A state visit to New Delhi by the President of the Swiss Confederation, marking the first anniversary of the India–EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA), produced agreements on migration and mobility, young professionals, transport and infrastructure and science. It also opened talks on defence production and nuclear energy — widening a relationship long defined by trade, banking and gold.

• Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement: legal pathways for students, researchers and professionals, alongside co-operation against irregular migration. India has similar pacts with France (2018), the UK (2021) and Germany (2022).
• Young Professionals Agreement: temporary work-and-skill exchange for young Indians, with an annual quota reported at 300, expandable to 500.
• Transport, mobility & infrastructure agreement: builds on Swiss work in the Varanasi ropeway (India's first urban public-transport ropeway), Noida International Airport (Jewar) and mountain rail and tunnelling.
• Science and start-ups: new joint research calls in health, clean energy and space; a DST–Swiss National Science Foundation framework; and an academic tie-up with a Zurich university to train science start-ups.
• New domains: military exchanges, defence production, civil nuclear energy, and Yoga and Ayurveda.
• Technology governance: after India hosted the AI Impact Summit in February 2026, Switzerland will host the Geneva AI Summit in 2027; both back responsible, inclusive, human-centric AI.
• Business track: an India–EFTA “Prosperity Summit” of business leaders on 7 October 2026 to turn TEPA's investment promise into projects.

Figure 1 — TEPA at a glance

India's first FTA with a European bloc — 4 EFTA states, 14 chapters, a USD 100 bn investment goal and 1 million direct jobs. Image courtesy Press Information Bureau; reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Capital and technology: Swiss firms lead in precision engineering, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and tunnelling — all aligned with India's manufacturing and infrastructure goals.
• Himalayan infrastructure: Alpine expertise in tunnels, ropeways and avalanche protection suits India's mountain rail, road and urban ropeway projects.
• Talent mobility: an ageing European workforce and India's young population make mobility pacts a two-way gain.
• Tax transparency: India has received Swiss bank account data under the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) framework since 2019.
• Multilateral convergence: both support reform of global institutions; Geneva hosts the WTO, WHO, ILO and the UN Human Rights Council.

• No investment treaty: India terminated its 1997 Bilateral Investment Treaty with Switzerland in 2017, after adopting its Model BIT (2015); Swiss investors seek a new protection pact.
• Patents: Swiss pharmaceutical firms have long objected to Section 3(d) of the Patents Act, 1970, which bars patents on minor changes to known drugs (“evergreening”). The Supreme Court upheld it in the Novartis (Glivec) case, 2013. India maintains that its TEPA IPR commitments stay at TRIPS level.
• Tax treaty: in December 2024, Switzerland suspended the Most-Favoured-Nation clause of the India–Switzerland DTAA after an Indian Supreme Court ruling (2023), raising withholding tax on dividends for some investors.
• Trade imbalance: India runs a large deficit, driven mainly by gold imports, plus machinery and pharmaceuticals.
• Different geopolitics: Swiss neutrality aligns it with many Western initiatives on Ukraine; India follows strategic autonomy and avoids bloc-based sanctions.

• Track TEPA investment sector-wise through the India–EFTA Desk at Invest India, steering it into PLI sectors, medical devices and green hydrogen.
• Negotiate a balanced investment treaty that offers predictability without diluting regulatory space.
• Co-development in pharma — joint R&D, clinical research and API manufacturing in India — rather than adversarial IPR disputes.
• Operationalise the mobility pacts with mutual recognition of skills and qualifications.

India's first national-level pilot to build rural homes with 3D Concrete Printing (3DCP) under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–Gramin (PMAY-G) began in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, on 4 October 2026. It tests whether robotic construction can deliver rural housing faster, with less waste and to a standard design.

• 2021: India's first 3D-printed house, built by IIT Madras and its start-up Tvasta on the IIT Madras campus.
• 2023: India's first 3D-printed post office, at Cambridge Layout, Bengaluru.
• Policy cradle: MoHUA's Global Housing Technology Challenge–India (2019) and six Light House Projects (2021) tested alternative building technologies in urban housing.
• Global: Dubai's 3D Printing Strategy (2016) targets 25% of new buildings to be 3D-printed by 2030.

• Gains: faster construction, less material waste, no wall formwork, uniform quality, and disaster-relief, remote-area and defence uses.
• Cost and scale: the pilot's per-unit cost is well above PMAY-G norms; economics improve only with printer utilisation at scale.
• Codes and approvals: standards for printed structural walls, especially in seismic zones, are still evolving.
• Livelihoods and fit: automation may reduce work for local masons; designs must allow for later extension, local climate and thermal comfort.
• Carbon: cement-rich printable mixes need low-carbon binders such as fly ash or calcined clay to be sustainable.

As of September 2026, the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) has commissioned 40 supercomputers with a combined 68 petaflops (PF), against a target of 50 systems and over 123 PF. More important for self-reliance, India now designs its own servers, interconnect, cooling and system software.

• 1988: faced with Western export restrictions on supercomputers, India set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune.
• 1991: PARAM 8000 — India's first indigenous supercomputer, at about 1 gigaflop.
• 2008: PARAM Yuva, about 54 TF.
• 2015: NSM launched in April with an outlay of about ₹4,500 crore, jointly steered by DST and MeitY, implemented by C-DAC and IISc Bengaluru.
• 2018: weather supercomputers Pratyush (IITM Pune) and Mihir (NCMRWF, Noida); succeeded in 2024 by Arka and Arunika.
• 2023: AIRAWAT, C-DAC's AI supercomputer, entered the TOP500 at rank 75.
• 2024: three PARAM Rudra systems, built on indigenous servers, at Pune, Delhi and Kolkata.

Figure 4 — NSM progress snapshot

About 80% of planned systems are deployed, but only about 55% of planned compute — the larger machines are still to come. Image courtesy Press Information Bureau (source: MeitY); reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Rudra servers: designed by C-DAC, manufactured by Indian EMS firms after technology transfer; 6,000 deployed in PARAM Rudra systems, 1,500 more in production.
• Interconnect: an indigenous high-speed node network tested at 100 Gbps and 200 Gbps.
• Cooling: indigenous technology now in deployment — critical because power and cooling dominate running costs.
• System software: a complete Indian HPC software stack.
• PARAM Shavak: a “supercomputer-in-a-box” for colleges and universities.
• Build approach: three concurrent phases — assembly, manufacturing, and design-and-manufacture — to raise domestic content step by step.

• Health: a genomics and drug-discovery platform used during COVID-19 to screen existing drugs and predict side-effects such as cardiac risk.
• Disasters: flood early-warning up to 2 days ahead in the Mahanadi basin; a forest-fire spread model tested in the Sikkim Himalayas.
• Cities: an urban decision-support system forecasting heavy rain and air pollution.
• Energy and materials: seismic imaging for oil-and-gas exploration; simulation suites for materials science and chemistry.
• User agencies: IMD, Central Water Commission, CPCB and the Ministry of AYUSH.

• Processors: the CPUs and GPUs are still imported; full self-reliance depends on indigenous chip design under the India Semiconductor Mission.
• Scale: India's total NSM compute (68 PF) is far below a single exascale system; AI workloads are rapidly raising demand.
• Energy efficiency: power is the main running cost — hence the focus on indigenous cooling.
• Utilisation and access: spreading users beyond elite institutes, and convergence with the IndiaAI Mission's GPU compute, will decide the mission's return.

The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2026 finds that the people who trust online banking most, and use UPI most often, are more likely to have been cyber-fraud victims. Victims who turned to their banks also reported delays, deflection of liability and suspicion of insider data leaks.

• Risky behaviour, high confidence: among the most vulnerable users (who open links from strangers or share OTPs), 49% called online banking “very safe” and 39% “somewhat safe”. Among less vulnerable users, only about a fifth said “very safe”.
• Trust tracks victimisation: 28% of victims rated online banking “very safe”, against 14% who rated it “very unsafe”. Victimisation fell as perceived safety fell.
• Frequent users hit more: those using UPI “many times” were more likely to be victims than those who never use it.
• Reading it: convenience breeds over-confidence; frequent, habitual use lowers guard against social engineering.

• Fraud “kits”: pre-activated SIM cards, bank accounts and phones sold for about ₹10,000–20,000, enabling thefts of lakhs or crores.
• Methods: fake investment and betting apps, impersonation, and “digital arrest” — victims held on video calls for days by fake officials. Indian law has no such procedure as a “digital arrest”.
• Money mules: ordinary people are tricked into lending their accounts; they are caught as the most replaceable link while organisers stay hidden.

• Victims act fast: 52% of financial-fraud victims complained to their bank; 63% of them within 24 hours.
• Banks deflect: in all but one interviewed case, banks said the victim had “collaborated” with the fraudster — even where there had been no contact. The exception was a high-net-worth client.
• Delay costs money: in one case, an account was not blocked for more than a day after the complaint, and fraudsters took a ₹5 lakh loan against the victim's credit card in the meantime.
• Suspected insider leaks: 40% of victims who complained to banks believed a bank insider leaked their data (26% among others); 5 of 13 interviewed fraud victims suspected bank complicity.
• Mule accounts: experts point to weak due diligence when opening accounts.
• Low satisfaction: more than 1 in 5 victims were “very dissatisfied” with banks' recovery role and 16% “somewhat dissatisfied”, with little difference between public and private banks.

• Enforce the RBI burden-of-proof rule, with time-bound blocking of accounts and penalties for delay.
• Hold banks accountable for data leaks under the DPDP regime, with audits of insider access.
• Choke the supply chain: stricter KYC at account and SIM issuance; AI-based mule-account detection; faster inter-bank freezing.
• Victim-centred redress: a single-window recovery process and recognition of non-financial harm.
• Behavioural awareness aimed at confident, frequent users — not only the digitally new.

The Union Defence Minister launched Surya (FSS-1), the first of five indigenous Fleet Support Ships, and laid the keel of FSS-5 at Hindustan Shipyard Limited (HSL), Visakhapatnam, on 6 October 2026. He urged Indian shipyards to move beyond self-reliance to global competitiveness.

• Blue-water reach: sustained presence across the Indian Ocean Region — anti-piracy, HADR and long-range carrier operations — depends on logistics as much as on combat ships.
• Self-reliance in auxiliaries: large support ships were previously sourced abroad; this is the biggest such series built in India.
• Yard capacity: HSL modernised Shipway No. 4 and added a 300-tonne Goliath crane, raising dock capacity to 80,000 DWT and building capacity to 45,000 DWT.
• Defence-industrial base: India's defence production reached a record ₹1,50,590 crore and exports ₹23,622 crore in FY 2024-25.

• Delivery record: Indian shipyards have a history of time and cost overruns; series production will test HSL's capacity.
• Remaining 18%: engines, propulsion and some systems still depend on imports.
• Commercial competitiveness: going global, as the Minister urged, requires cost parity with East Asian yards, design capability and assured order books.

The Silk Road was not a single road but a network of land and sea routes linking East, Central, South and West Asia for more than a millennium. Along it moved silk and spices, and also religions, technologies, art styles, languages and scientific knowledge.

Figure 8 — The main overland (red) and maritime (blue) routes

India sat at the junction of both systems — overland through the north-west, and by sea through its western and eastern coasts. Map: Kelvin Case (CC BY-SA), as published in The Hindu; reproduced with credit for educational use. Map is schematic and not to scale; it does not depict political boundaries.

• Buddhism: from India through Central Asia into China; the Bamiyan Buddhas and the Mogao caves at Dunhuang mark the route.
• Papermaking: spread west from China; tradition links its arrival in Samarkand to the Battle of Talas (751 CE).
• Other faiths: Christianity, Manichaeism and later Islam.
• Knowledge: music, astronomy and astrology, and medicine.

• UNESCO World Heritage: “Silk Roads: Routes Network of Chang'an–Tianshan Corridor” (2014; China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) and the “Zarafshan–Karakum Corridor” (2023; Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).
• Project Mausam (2014): Ministry of Culture initiative on India's Indian Ocean cultural and trade links.
• New Silk Roads: China's Belt and Road Initiative (2013) borrows the imagery; India opposes the CPEC segment as it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Indian territory, and backs connectivity alternatives — INSTC (2000), Chabahar and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC, 2023).