Economists have a name for what happens when a central bank’s independence quietly bends under the weight of government borrowing needs: fiscal dominance. It’s the slow drift toward that condition, not some Hollywood-style default, that should worry anyone watching from outside America’s borders.
A NITI Aayog assessment this February found that, under a net‑zero scenario, mineral demand will be 51% higher than under current policy. In other words, dependence deepens, not eases, precisely as India races to build EVs, batteries, defence platforms and renewable capacity.
An Indian company that writes brilliant software for a foreign platform gets paid well for the work. It almost never owns a slice of what that platform eventually becomes worth. This is the exact distinction Naoroji’s arithmetic always hinged on, not whether India earns money, but what kind of money it earns, and what kind slips past it entirely.
Dadabhai Naoroji wasn’t just saying the British took India’s money. He was showing, with the actual records, how an entire monetary system could make a growing, trading economy poorer with every transaction, legally, quietly, and year after year.
A monsoon that sustains more than a billion people is being rewritten, one melting season at a time, in a sea most Indians will never see. That isn’t a metaphor. It’s a data point. It means India’s Arctic stake isn’t mainly about trade or minerals. At its core, it’s also existential, in a way no ally’s is.
Giving data centres the same priority as highways, railroads, and electricity grids by designating them as important infrastructure was the most significant decision of the govt