Inside India - On the way to becoming a world power

India is on its way to becoming a world power. Around 1.43 billion people already live there today, more than in China. India's economy is growing rapidly. In four years, the Indian economy will have overtaken Germany and Japan. The country is currently in fifth place and aims to be the third-largest economy in the world by 2030.

The main growth drivers are the large cities and the innovation hubs that the government is building and expanding everywhere, specializing in biotechnology. There are now over 2,700 bio start-ups and over 2,500 biotech companies. Consequently, India also approved genome-edited plants in 2022.

Although half of the population still lives in rural areas, India is not just an agricultural country. Its most important exports are oil and oil products as well as pharmaceuticals. India is the world's largest supplier of generics.

Digitalization has also long since found its way into the agricultural sector. And the country has established one of the largest agricultural research systems in the world: the National Agricultural Research System (NARS), which includes the institutes of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and the State Agricultural Universities (SAU). They are intended to help secure India's food self-sufficiency on the one hand and meet the country's demand for agricultural technologies on the other.

There is no way around India in the future. That is why there will now be an India special in every Global Food Summit newsletter. We will present start-ups, entrepreneurs and companies as well as the most important research institutions and players in biotechnology and agricultural technology. With first-hand information and interviews in India.

And sometimes we also take a look at India's neighbouring country Bangladesh, which is one of the world's emerging economies with around 170 million mostly young inhabitants.