Mihir Sharma, Columnist

Why Indian Companies Don’t Want to Invest in India

Capital expenditure is down in India.

Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

Indian business rarely does exactly what the government wants it to. For the past decade or so, for example, it has obdurately refused to invest as much as officials think it should.

Last week, chief economic adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran said that profits for the 500 largest publicly traded companies had grown by over 30% a year since the pandemic, “but still, our overall capital formation rates from the private sector have been disappointing.”