Prices climb: CPI at 5.54%, WPI at 11.39%

Retail inflation rose to 5.54% in September from 4.83% in August, data released on 12 October showed. Food inflation hit 7.74%, led by onion prices that more than doubled. It is the highest reading since the new CPI series (base year 2024) began in January. Wholesale (WPI) inflation, released on 14 October, jumped to 11.39%, a record for the new WPI series (base year 2022-23), driven by food, fuel and manufactured goods.

Exports jump 23% in September

Merchandise exports grew 23.04% to $44.40 billion in September, while imports rose 8% to $74.61 billion. The trade deficit narrowed to $30.21 billion, from $33 billion a year ago. Electronics exports rose about 70% and gold imports fell 81%.

China becomes top trading partner in H1

India-China trade rose nearly 29% to $91.76 billion in April-September 2026-27, putting China ahead of the US ($83.14 billion). The trade deficit with China widened to $68.93 billion. The US remained India's largest export destination.

Fairfax to take control of IDBI Bank

On 14 October the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the sale of a 60.72% stake in IDBI Bank to Canada-based Fairfax Financial Holdings for ₹52,878 crore (₹81 a share). The government will keep 15% and LIC 19%. The government called it the largest FDI ever in India's financial sector.

Direct tax collections up 13%

Net direct tax collections rose 13.21% to ₹13.38 lakh crore between 1 April and 14 October. Gross collections were ₹16.03 lakh crore, and net corporate tax grew 20.58%.

Results season

HCLTech reported a September-quarter net profit of ₹5,132 crore, up 21%, on revenue of ₹35,620 crore.

Nobel Peace Prize for Navi Pillay

On 9 October the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2026 Peace Prize to Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, a South African jurist of Indian Tamil origin, "for her efforts to promote peace and international law". Born in Durban in 1941, she served on the UN tribunal for Rwanda and was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Economics Nobel

On 12 October Robert E. Hall (Stanford) and Michael Woodford (Columbia) won the economics prize for "microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation", the last Nobel of 2026.

Pakistan: emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

President Asif Ali Zardari imposed a six-month emergency and governor's rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, removing the PTI provincial government. Chief Minister Sohail Afridi was taken into preventive custody.

Ship sinks in Strait of Hormuz

A cargo ship carrying about 2,500 containers sank in the Strait of Hormuz on 14 October. Iran said it hit a mine; a US official said Iran attacked it.

AI fighter prototype

Bengaluru start-up Flying Wedge displayed a static prototype of FWD Supreme, an AI-piloted fighter of about 1.5 tonnes, in New Delhi on 13 October. It has not flown yet.

Asian Games: 85 medals

On 15 October PM Modi met India's medallists from the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, where India finished fourth with 85 medals (21 gold, 27 silver, 37 bronze). Both hockey teams won gold: the men beat Malaysia 5-1, the women beat China 1-0.

Cricket and football

West Indies beat India by 24 runs in the fourth T20I in Hyderabad on 14 October, levelling the series 2-2; Shai Hope hit 102 not out off 50 balls. India's U17 women's football team qualified for the AFC U17 Women's Asian Cup 2027 in China, scoring 20 goals without conceding.

In 1965 Gordon Moore, who later co-founded Intel, noticed that the number of components on a chip was doubling every year. In 1975 he revised his estimate to a doubling every two years. This prediction, known as Moore's law, is not a law of nature. It became a target that the chip industry raced to meet for decades.

How many is "many"?

The Intel 4004 of 1971 held 2,300 transistors. Apple's M3 Ultra, announced in March 2025, holds 184 billion. That is about 8 crore times more.

What researchers are working on now

• Gate-all-around transistors: the gate, which turns the switch on and off, wraps the channel on all sides for better control at tiny sizes. Samsung began producing 3-nanometre chips with this design in June 2022. Intel calls its version RibbonFET.
• Chiplets: instead of one large slab of silicon, smaller chips are joined inside one package. The M3 Ultra itself links two M3 Max dies through more than 10,000 connections.

India's push

In December 2021 the Union Cabinet approved Rs 76,000 crore for semiconductor and display manufacturing and set up the India Semiconductor Mission. In September 2026, at SEMICON India 2026, the government unveiled its roadmap for Semicon 2.0, with a focus on chip design, equipment, fabs, advanced packaging, research and talent.

Takeaway for students

The transistor began as a lab experiment with gold contacts and a piece of germanium. Every chip since then has grown out of the same school subjects: physics, chemistry and mathematics. Learn them well, and the next breakthrough could come from an Indian lab.

Having sent waves through walls, Bose turned to living things. Do plants respond to the world the way animals do?

To find out, he built the crescograph, an instrument that recorded tiny growth movements at the tip of a plant. Using two levers, each magnifying 100 times, it could enlarge that movement about 10,000 times. Bose argued that plant and animal tissues show deep parallels in how they respond to stimuli.

A temple of science

On his 60th birthday, 30 November 1917, he dedicated the Bose Institute in Calcutta to the nation, and led it for the rest of his life. He was knighted the same year.

Not merely a laboratory but a temple. — J.C. Bose

In 2012, IEEE, the world's largest engineering body, named his millimetre-wave experiments a Milestone, with a plaque at Presidency College.

The lesson for students

Bose had no big laboratory and no equal pay. What he had were questions, patience and self-respect, and he chose to share his ideas openly rather than lock them away. Small resources do not make small work. The size of your work is decided by the size of your questions.

The student's hobby is now one of the largest open-source projects in the world.

In your pocket

Android, the leading operating system on smartphones, is built on the Linux kernel. Google takes long-term supported Linux kernels and adds Android-specific changes on top. So every Android phone runs a kernel whose story began in a Helsinki student's room.

Inside the fastest computers

The TOP500 project ranks the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers twice a year. Since November 2017, every single system on the list has run a Linux-based operating system.

In servers and the cloud

Linux is the leading operating system on servers. Estimates from 2024 suggest it handles at least 80% of public cloud workloads, on platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Built together

Volunteers and companies work on the same code. A 2017 analysis of the kernel found that well over 85% of the code came from programmers paid for their work, by firms such as Intel, Samsung, Google and AMD. Rival companies improve one shared kernel because all of them depend on it.

The lesson

Linux did not begin as a grand plan. It began with one student solving his own problem and sharing the result openly, with a humble note asking for feedback. Start small, share your work, and welcome help from others. That is how a hobby grew into software that runs much of the modern world.

George Eastman saw early that film earned more than cameras. Kodak sold a camera once, but customers bought film, paper and chemicals for years. This razor-and-blades model kept Kodak rich for decades, and its revenue peaked at $16 billion in 1996.

Digital photography needs no film and no printing. Kodak's own staff saw this coming: a 1979 internal report by Larry Matteson predicted a complete shift to digital by 2010. But film sales kept rising through the 1990s, and executives were reluctant to pour money into a small new market.

Kodak did make digital cameras. By 2005 it was No. 1 in US digital camera sales, but margins were thin and cameras were often sold at a loss. Then phones absorbed the camera. By 2010 Kodak's share was about 7%.

Kodak today

A much smaller Kodak now works in commercial printing, advanced materials and chemicals, and motion-picture film, and licenses its brand to other makers. Its 2025 revenue was about $1.07 billion.

Lessons

• Your cash cow can become a trap. Kodak guarded film profit instead of building the next one.
• Inventing is not owning. Kodak invented the digital camera; others built the business.
• Follow the profit, not the product. Value moved from cameras to phones and sharing.
• A correct forecast is useless without action. Kodak's warning came 30 years early.

In 1965 Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Kurien to repeat the Anand model across India, and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was set up. In 1970 NDDB launched Operation Flood, later called the White Revolution.

The first phase was paid for by selling milk powder and butter oil donated by the European Economic Community. It linked 18 milk-producing regions to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. By the end of 1985 the programme covered 43,000 village co-operatives and 42.5 lakh milk producers. It ran in three phases until 1996.

In 1998 India overtook the United States to become the world's largest milk producer. In 2024-25 it produced 247.87 million tonnes of milk.

Amul today

Amul is marketed by the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), set up in 1973 and owned by about 36 lakh farmers. In 2025-26 the Amul brand's total turnover crossed Rs 1 lakh crore; GCMMF's own sales were Rs 73,450 crore. Kurien died in 2012. His birthday, 26 November, is National Milk Day.

Lessons

• Ownership changes behaviour. Farmers who own the dairy have every reason to protect it.
• Build the whole chain. Collection, processing and selling were built together.
• Question what experts call impossible. Buffalo-milk powder was one such "impossible".
• Scale what works. Operation Flood copied a proven village model.