The RBI has downgraded its growth forecast by 80 basis points in four months. This has rattled markets. The RBI has projected GDP growth for FY26 at 6.7 percent. However, many economists are sceptical and predict a growth slowdown with tepid private investment, mixed consumption demand, and high global trade uncertainty. What does it take to bring the economy back on the growth track? Neha Bothra speaks to economists to understand the answer to the big question.
The emergence of China’s DeepSeek, which is said to have been built at a small fraction of the cost compared to OpenAI’s GPT large language models (LLMs), has sparked excitement among India’s artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and engineers to build a home-grown LLM from scratch. Currently, India is entirely reliant on models such as OpenAI’s proprietary GPT or Meta’s Llama, an open-source model. Will India have its own AI model? Naandika Tripathi takes a look.
“If you don’t take risks, you don’t gain anything?” “How will you gauge your resilience if you don’t restart from zero?” “Aren’t these hot, red and spicy questions?” Ajay Singh, the chairman, and managing director of Spicejet, laughs as he asks Forbes India’s Rajiv Singh, also alluding to the tagline of his airline, SpiceJet, which he started in 2005. This interview with Singh, the founder of the airline that has survived multiple near-death moments and is now grappling with yet another existential crisis, is emotionally packed and gripping. Read here.
Discover:
1. Tapping into the Indian talent
Salil Gupte, president, Boeing India Image: Amit Verma
Boeing had come to Indian shores in search of the vast talent in the country, especially as the defence cooperation between India and the US has seen an improvement over the past few decades. Last year, the company inaugurated a global engineering and technology campus in Bengaluru, a state-of-the-art centre built with an investment of ₹1,600 crore and spread across 43 acres. In an interview with Forbes India, Salil Gupte, the president of Boeing India, talks about the American aircraft maker’s India GCC operations and how it has been tapping into the talent here to build aircraft for the world. Read more.
2. Going strong on R&D
Manu Saale, MD and CEO of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
Mercedes’s tryst with the Indian shores began in 1994, when the Stuttgart-headquartered automaker brought its globally acclaimed W124 in 1994, importing it through a partnership with the Tata Group, and retailed it for around ₹20 lakh, a princely sum then. Now, as vehicles become more technology-enabled, the German automaker’s R&D arm in India has emerged as a crucial vertical for the company, says Manu Saale, the MD & CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D India. “There is a little bit of India in every Mercedes vehicle across the world,” he adds. Read more here.
3. New in: Agentic AI
L-R: Neha Bothra, Associate Editor, Forbes India, moderated a thought-provoking panel discussion with Nitin Seth, Co-Founder & CEO of Incedo, Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder & Group CEO of Fractal Analytics, and Senthil Ramani, Global Lead – Data and AI at Accenture, at the NASSCOM Technology & Leadership Forum 2025.
As artificial intelligence (AI) opens new frontiers, conversations in Silicon Valley has shifted from GenerativeAI (GenAI) to Agentic AI. At the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2025, held on February 25 in Mumbai, the excitement around Agentic AI was palpable: CEOs, consultants, and strategists exchanged notes on how they can use the transformative power of this technology to drive efficiency and innovation for large-scale impact across industries. Neha Bothra sheds light on the application of Agentic AI in diverse sectors including health care, finance and manufacturing, the need for ‘experimentation’, and more.
4. Curtain call
An Anurag Kashyap-backed movie, ‘Tiger’s Pond’ (Vaghachipani) is a Kannada film set in a village in the Western Ghats “that you can’t find on Google Maps.” ‘Baksho Bandi,’ the Bengali film, about a woman (starring Tillotama Shome) juggling multiple jobs while looking after her PTSD-saddled husband, and, ‘Letters from Wolf Street,’ a ‘very very unusual film’, shot over 10 years in Poland, and in Polish, explores the idea of community and also what it’s like to be an Indian immigrant there. As the Berlin Film Festival comes to a close, film critic and India and South Asia delegate, Meenakshi Shedde, recalls how these Indian films have had an exceptional year at the prestigious Berlinale. Watch for more
RBI has downgraded its growth forecast by 80 basis points in four months. This has rattled markets. Image: Shutterstock
Illustration: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur; Photo imaging: freepik.com 
Ajay Singh, Chairman, and Managing director of SpiceJet Image: Madhu Kapparath