What do biriyani and UPI have in common?

Hello DoorDesi,

Do you do resolutions every year? I do. One. At best two. So I can actually stick to them. SMART goals and all that… Speaking of goals, I was reading this week’s newsletter by Adam Thomas (love his stuff, by the way) and it was about year planning and I kid you not, I thought about you guys.

I thought, why don’t I share some of the non-newsy stuff that I read, and find useful, with you guys? And boy, I read newsletters by the dozen each week! So, in the spirit of passing the wisdom along, here is his piece on Year Planning and what he has learnt about setting goals. I could relate to it so I thought maybe you guys could too, or perhaps take a thing or two away from it?

On a less ‘looking ahead’ note, Mahashtra municipal polls just concluded and there are claims of several polling booths not having used the indebible ink. Instead they used permanent markers, according to many claims including some personal contacts. So yaay for the world’s largest ‘democracy’!

2026 is shaping up to be quite the year!

Stay sane, stay hydrated.

Just the gist

🔗 A new tariff for every morsel (of rice)

Remember the ‘up to 500%’ tariff that Trump is ready to impose on India and other countries that continue to buy Russian oil? Well, add to that another 25% tariff and you have a man-child, a joke of a foreign policy, and a ‘Vishwaguru’ on its knees.

Iran happens to be the third largest buyer of India’s basmati rice exports because… and get this… “a cup of milled 1718 or 1509 grains give around 4.5 cups on cooking, making it possible to serve more plates of biriyani from the same quantity of rice“. And I thought I love biriyani! :D

Anyway, the ongoing protest in Iran has drawn a lot of (opportunistic) international critique. While people are dying on the streets in Iran at the hand of the State machinery while fighting for their right to live a decent, dignified life, Trump is here imposing 25% tariff on countries doing any trade with Iran.

But who is really paying the price? The prices of these strains of rice have dropped in the India as a result. It is also more expensive for buyers in Iran to buy them now because the government of Iran ended the preferential exchange rate it had in place for essential goods such as rice. So yeah… the burden, once again, falls on everyday people trying to keep food on the plate.

➡️ Administrations around the globe have made a mockery out of the foreign policy, trade agreements, and basic human decency. The price war, trade or arms, is always borne by the most vulnerable.

🔗 When one door closes, another opens

So while Trump is on his Godzilla-esque tariff rampage, India is swiping for a new partner and it might just have found one in the EU. India is on its way to sign a free trade agreement with the EU which will ease trade between India and the 27 countries in the EU bloc. Not bad! 27 birds with one stone.

The EU market accounts for about 17 per cent of India’s total exports, and the bloc’s exports to India constitute 9 per cent of its total overseas shipments. India’s textile exports to the EU alone face 12-13% tariff making them less competitive compared to the same from Bangladesh and Vietnam. So with the FTA in place, my fellow EU dwellers, get ready for more Made in India clothes! (but seriously, avoid fast fashion like the plague!).

➡️ To give you a sense of exactly how monumental this is, besides the fact that India now desperately needs to diversify thanks to Trump and its overreliance on China, the trade agreement talks between India and the EU began in 2007. So this has been 20 years in the making! That is two-thirds of my life! So if we cross the bridge this time, we will have crossed a long long bridge.

🔗 The hidden cost of convenience

A golgappawala once taunted me for giving him cash, looked almost distressed that he’d have to find change somewhere. That triggered me to get UPI and my visits to India since have been ✈️. Beeeep done. Beeeeep done.

But this convenience comes at a cost of ₹2 per transaction. However, this cost is neither borne by me nor the merchant. It is borne by the banks, the fintech companies, and eventually the government in the form of subsidies to the companies. So while UPI has brought with a form of financial inclusion for a large part of the society, it is not sustainable in the way that it is set up now.

Without reform to the current policy, there are chances of fintech firms stalling rural expansion and cutting back on operations while even today only 45% of the India’s merchants have UPI transactions and even that is concentrated in tier-1 and tier-2 cities.

➡️ While UPI has revolutionised business to business and peer to peer transactions in India, causing wonder among many, it is also slowly crippling the system. A reform that is less handout based and more longterm overall sustainability focussed is necessary.

🔗 The unseen infrastructure need of a changing economy

India loves talking about startups like they’re Pokémon cards: valuations, funding rounds, unicorn counts. Very shiny. Also… kind of missing the point.

The real economic value of startups isn’t capital at all, it’s people. Startups matter because they create formal jobs, train talent, and quietly upgrade how the entire labour market works. By the end of 2024, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade had recognised over 1.5 lakh startups, reporting 17 lakh direct jobs. Mostly formal, skill-intensive roles in IT, healthcare, logistics, and professional services.

Government policy, therefore, should not be focussed on keeping startups from failing because that’s a part and parcel of innovation. It should be focussed on ensuring that talent circulates efficiently across firms and sectors, allowing skills to compound. Startups have also reported difficulty in hiring skilled professional, ones that have skills required for high-growth ecosystems.

➡️ What we need to invest in, as a country, is skills as an infrastructure, making our curriculum more responsive to the changing work place.

Read with me

🔗 How deep are the pockets in the Valley?

India is flirting with a big idea: if AI companies want to train their models on Indian copyrighted content, they should pay a mandatory licensing fee, likely pegged to a slice of global revenue.

For companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon — walking away isn’t really an option. India isn’t just another market. It’s the market with the largest population in the world, WhatsApp and Facebook’s biggest user base, ChatGPT’s second-largest market after the US, and a country where Big Tech has already sunk tens of billions into AI infrastructure.

India’s argument is simple. If you want high-quality, multilingual Indian data to make your models actually work here, you need Indian creators. And if you need Indian creators, you pay them.

Naysayers are many. Critics argue that this will slow innovation, big creators will capture most of the money, while small ones get crumbs, and that banning opt-outs removes agency. But litigation is slow, expensive, and stacked in favour of deep pockets. Licensing, for all its flaws, creates rules before the courts get involved.

➡️ If this works, it could reshape how AI is trained globally, how creators get paid, and whether countries outside the US and the EU get a real say in the AI economy.

Thank you for reading this far!

With love on behalf of two women who cringe at the mention of chai tea latte,

Sudeshna

Co-Founder, DoorDesi 💃

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