokerage Kotak Securities.

These companies already dominate the broader…

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart dominate India’s e‑commerce market. This week, I unpack why the U.S. giants are keen to expand in the South Asian country where only 30% of the population shops online.

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Last December, when Amazon pledged a massive $35 billion investment in India including for digitizing over 12 million small businesses and enhancing logistical infrastructure, the scale of the commitment seemed disproportionate to the market’s size.

Only 30% of Indians shopped online in 2025, far behind China (92%) and the U.S. (74%), according to a Bain & Co. report earlier this month. E‑commerce accounted for just 1.6% of India’s GDP, compared with 4%–4.5% in Indonesia and 13%–14% in China, Bain added.

But then India is the world’s fastest‑growing e‑commerce market, with online shopping spreading rapidly from major metros to smaller cities and towns.

Take Evelyn Nazareth, a schoolteacher in her 30s who lives in Jaipur, and is among a growing cohort of avid online shoppers outside India’s largest cities. She shops on major e‑commerce platforms three to four times a month and orders from ultra‑fast delivery apps almost daily.

Once, she ordered a smartphone online and received a feature phone but was billed for the former. That unpleasant experience, however, did not turn Nazareth away from online shopping. She simply switched platforms.

Online shopping has since become a habit. “I can shop anytime without stepping away from what I’m doing,” she said, noting the broader choice available online, especially for fashion. “When I buy something others around me don’t have, it makes me feel different.”

Jaipur is not a metropolis, and it is these relatively smaller cities that now account for more than 60% of India’s online shoppers, Praveen Govindu, a partner at Deloitte India, told CNBC. They generate a similar proportion of e‑commerce orders, he said, marking “a decisive shift in audience dynamics.”

India’s e‑commerce market experienced a compound annual growth of 23% between 2020 and 2025, driven by both a rising number of users and higher spending per shopper, Govindu said. Deloitte, in a report on earlier this month, forecast that the sector will become a $250 billion market by 2030.

Walmart-owned Flipkart Group, which includes Flipkart Minutes, Myntra and Shopsy, “is widely viewed as the market leader in India’s e‑retail landscape,” said Manan Bhasin, a partner at Bain & Company.

In June last year, a report by marketplace analytics firm MerchantSpring said Flipkart holds 48% of the…

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Just as India’s textile industry was beginning to stabilize after U.S. tariffs, it received another blow. Industry leaders tell me the Iran war has raised costs, hit demand and sent workers fleeing, crushing hopes of a sustained recovery.

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Indian textile exporters could be forgiven for thinking that U.S. President Donald Trump has them in his crosshairs.

In August last year, Washington slapped a 50% tariff on Indian goods, making exports uncompetitive. Relief came months later, when rates were slashed in February, but it lasted barely a few weeks: Trump’s subsequent war on Iran plunged India’s textile industry into fresh turmoil.

Ready-made garment companies were among the worst-hit by the U.S. tariffs, losing orders or being forced to offer discounts to retain customers, experts said, adding that the Iran war has driven up raw material and packaging costs.

The war, which began on Feb. 28 after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran, has disrupted the movement of goods through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up energy and freight costs and straining supply chains.

This has led to some unusual challenges for the textile industry, India’s second‑largest employer which supports more than 45 million jobs.

Industry leaders said some migrant workers employed by the textile companies were struggling to secure liquified petroleum gas, the primary cooking fuel. This has prompted some to return to their home towns.

“It was a tough year, and just when things were starting to come together in February, this war started,” Ashwin Chandran, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Textile Industry, told CNBC.

Between April 2025 and February this year, India exported cotton and man‑made yarns, fabrics, and ready-made garments worth $29.5 billion, down from $29.8 billion a year earlier, according to data from the Indian commerce ministry. While the decline may appear modest, the direction of travel is worrying for a country that aims to export $100 billion worth of textiles annually by 2030.

“We were expecting FY27 [financial year ending March 2027] to be much better, but now, with the Iran war, the beginning hasn’t been encouraging,” said Madhu Sudhan Bhageria, chairman at synthetic and polyester filament yarns manufacturer Filatex India.

He explained that polyester prices — which depend on petroleum — have risen more than 40% since the start of the war, making it difficult to pass on costs to customers.

“Demand has fallen as people don’t want to buy at high prices,” Bhageria said,…

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Inside India“ — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Indian markets have been rattled by the Iran war, with foreign investors fleeing and valuations slipping to rare lows. But fund managers tell me that low prices by themselves won’t lure investors back.

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For months, trade tensions with the U.S. were dubbed the biggest overhang on Indian equities. When the two countries agreed on a trade pact in February, foreign investors poured nearly $2.5 billion into Indian stocks. But a month later, the market has completely reversed course.

India’s benchmark Nifty 50 fell more than 10% in March, as foreign investors sold over $12 billion in equities — the worst monthly sell-off on record.

The index now trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.6 times, a level rarely seen over the past decade. The only two occasions in the past ten years when Indian benchmark valuations dipped this low were during the early months of the Covid‑19 outbreak in 2020 and the Russia‑Ukraine war in 2022.

So, I asked fund managers whether Indian markets are oversold — and whether these near-historically low valuations could be a good point to invest in the fabled “India growth story.”

The escalating conflict in the Middle East has revealed that India “is structurally exposed,” Pramod Gubbi, co-founder of portfolio management firm Marcellus Investment Managers, told me. If there is no quick resolution to the war and oil prices remain elevated, India’s fiscal deficit, inflation, and currency will all come under pressure — which in turn will “affect demand and earnings,” he said.

Gubbi added that earnings growth in India has been weak for more than a year, and the current conflict will exacerbate it.

Some of his concerns echo those raised by India’s Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran in a report published March 28.

The world’s fastest-growing economy’s forecast of 7.0%–7.4% growth for the financial year ending March 2027 faces “considerable downside” risk due to rising energy costs and supply‑chain disruptions linked to the Iran war, Nageswaran warned. He also expects the trade deficit to “rise significantly” and lead to a “widening [of] the current account deficit.”

In response to these pressures, the Indian government introduced two key interventions last week. The first aimed to curb the falling rupee by limiting currency‑hedging positions that banks can take. The second was an excise duty cut on petrol and diesel to prevent a spike in retail fuel prices that could worsen inflation.

While the rupee has strengthened thanks to the currency curbs, Nitin Jain, chief…

Gold edged higher on Tuesday morning, but the metal remained on course to notch its biggest monthly decline in almost 17 years.

By 3:30 a.m. ET, U.S. spot gold was trading around 1% higher at $ 4,553.69 per ounce. Front-month gold futures were up by 0.6% to settle at around $4,553.

The gains came amid lingering uncertainty over the trajectory of the U.S.-Iran war, which has entered its fifth week.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday evening that U.S. President Donald Trump told aides he was willing to end military hostilities against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed.

Trump said in Truth Social post that Washington was “in serious discussions” with Iranian officials, but added that if a deal was not reached soon U.S. forces would attack electricity plants, oil wells and the critical Kharg Island.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera in an interview published Monday that Washington’s objectives in Iran would take “weeks, not months” to achieve.

Reuters reported that 2,500 U.S. Marines had arrived in the Middle East over the weekend, with unnamed officials telling the news agency the deployed troops were from the elite 82nd Airborne Division.

The conflict in the Middle East has weighed on gold prices, with surging oil and gas prices raising expectations of an inflation spike across economies that will lead to a bout of interest rate hikes.

Spot prices are now on track for a monthly decline of 14.6%, which would mark the metal’s biggest monthly drop since Oct. 2008, when prices fell 16.8%.

Wayne Nutland, Investment Manager at Shackleton Advisers, told CNBC on Tuesday that the past four years have changed the way gold is traded.

“Prior to the Ukraine war, the gold price tended to be inversely correlated to real bond yields and the US dollar, with the gold price rising when those metrics fell, and gold falling when those metrics rose,” he said.

“The period after the Ukraine war upended these relationships, in particular in 2025 and into early 2026 when gold rose very strongly, far in excess of the moves suggested by those historic relationships.”

Nutland added that in the wake of the Iran war, gold had reverted to its more traditional relationships.

“Bond yields and the U.S. dollar have both moved higher, and against this backdrop gold has demonstrated its traditional inverse sensitivity to these metrics, falling as a result,” he said. “Gold’s declines have perhaps also been exacerbated by the strength of the gold price going into 2026 and possibly a desire amongst investors to liquidate profitable positions.”

Iain Barnes, chief investment officer at Netwealth, said the price volatility of gold has been…

HOUSTON — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Wednesday that the U.S. recently brought back $100 million of gold from Venezuela.

Burgum visited Venezuela with oil and mining executives earlier this month to meet with interim President Delcy Rodriguez.

“There hadn’t been a shipment of precious metals between Venezuela and America in over 20 years,” Burgum told energy executives at S&P Global’s CERAWeek conference in Houston.

“At the end of the two days, we were able to bring home $100 million of gold — physically, the gold,” the Interior secretary said. U.S. refiners will use the gold for commercial and consumer purposes, he said.

The U.S. captured former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a military raid in January, leaving the rest of the regime largely in place. The Trump administration is cooperating closely with Rodriguez, vice president under Maduro.

The Interior secretary said he met with Rodriguez for 10 hours during his trip.

President Trump has been pressuring U.S. oil and gas executives to invest in Venezuela’s energy sector. The South American nation is believed to possess the largest crude oil reserves in the world.

Minerals and metals

Beyond petroleum, however, the U.S. also sees a major opportunity to develop Venezuela’s mineral and precious metal resources, Burgum said. The country also has vast coal resources that contain critical minerals, he said.

“The mining opportunity — that’s an industry that’s been in complete collapse in Venezuela and they know that. It’s down to just artisanal miners controlled by gangs, [with] probably some of the worst environmental practices in the world,” Burgum said

“They want a clean environment, they want to have modern investment, they want to see growth in their country,” the Interior secretary said of the Rodriguez government.

Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado addressed oil and gas executives in Houston on Tuesday. Her role in Venezuela’s future remains unclear as the Trump administration cooperates with Rodriguez.

Machado called for the full privatization of Venezuela’s oil industry during her remarks. She said it will take at least nine months to create the conditions for free and fair elections in Venezuela.

Gold’s sharp selloff may have pushed the metal firmly into bear market territory, but some market veterans are sticking to ambitious long-term forecasts.

Bullion extended its slide Tuesday, with spot prices falling as much as 2% before trimming losses to trade down 1.5% at $4,335.97 an ounce. Futures dropped about 2% to $4,317.80, while silver also declined. 

The move leaves gold — down roughly 21% from its late-January peak of $5,594.82 — firmly in a bear market.

For many strategists, the recent slump reflects short-term dislocations rather than any shift in gold’s underlying fundamentals. Persistent geopolitical risks, strong central bank demand and the prospect of a weaker U.S. dollar continue to underpin a structural bull case for the metal. Gold is traditionally seen as a safe haven by investors during times of instability.

“We are sticking with $10,000 by the end of the decade,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research told CNBC via email, even as he lowered his year-end forecast to $5,000 per ounce from $6,000 — which is still up around 15% from current levels.

The latest leg lower came as investors unwound positions amid a stronger U.S. dollar and tentative signs of easing geopolitical tensions after U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he had ordered a five-day pause on planned strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure.

The U.S. dollar has been strengthening, which might have triggered profit-taking in gold, said market participants.

The dollar index has strengthened around 3% since the start of the war on Feb. 28.

Despite the near-term weakness, strategists broadly view the selloff as an opportunity rather than a turning point.

Justin Lin, investment strategist at Global X ETFs, said his base case for gold remains $6,000 per ounce by year-end, describing the recent drop as “a compelling entry point for investors.”

“The sell-off appears driven by a combination of short-term sensitivity to higher interest rates, portfolio rebalancing amid equity market weakness, and a degree of complacency around the ongoing conflict in Iran,” Lin said via email.

Crucially, Lin emphasized that his bullish outlook does not depend on war-related risk premia.

“Rather, it is built upon the broader backdrop of persistent geopolitical uncertainty, continued central bank demand, and sustained inflows from Asian gold ETF investors,” he said.

That structural demand, particularly from emerging market central banks seeking to diversify reserves, is expected to provide a floor under prices. Lin added that there is a “high likelihood” central banks step up purchases following the recent selloff, helping stabilize the market.

Standard Chartered also remains constructive, citing similar long-term drivers.

“We remain constructive on gold over the longer term, underpinned by structural factors, including strong Emerging Market central bank demand and…