Fortune India - April 2017

It’s the beginning of a new financial year for most of us, and this seems the appropriate time to look into the crystal ball, read the tea leaves, and otherwise try to tell the future. Not the high-tech one where there are flying cars and Mars has been colonised, but a future we will most likely be a part of, say a decade from now. There’ll be drones and driverless cars, sure, but how will all this affect any given business? And that’s what we set out to answer in this issue.

There’s a lot of interesting work being done in India by multinationals, especially in Bengaluru. Much of this is outsourced to India, and really should not be called “Indian” innovation. Speaking of outsourcing, what’s going to happen to this once lucrative business? Senior assistant editor Viraj Nair caught up with recent Padma Shri awardee B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, now chairman of Nasscom, to understand if outsourcing as we know it is really going to die.
Catch this story on page 84.

Padma Shri awardee, Subhash Palekar, a farmer, tells that Indians have known about the future of farming for generations—it’s all about going back to age-old methods that are safe for humans and soil. At the same time, there’s cutting-edge innovation in this space, including using drones to analyse farms and deliver fertiliser and pesticide. Read the full story on page 72.

Assistant editor Debabrata Das began speaking to real estate consultants and developers and buyers to understand the future of housing. The more conversations he had, the more he realised that his generation, the millennials, was perhaps never going to be able to afford to buy a house in a city. The future of housing, he discovered, is probably going to be in rentals. It’s something parts of the world have already discovered, but is a concept that’s just begun to be spoken of in India, a must read on page 78.