Rising Bharat Summit - West Edition: The Leaders, Markets and Businesses Shaping What Comes Next

At the News18 Rising Bharat Summit - West Edition, presented by HDFC Bank and held in Mumbai on 28 October 2026, the conversation centred on delivery: how a region that anchors India’s financial markets, industrial corridors and manufacturing base is turning investment interest into projects and long-term plans. The edition, themed ‘The Next Phase of Indian Enterprise,’ brought together policymakers, industry leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss industrial competitiveness, new avenues for investment and businesses that can power India’s next chapter of growth.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Shri Devendra Fadnavis anchored the day with the state’s own figures. Fadnavis said Maharashtra’s economy had reached $660 billion since the state set itself a trillion-dollar target in 2015, adding, “We will achieve our target by 2030.” His case rested on delivery: about 60% of the investment MoUs signed in Maharashtra have been acted upon, compared with a national rate of 35-40%.

He also outlined the vision for Mumbai 3.0, a planned city around the Atal Setu and Navi Mumbai International Airport. Its proposed clusters include an Edu City for about one lakh students, with 12 to 15 foreign universities expected, alongside a Medicity, an innovation hub for deep technology and AI, and a hub for global capability centres.

The markets session carried that confidence into the investment outlook. Ridham Desai of Morgan Stanley India noted that with crude oil at $120 a barrel, India’s oil-import bill would remain below 4% of GDP, compared with 13% at 2008 prices. Desai and Prashant Jain of 3P Investment Managers argued that the economy is more resilient than the prevailing narrative suggests, with Jain expecting low- to mid-double-digit equity returns over the next three years.

On artificial intelligence, he said the latest results of major IT companies do not yet indicate a decline in revenue because of AI. He argued that the more immediate change is the rise of global capability centres, which employ around two million people at salaries three to five times those in traditional IT services. Jain said any resulting disruption was more likely to cause “localized pain to those families, to those communities” than destabilise the wider economy.

Consumer founders and investors pointed to the same underlying momentum. “Every space is underpenetrated,” said Arjun Vaidya of V3 Ventures, describing a middle class “that finally has money to spend” and is trading up across categories ranging from smartphones to watches.

Vedang Patel of The Souled Store said the ecosystem has matured, with growth increasingly built on returning customers. Ankush Grover of Rebel Foods observed that convenience and regular consumption now sit alongside celebration as reasons to order food, while Deloitte’s Anand Ramanathan said D2C brands and private labels are prompting established FMCG companies to rethink their strategies.

A panel of entrepreneurs examined what it takes to scale. Nitish Mittersain of Nazara Technologies said he set out to build a business “very resilient to disruption” so that it could take advantage of change, with diversification across geographies, products and monetisation models helping to reduce risk.

Niraj Singh of Spinny said a high-value purchase couldn’t be driven by marketing alone. The platform ran no campaigns for its first six or seven years, relied on word of mouth and launched its first brand campaign in 2022. “You can’t build for scale on day one,” he said.

Dhvanil Sheth of Skillmatics, now present in 30 countries, said, “When the pain points are universal, companies from India can today build globally.” Naiyya Saggi of EDT noted that around 70% of premium devices and appliances purchased across the categories served by EDT are financed through EMIs. She described her aim of making devices feel “like they were made for a market of one.”

Leaders from real estate, capital markets and finance brought the focus to housing. Sumant Rampal, Group Head for Mortgage Business, HDFC Bank, said the average home-loan ticket size across banks is about ₹40 lakh, making a case for lending models that recognise self-employed borrowers in smaller cities. He also noted that the average age of homebuyers has fallen from around 40 a decade ago to 32-33 today, reflecting how homeownership is becoming an aspiration earlier in people’s working lives.

Taking the conversation ahead, Dr Niranjan Hiranandani, Co-Founder, Hiranandani Group, stressed that connectivity must be planned alongside residential and commercial development while Shashank Jain, CEO and MD, BGRE and Brookfield India REIT, urged investors to assess individual locations over a 15-20-year horizon. “It really boils down to micro-markets,” he said.

Across sectors, leaders described an India that is becoming more connected, more consumption-driven and increasingly attractive for long-term investment. The next chapter, they agreed, will be determined by the ability to build faster, allocate capital more intelligently and create enterprises capable of growing with the country’s expanding aspirations.