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legal battles between domestic generic drug manufacturers and global innovators, reigniting the debate over striking a balance between innovation protection and broader drug accessibility.Looking ahead to another year of patent challenges, Mint examines who ultimately benefits from these challenges.New drugs or methods of making them are typically protected by patents under intellectual property (IP) rights. The patent grants the innovator exclusive rights to market the drug for a set period, typically 20 years.

Optimism, especially about our ability to solve big problems, is in brutally short supply these days. The gloom might be at its worst in the climate change arena, where the Trump administration is in the midst of an all-out assault on green energy and the world is poised to miss the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to no more than 1.5° Celsius.Given that backdrop, I was struck by Bill Gates’ recent announcement of a major— and decidedly optimistic—shift in his thinking about climate change.

India is making steady progress on artificial intelligence (AI). After chairing the Global Partnership on AI Council in 2024, the country is preparing to host the five-day India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi in mid-February. Apart from heads of state, CEOs of tech firms such as Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Adobe, Salesforce and Qualcomm are expected to attend.

Dear reader, as 2025, a year of global tumult and volatility, rolls by, Mint's reporters and columnists look around the corner on what is coming in 2026—to help you know what to expect and prepare for it. Tell us what you think at [email protected] July 2025, Mumbai-headquartered Glenmark grabbed the spotlight when it signed what was one of the biggest out-licensing deals for an Indian drugmaker with Chicago-based Abbvie Inc.

India’s economy is at an inflection point. On one hand, we aspire to become a $5 trillion economy soon and project a bold vision of a Viksit Bharat by 2047. On the other, our economic reality tells a humbling story—just as we did not achieve the $5 trillion mark in 2025, as originally envisaged, the vision of ‘developed’ status by 2047 will not be realized if our GDP grows at its current rate.

Many investors look for dividend stocks to include their portfolios as dividends provide steady income and can contribute significantly to long-term returns. They also signal strong fundamentals and offer stability during market downturns.However, dividends should not be the sole focus when buying a stock.

The growing popularity of obesity drugs is expected to spur Indian pharma companies to sign licensing partnerships and distribution deals as they eye the lucrative segment. Indian companies started signing big-ticket deals with innovators for novel GLP-1s, as well as generic versions, last year.

passage of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act in July 2025, US lawmakers added to the sense that crypto is here to stay. But look beyond the hype and an uncomfortable issue remains unresolved: Are cryptocurrencies a genuine innovation capable of serving the common good, or a speculative threat to financial and social stability?Of course, not all cryptocurrencies are alike.

release of a highly competitive chatbot caused a sensation in early 2025. Dubbed the “DeepSeek moment,” it immediately prompted analogies to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. But do such spectacles really mean that China is closing the gap with the West?In considering that question, it is important to bear in mind that no industrial revolution has ever emerged outside advanced democratic capitalism.

The challenge of regulation: Economic theory on market behaviour under a duopoly is subsumed in the larger literature focused on economic dynamics under an oligopoly (few sellers).There has been extensive oligopoly research; the problem is not paucity of theory or models, but the lack of a model that predicts firm behaviour in particular contexts with accuracy and reliability.This is required, as it could form the basis for policy decisions on whether, how and under what circumstances the government ought to intervene with regulatory measures.Empirical research shows that firm performance varies along a continuum bound by perfect competition and perfect monopoly, but not in predictable ways. Thus, the difficulty in formulating useful public policy interventions is that duopoly behaviour is highly circumstantial.

silver bars at ₹55,000 per kg, however, I harboured no such illusions of heroism. I was not riding in to save anyone. My motivation was entirely selfish: to protect a slice of my savings from becoming worthless in a troubled world.Today, at indicative prices of around ₹2,43,000 per kg, I have sold that silver.Selling it, I discovered, was a journey in itself.

Dear reader, as 2025, a year of global tumult and volatility, rolls by, Mint's reporters and columnists look around the corner on what is coming in 2026—to help you know what to expect and prepare for it. Tell us what you think at [email protected] India’s telecom sector moves into 2026, the stage is set for major, high-stakes developments.

Will and Ariel DurantIn the day-to-day intensity of building and running a business, it’s easy to get consumed by immediate decisions, metrics and crises. The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant reminded me of the importance of occasionally stepping back and zooming out. The Durants distil centuries into recurring themes: ambition, cooperation, conflict, resilience, and show how little human nature truly changes.

The government is likely to announce a manufacturing-focused incentive scheme under the Drone Shakti initiative in the Union budget for 2026-27 to accelerate the indigenous production of unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a Moneycontrol report. The proposed scheme is expected to run for five years and align with the period of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, the report said.Here are three drone stocks that stand to benefit should an announcement materialize.

Dear reader, as 2025, a year of global tumult and volatility, rolls by, Mint's reporters and columnists look around the corner on what is coming in 2026—to help you know what to expect and prepare for it. Tell us what you think at [email protected] DELHI: India is pushing to upgrade its image from the 'pharmacy of the world' to a global life sciences hub, a goal that faces critical execution risks, especially concerning quality standards and policy follow-through.

₹5 and ₹10, even as ₹1 candies continue to dominate the market. The shift is part of the company’s effort to balance its portfolio in a candy market still heavily skewed toward ultra-low-value purchases.Nearly 70% of Perfetti’s business in India comes from the ₹1 segment, which dominates small mom-and-pop stores and drives the bulk of category sales. The company plans to increase the share of its ₹5-and-above portfolio from about 30% over the next three to four years; this number stood at just 7% in 2019.

The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Technology for India (Shanti) Act of 2025 is a watershed moment in making nuclear power a part of the country’s decarbonization strategy. It paves the way to achieve a target of 100GW of nuclear power capacity by 2047, while removing structural and legal hurdles that constrained investment, slowed capacity addition and kept the sector technologically insular.The Act heralds three transformative shifts. First, it opens the door for private sector participation in nuclear power generation, equipment manufacturing and fuel-cycle services.

The post-neoliberal consensus is here, but don’t look for it in US President Donald Trump’s policies. After a decade of backlash, it is time to accept not only that neoliberalism is dead, but also that a new consensus is taking its place. Remarkably, significant segments of the left and the right in America have come to agree on the broad outlines of economic policy.

India is a nation on a trajectory of rapid economic growth and today stands at the threshold of a defining era.This growth is being channelled through ambitious national goals that explicitly link innovation with sustainability, notably India’s commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070 and its push to strengthen advanced manufacturing and global technology capabilities through initiatives such as Make in India and the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes.This approach to combining scale with responsibility positions India as an increasingly attractive partner for countries across the world.Finland, a country renowned for innovation, clean technologies, and robust public and industrial systems, shares this forward-looking vision.Finland’s national goal is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, a significantly more ambitious timeline than the European Union’s overall target of 2050.The current annual bilateral trade value between India and Finland, at approximately €3 billion, remains modest relative to the potential of two innovation-driven economies.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The artificial intelligence boom has propelled US technology stocks to historic highs, while India’s IT services sector is struggling to keep pace, slipping into one of its weakest relative phases since 2023. On a rolling three-year basis, the Nifty IT index is now underperforming its US technology peers in the Nasdaq by over 40%.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Bill, 2025, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 16 December, represents the most significant reform of India’s insurance sector in decades. The bill seeks to amends three core laws—the Insurance Act, 1938; the LIC Act, 1956; and the IRDAI Act, 1999—to liberalise foreign investment, strengthen regulation, introduce new intermediaries, and accelerate insurance penetration in line with the government’s goal of ‘insurance for all by 2047’.