B.S. Ashwin · ResearchFox
Weekly perspectives on GCC setup, talent, innovation, and AI — grounded in real advisory work.
Work With Ashwin →Every MNC evaluating Tier 2/3 India is reading the same map. The map is accurate. It was built for one sector's requirements. That is why site selection keeps misfiring.
No one has commissioned the Manufacturing Graduate Employability Index. India's skill gap data is drawn almost entirely from surveys the IT sector paid for. The other two engines are flying blind — and policy is following the only instruments that are lit.
India's economic conversation is dominated by GCCs. Manufacturing employs six times as many people. Agriculture employs ninety times as many. All three are betting on the same Tier 2/3 ground. Nobody has stress-tested whether the ground holds all three.
AP's own policy calculates that raising female workforce participation grows GSDP by 15%. It then builds the supporting infrastructure at 2% of the required scale — and points it at new births, not the existing workforce.
China didn't copy what worked elsewhere. India shouldn't copy China.
Every country invited foreign universities in. China told them what they had to become first.
India is not the first country to bet on foreign branch campuses. It is the fourth. The first three produced the same outcome.
The brands winning India's FMCG growth aren't the ones anyone's talking about.
HUL's CEO told investors India has a shortage of competition. His own numbers show: margins flat for three years, negative pricing in the flagship category, and a revenue CAGR half the sector average. I'd hate to see what more competition looks like.
Every major crisis in India's last 30 years — 1991, 2013, COVID — was followed by the structural reforms that made the next decade. The companies that entered during the worst moments captured the best structural positions. The ones that waited for stability arrived after the advantage was already built.
What separates innovation ecosystems that thrive from those that stagnate?