Forbes India Rewind 2021: Our most loved podcasts of the year

'Pandemonium' by veteran banking editor Tamal Bandyopadhyay is a deeply researched and reported book which narrates untold gripping stories from the Indian banking ecosystem. From the bad loans war room created far from the Mint street, in Mumbai, to understand the rot in the banking ecosystem; how banks were not properly reporting non-performing loans, to the arrests made in connection to the disbursal of such loans—he breaks down the nuances of bad loans in India, the key players, and a collection of rare interviews of past Reserve Bank of India governors on what they think has caused the big banking mess. The book also highlights the fractured relationship between the Centre and the officials in the Mumbai office on how policies should be framed and implemented. Bandhopadhyay discussed his book on our podcast, where non-fiction authors provide insights into their writing. The book offers scantly available information on what happened behind the close doors while a team was identifying the NPAs in the banking ecosystem, and the overhaul by governor Raghuram Rajan on the bad loan mess. Find the full playlist of From the Bookshelves of Forbes India here. 

In this episode, we spotlighted a health-tech company, Mfine, which is developing a platform for patients and doctors to be better informed even before a consultation. Mfine is one of India’s most popular mobile health service apps. It allows users to consult doctors online, buy medicines, and book tests and have samples collected at home. It also includes an AI-powered self-check feature for a small number of diseases. In this conversation, Ajit Narayanan, CTO at Mfine talks about how the four-year-old Bengaluru startup is bringing AI in healthcare to millions of users.

Use of computer learning and AI has been around for some time, he points out, in areas like intelligent medical imaging, for example. What Mfine is working on, is to bring AI algorithms to the consumer space. With over 1,000 conditions today, Mfine has developed a virtual doctor that gathers all the information needed from the patient, following specific standardised protocols, and summarises the information for the human doctor.

The summary offers investigation details, pointers on what the differential diagnosis could be, and even what treatment regimens might be useful. The patients aren’t exposed to this, but the doctors get to see it on their Mfine-for-doctors app. “Doctors benefit by the thorough investigation done using AI,” Narayanan says. That and the biggest headlines of the day that day.

In this episode, we brought you the second part of a conversation with Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, a blockchains company. Polygon is perhaps the most successful blockchain protocol to come out of India, with Matic, its native token, surging in value to billions of dollars in recent times.

The company, started in 2017 by three Indians and a Serb, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, is working to make it easier and cheaper to use the Ethereum network. In this conversation, Nailwal talks about his hopes for how Polygon might shift the outlook on blockchain from transactions to interactions.

Because Bitcoin was the first, and the most popular, blockchains, the current “mental model” is around transactions, he says. In time, this will switch to “interactions” with all sorts of digital entities, he says.

Another notable phenomenon will be the rise of ‘decentralised autonomous organisations’, Nailwal says — for everything from building technology on blockchain networks to collectively owning art.

And Nailwal and his co-founders aim to be an important blockchain network — rivalling Ethereum — that will facilitate a large number of these interactions. That and the biggest headlines of the day that day.

On CEO Rajesh Gopinathan's watch, Tata Consultancy Services, one of the world's top IT companies, is ready to shed the outsourcing legacy and embrace symbiotic transformational journeys with its biggest customers.

With Rs 75,000 capex play, Reliance Industries is planning to give green energy its Jio moment. The move has the potential to make RIL the largest green energy business in India, and it takes forward Ambani’s plan to become a carbon-zero business by 2035. A large part of Reliance’s green energy rollout would be in the solar space. Here, the technology is reasonably mature and it provides an opening for RIL to reduce India’s imports from China. In the pipeline are plans to build four gigafactories in Jamnagar. For storage of intermittent energy, the company plans to set up a battery manufacturing facility. The market is unclear whether these batteries would be of the sophistication required for electric vehicles or whether they would be for supplying electricity during times when solar or wind power is not available.

In the next decade, experts predict that hydrogen fuel cells would power cars, aircraft and ships as well as data centres, telecom towers and micro grids. If Reliance manages to produce hydrogen at scale, it could emerge as a leader in this area. Samar Srivastava, cover story author gives a peek into Reliance Industries’ green gambit, in the cover story.

The Forbes India 30 Under 30 2021 nomination forms were brimming with the stories of India's young professionals and entrepreneurs, and made it challenging for the team to debate and decide on 30 winners that will be called the Forbes India 30 Under 30, Class of 2021. Ruchika Shah gives you a glimpse into putting the list together, while Kathakali Chanda talks about India's rising star Shubman Gill, our cover man for the fortnight and also the youngest on the list.

Entrepreneurs innovated their businesses to survive the Covid-19 shock and to help others. Take, for example, the 29-year-old duo who founded Classplus to digitise local coaching centres and boasts 50,000 teachers on their platform. Another 29-year-old is giving a voice and stage to entrepreneurs from beyond metro cities, a growing necessity in the post-Covid-19 world. Piyush Verma, founder & CEO, Manush Labs, helps innovators and entrepreneurs from tier 2 cities and beyond get access to mentorship, network, markets and even funding. This podcast gives a glimpse into our most exciting list, one that unfailingly gives us a reality check every year.

Change comes from within, and that is what Tata Consultancy Services—one of the world's biggest IT services providers—has been undergoing, even before Covid-19 struck. In this free-ranging conversation with Forbes India, CEO Gopinathan articulates what it takes to change an organisation that has more than half a million employees—most of them engineers. The aspiration is to set the company on to its next phase of evolution, to retain and build on its engineering prowess, but also to step up much more as a trusted strategic business advisor.

In this episode, we turned our cover story interview with Rajesh Gopinathan, TCS’s CEO, into a podcast conversation. Gopinathan spoke with candour about the change he is trying to bring about.

On the engineering front, TCS is right up there with the very best in the world. Gopinathan himself is credited with conceptualising TCS’s machine-first delivery model, for example. The change that Gopinathan is effecting is on another front — one on which Indians, traditionally, haven’t fared very well. This is the ability for engineers to value their work not in terms of the elegance of the technical work involved, but in terms of the business value delivered, which could be far higher.

Gopinathan talks about how that realisation, and acting on it, will have truly far reaching consequences for TCS’s future. Going forward, he sees TCS sitting at the intersection of his biggest customers’ business and technology needs—offering advice and the tech know-how to help those customers to chose the ecosystems best suited for their needs. On Gopinathan’s watch, TCS is also learning to become its own best salesman.

Founded in 2012 by Abrar Mir and Dr Amit Varma, Quadria Capital invests around 40 percent capital in the Indian market while the remaining is for the Southeast Asian market, and now manages assets of nearly $2.1 billion. Varma talks about the fund’s acquisition of a 15 percent stake in global topical drugs manufacturer Encube Ethicals for a total consideration of $119 million and its $70 million investment in female hygiene company and India’s first senior diaper maker Nobel Hygiene. He talks about Quadria’s upcoming exits of its vintage fund and why the pandemic is an open lesson on the need for public healthcare infrastructure. In this candid interview, Varma talks about one vertical that the fund has not been able to crack which is the tech-enabled healthcare deal space, even as it has been looking at it for last three-four years. While Varma and his team believe that there is no debate that health tech is the future, it has roped in an operating partner to close deals in this space.

In this episode, we brought you the first part of a conversation with Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, a blockchain company. Polygon is perhaps the most successful blockchain protocol to come out of India, with Matic, its native token, surging in value to billions of dollars in recent times.

The company started in 2017 by three Indians and a Serb, Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Mihailo Bjelic, is working to make it easier and cheaper to use the Ethereum network. In this conversation, Sandeep Nailwal, one of the founders of Polygon talks about how blockchains will become a “paradigm shift” in the way people interact digitally in the future.

At the heart of this shift is the idea of decentralisation of trust—taking it away from any kind of centralised entity and vesting it in a network of users. In practice is easier said than done, in part because of the current technical difficulties thanks to the way the existing blockchain networks are built and operate. It’s not easily accessible or affordable to all unlike the way today’s internet is.

And a central reason for Polygon’s existence is to change that state of affairs, Nailwal says. To that end, Polygon is a “layer two” block chain network, he says, which aims to facilitate the development of multiple applications that millions of people can use for hundreds of millions of interactions every day. Here’s a playlist of the Tech Briefing podcast. If you’re into in-depth conversations with tech’s big executives and players, hop over to Daily Tech Conversation here.

In this episode we spotlighted an agri-tech company focused on digital technologies. In this conversation, Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, founder and CEO of AgNext Technologies talks about bringing AI to agriculture. Advances in technologies like computer vision and machine learning and how AI algorithms are becoming more mainstream, and startups in multiple fields that are bringing new, digital technologies to old problems.

Bhamra’s Chandigarh company is developing data-driven solutions to tackle various problems in agriculture. One important aim was to eliminate the subjectivity around the quality of the food in a sale of produce—be it at the farm gate or at a warehouse or a factory.

AgNext is applying both hardware sensors and software programmes to change the way food quality is assessed across the entire supply chain. This could mean more transparent transactions for farmers and buyers, and better quality food products for consumers. AgNext is also representative of a generation of agri-tech startups that are coming of age in India. 2021, in fact, was a pivotal year for many of them. They saw wider commercialisation of their technologies and greater investor interest as well.