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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

MVA protests for third day:

Mumbai: The Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) allies continued their agitation for the third day in different parts of Maharashtra with an aggressive state Congress hitting the streets today to protest the detention of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra and other Congress leaders yesterday, here on Wednesday. State and city Youth Congress again carried out vociferous protests near Mantralaya raising slogans, carrying banners and placards slamming the...

MVA protests for third day:

Mumbai: The Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) allies continued their agitation for the third day in different parts of Maharashtra with an aggressive state Congress hitting the streets today to protest the detention of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra and other Congress leaders yesterday, here on Wednesday. State and city Youth Congress again carried out vociferous protests near Mantralaya raising slogans, carrying banners and placards slamming the state and central Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and when some attempted to enter inside, they were prevented by a strong posse of Mumbai Police deployed there since Monday. As tensions appeared to escalate, the police clamped down by detaining top state and city Youth Congress leaders including President Harshwardhan Sapkal, Vijay Wadettiwar, Bhai Jagtap, Hussain Dalwai, and many others. Thousands of students carried out a fresh demonstration at Dadar west Shivaji Park to vent their ire at the police action on Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)’s agitation in New Delhi on Monday. Several MVA leaders and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray visited or expressed solidarity with the protesting youth, comprising many women. Opposition’s Voice The Congress leaders alleged that Rahul Gandhi was targeted by the BJP-led government to muzzle democratic dissent, suppress the Opposition voices inside and outside Parliament and trampling upon the peoples' Constitutional Rights to protest peacefully. Defying pouring rains in the city on Wednesday, Congress workers along with activists of MVA allies, staged a noisy demonstration in Chembur and another group attempted to storm the BJP office in south Mumbai, condemning the assault on students in New Delhi and the detention of the Gandhi siblings. Senior Congress leader Hussain Dalwai flayed the government for “misusing the police” to gag democratic rights and the protests were intended to defend the Constitution and democracy against the BJP’s policy of intolerance of dissent in any form. “This is gross injustice. We are not allowed to protest against the government failures as they are misusing the police. The PM is scared of taking the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as he could be the next. We want to highlight to the BJP to govern the country as per the Constitution,” Dalwai declared, interacting with the media at Nariman Point. As the BJP also threatened to launch counter-protests, the police cordoned off and deployed a precautionary security ring around Tilak Bhavan, the state Congress headquarters, as leaders from both sides exchanged political darts and looked aggressive enough for a confrontation. MVA ‘bandh’, ‘Tricolour’ march today The state is set for another two days of political turmoil as the MVA has announced a Maharashtra shutdown (‘bandh’) on Thursday followed by a non-partisan ‘Tricolour Peace March’ on Friday. MVA allies, Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) President Prakash Ambedkar and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, besides other leaders of the alliance, informed of the state and city level actions today. Ambedkar appealed to the masses and also the BJP youth to participate wholeheartedly in the bandh tomorrow and claimed that students’ bodies, parent-teachers associations, colleges, universities, other institutes of higher education, private coaching institutions, and other governmental departments could support the shutdown, as it has now become a national issue. Aaditya sought the peoples’ participation in the ‘Tricolour Peace March’ on the theme of “One Nation, One Emotion” planned on July 24 afternoon to Shivaji Park, in support of environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk, the Cockroach Janta Party, plus the youth and students protesting in New Delhi. Terming it as a national citizens’ movement rather than a political party, he called upon the people not to carry any party flags but unite under the National Tricolour to assert democratic rights and express resentment against the government’s high-handed policies. Meanwhile, Mumbai Police have already imposed prohibitory orders under Section 144 across the city from July 23-to- August 6, apprehending the possibility of law-and-order disturbances.

New-Age IPOs Are Re-Wiring India’s Growth Story

The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet.

In 2025, India’s IPO market quietly crossed a symbolic milestone of more than Rs 1.7 lakh crore raised in a single year, surpassing even the blockbuster primary issues of 2024. The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet. While the successful listings of Lenskart, Meesho, PhysicsWallah, and Pine Labs are being cheered for their listing gains, the real story lies in their strategic audacity.


For years, the Indian e-commerce playbook dictated by global incumbents focused on asset-heavy warehouses and a ‘Top 10 per cent’ consumer base. The logic was simple: control the inventory to control the experience. Meesho disrupted this by realising that "Bharat" doesn't need a prime subscription; it needs value. But the real genius, which even the most sophisticated logistics players struggled to master, was their backhaul optimisation. Meesho tapped into the fragmented trucking industry’s greatest inefficiency: the return journey. By intelligently coordinating with third-party logistics to fill trucks that would otherwise return empty from Tier-2 and Tier-3 hubs, Meesho slashed delivery costs to levels that asset-heavy giants simply couldn't touch.


The Data: This operational efficiency helped Meesho shrink its FY24 losses from Rs 1,569 crore to a mere ₹53 crore, leading to an 80x-subscribed IPO—a feat of frugality and scale combined.


Lenskart Edge

Legacy retail houses in India treated eyewear as a fragmented, low-frequency medical purchase. Lenskart turned it into a high-frequency fashion accessory. However, their true disruption was vertical integration. While traditional groups relied on complex distributor networks that ate 30-40 per cent of the margins, Lenskart built its own robotic manufacturing ecosystem. By controlling the journey from the factory floor to the customer’s face, they decoupled quality from cost. In FY25, Lenskart reported a net profit of Rs 297 crore, proving that in a market like India, owning the supply chain is the only way to own the customer.


The Edtech sector was nearly written off after the spectacular collapse of marketing-heavy giants. The industry’s "Big Boys" spent billions on celebrity endorsements and aggressive sales tactics, treating education as a product rather than a service. Alakh Pandey’s PhysicsWallah (PW) achieved what legacy coaching institutes and well-funded EdTechs couldn't: scalable trust. By focusing on a "community-first" approach and keeping fees at a fraction of the market rate, PW built a loyal student base that required zero customer acquisition cost. Their pivot to a hybrid model merging low-cost digital reach with physical centres pushed FY25 revenue to Rs 2,887 crore with a growing profit margin. PW proved that in the Indian heartland, brand affinity is built in the classroom, not on a billboard.


Invisible Infrastructure

Traditional banks viewed the Point-of-Sale (POS) machine as a mere card-swiping tool. They ignored the merchant’s deeper pain points. Pine Labs disrupted this by treating the POS as a "Smart Business Terminal". They layered software over hardware, providing merchants with instant EMI, loyalty analytics, and embedded credit rails. This transformed a passive device into an active revenue generator for small businesses. By delivering back-to-back profitable quarters (Q2 FY26 net profit of Rs 6 crore), Pine Labs showed that the future of fintech isn't in competing with banks but in building the sophisticated "soft power" infrastructure that banks lack.


India owes much of its economic foundation to the Tatas, Birlas, and Reliance groups that built steel plants, financial systems, telecom networks, and global brands over decades. But today’s startup founders start with a problem, not a product. They design for Bharat, not just India. They prioritise technology but worship operational excellence. They scale without waiting for permission.


The Lenskart–PW–Meesho–Pine Labs cohort is not the end of an era. It is the beginning of a new industrial revolution, “Made in India, by India, for India.” And this time, the assembly line is not steel or petrochemicals.


It is creativity, technology, trust, and bold entrepreneurship.


(Disclaimer: Stocks mentioned in this article are not to be considered as a recommendation, and the author does not own any of these stocks.)


(The writer is a Chartered Accountant. Views personal.)


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