India’s growth story continues to gain strength, driven by a mix of diversified corporate performance, strategic policy initiatives, and rising investor confidence. Mahindra Group CEO and Managing Director Anish Shah highlighted how the company’s expansion beyond its core auto business mirrors the broad-based momentum across India’s economy, with strong contributions from finance, technology, and agriculture.Honeywell Global Regions’ President and CEO Anant Maheshwari echoed this optimism, noting that India remains a key bright spot for global investors despite worldwide uncertainty.Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran added that government policy continues to focus on enabling frameworks — such as correcting duty structures and enhancing participation in global value chains — to build on the success of the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme and move India from indigenisation toward “strategic resilience and indispensability.”
Below are the edited excerpts from the interview.Q: Talking about September 30 – revenue 21%; if I look at your volumes for the festive season, personal cars, since Diwali is 23% for the industry, that is two-wheelers are 22%. So, excellent volumes for the festive season. What would you guide for the full year? And you are not just an automaker. I understood when I was walking with you inside that he told me he is only 28% an automaker. What is the rest of your universe telling you? So?Shah: If you look at our profits over the last five years, auto is only 28% and the part of auto that everyone loves talking about is less than half of that, which is sports utility vehicles (SUVs). So, as we look at results for this quarter, we actually play in 70% of India’s GDP, and for us, this quarter, July-September of 2025 (Q2FY26), the farm business profit after tax (PAT) was up 54%, Mahindra Finance 45%, Tech Mahindra 35%. Our growth jumped 22% and auto up 14% because we have had some transition, which we caught up in October and therefore, for the quarter itself, was a little lower.But you can just see from that that the Indian economy is firing on all cylinders, which allows us to fire on all cylinders. Therefore, I am very bullish about growth. You started by asking the right person for growth forecasts. I am the wrong person to ask for this, but my forecast would be greater than 8-10% for the next 20 years is what we see from a business standpoint.Also Read: GLS 2025 | OpenAI’s Oliver J: India is shaping how the world learns with AIQ: But for the full year itself, what would you guide for the auto sector and for tractors? Are you confident of double-digit?Shah: Tractors, we do see growing in low double digits now. Our initial estimate was mid-single digit or so, and auto was also much lower. From an industry standpoint, we see it possibly still in single digits, but our guidance for SUVs has been mid to high teens, which we did last year as well, contrary to the industry, and we expect that to continue this year.Q: We in India have been slightly disappointed by the way the foreign portfolio investment (FPIs) have kind of shunned India. There have been outflows for three of the last four years. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is coming, but it is also going because of the very good initial public offering (IPO) market. Since you as Honeywell Global Regions, are looking at the interface between foreign investors, what are foreign investors thinking about in terms of investing in India?Maheshwari: I will use the analogy you used of the tunnel, and I was reading that title, flying into India yesterday in the evening, and I said, I don’t see any tunnels in India, and they are definitely not dark, and if I take the automotive industry example, that that since Shah is sitting here, and if you were flying into Germany or into Japan, and you thought about the automotive industry, yes, there are some tunnels, and you got to think through them in terms of where the brightness is.But I would say, in general, even the numbers that we were talking about, 6.8 or above, the growth numbers that you just spoke about, Mahindra, they are in order of magnitude different from everything else in the world.Also Read: Five reasons why the market bears may be wrongThere may be short-term moves around the FPIs or the FDI, but in general, if you ask any CEO globally, India is a bright spot; the Middle East is a bright spot that they would want to have a general lower risk of investment cycle into these two markets. India, primarily with its consumption-led economy, is a local economy is more, I would say, risk-insulated from the global moves that exist.Q: The tunnel part, for me, becomes relevant when I look at the global picture, global ecosystem, because a lot of CEOs, or at least economists we speak to, tell us that the CEOs are riddled with uncertainty. I mean, you don’t know whether to invest in this country or that because you don’t know how much you will be taxed, where this product may be tariff more. Here, we ask Indian textile guys, will you shift a little bit to Vietnam because the tariff is lower? They said, Who is to say that that will not change two years from now? So, they are not moving. The point is, they are not investing because they don’t know. Is that a likely cloud for us, a likely tunnel for us?Maheshwari: Maybe it is a very sectoral response. If you are today in the business of supporting the data infrastructure, data centres, the networking, the communications, you are supply-constrained on the planet. If you are in the business of supplying any form of energy in any part of the planet, you face supply constraints. If you are in the business of supporting high-tech manufacturing, you are supply-constrained. So, there are many sectors on the planet which are seeing a very uniform aviation, a very uniform investment cycle. So, I don’t see those sectors as being affected. It is more, I would say, short-term sectors where there may be a little bit of a concern, but in the larger picture, I still see a lot of CapEx.Q: We understand that pre-budget consultations are starting sometime soon. Market participants who came here said they have already received invitations from Kartavya Bhavan, for ideas for feedback. We got some very good success stories in PLI. We have got success stories in a way that we have boosted electronics, semi knockdown and complete knockdown into India, assembling. What are the lessons that we have learned, and how can we ramp up to a faster pace of growth?Nageswaran: More than the specific plans, it’s the right set of framework, the legal and regulatory framework that enables successes in some of the sectors, for example, removing the inverted duty structures, exempting primary and intermediate raw material from customs duties, so that making the cost of production cheaper and competitive, those are all the important success stories which we have learned from the electronic sector and so on, and therefore making sure that in the process of boosting domestic production, there has to be a complementary goal of plugging ourselves into the global value chain.That’s equally important, because I don’t think we will succeed only by onshoring everything, but by plugging ourselves more intelligently into the global value system. For example, different countries have been able to have different kinds of leverage with the US administration tariffs, and those were directly influenced by the amount of leverage they had. So, the success of PLI has to encourage us to move from indigenisation to strategic resilience and from then on to becoming strategically indispensable. And that is the lesson we need to draw from the PLI successes and move on to the next stage.Watch the entire discussion in the accompanying video
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