Now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sacrificed his poorly designed makeover of India’s farms at the altar of electoral math, there will perhaps be no fresh attempt at reform for a decade. That’s a shame for urbanization. Agriculture in the second-most-populous nation suffers from many…

Amazon.com Inc. won a crucial court case to halt billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s planned $3.4 billion purchase of an indebted Indian retailer, a big boost to the global e-commerce giant’s ambitions of dominating the country’s $1 trillion retail market. On Friday, a two-judge bench of India’s Supreme…

The world may be going crazy over digital currencies, but tiny Singapore is swimming against the tide. The central bank has decided against offering a paperless version of the city-state’s legal tender — at least for now. Not because an electronic version of cash may flop, but because it’ll most…

When it comes to saving the planet, the ambition of India’s reach is praiseworthy. The challenge lies in the weakness of its grasp. After emphasizing for years that a pathway to going green was more important than a deadline, India surprised delegates at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow by…

What exactly do the likes of BlackRock Inc. and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board see in the unprofitable Indian payments startup heading for the country's biggest-ever initial public offering? A simple answer: the raw power of data. Paytm, formally known as One97 Communications Ltd., has…

Even official money is quasi-private in Hong Kong, with people interchangeably using the IOUs of its three note-issuing banks. But as central banks around the world plan to take cash digital, can this arrangement hold up? Or will the city’s 7.5 million residents have to deal in a brand new currency…

Digital businesses are helplessly losing their Indian customers. And nobody knows how many will eventually return and after how long. From smartphone apps to websites, anyone with a regular, card-based payment arrangement with subscribers has run into a roadblock put up by the central bank. For…

Drop in at Air India Ltd.’s Mumbai office in early 2001, and you might have come across an elderly, white-jacketed man winding up the clock. With 17,400 employees and just 24 planes — three times the staffing level at major US airlines — silly tasks like timekeeping in the headquarters had become…

The Maldives and Sri Lanka, both highly tourism-dependent tropical islands, have seen the pandemic devastate their economies and finances. Government debt this year is expected to linger above 100% of gross domestic product in the two small Indian Ocean nations. Unsurprisingly, both have similar —…

Will banking meet the sorry fate of newspapers? With the tech industry creeping up on licensed deposit-taking institutions in India, it’s time to take the question seriously. Alphabet Inc.’s Google already provides one of the two most popular payment wallets in the country. But now Google Pay…