A proper newsletter, and other thoughts
Deep Tech Dispatch Issue #1 | A newsletter from India Tech Report
Hi,
Wherever you’re reading this, I hope you’re doing well.
My news today is that I’m attempting to bring you a proper newsletter, instead of just the basic alerts as and when I publish a post. I guess this is part of the ‘what next’ as I step into the second year of my podcast.
The featured image above is an AI generated one, as you would have guessed. My prompt to generate it was something like this: “A new newsletter on deep tech in India gently floating into a mailbox on a reader’s smartphone.”
And then it it took a couple more tweaks to get the colours of the newsletter to reflect my logo’s colours. Probably not very original, but It’ll do. Let me know what you think, if you feel like commenting below. So let’s go.
Two headlines that caught my attention
Govt plan to replace old commercial vehicles in Delhi-NCR
The Union Cabinet approved a ₹9,585 crore, two-year scheme to replace approximately 2.07 lakh old trucks and buses (BS-IV or earlier) in the Delhi-NCR region. The initiative offers financial incentives, tax concessions, and discounts to encourage transitioning to cleaner BS-VI or electric vehicles, aiming to curb air pollution.
Why this matters: This could move the needle on accelerating the electrification of the transport sector in the national capital.
India remains engaged with the US over proposed tariff hikes
India is actively negotiating with the United States regarding proposed Section 301 tariff hikes on 60 economies. While the USTR seeks public feedback on these measures ahead of July hearings, India is concurrently finalizing a bilateral framework agreement to address the issue and protect trade interests.
Why this matters: The final outcome of these negotiations will have a bearing on India’s deep tech startups too — from what they still need to import to how overseas investors view India-domiciled deep tech ventures, potentially affecting their funding.
Coming up: World Environment Day
Tomorrow is World Environment Day, and coming up on India Tech Report is an interview with Devdut Dalal (Dev), Xavier Laguarta Soler (Xavi) and Nathan Torbick (Nate), founders of Mitti Labs, on their plan to help rice farmers cut methane emissions from their fields, save water and eventually make money by selling the methane reductions as carbon credits.
Mitti Labs, while headquartered in the US with a team in India, is a truly multinational startup, with Dev in Bengaluru, India, his Harvard mate Xavi in Barcelona, Spain and Nate, a noted scientist who’s worked at NASA, in Durham, New Hampshire in the US.
It’s a longish interview and in fact would have gone on longer if Nate hadn’t had to jump off, after joining the call first and being patient with all my questions for about 75 minutes. But do listen to even a few minutes randomly — I’ll be sure to add chapter markers.
Meanwhile, here’re a couple of previews that are already out to give you taste of what they had to say.
And if you’re interested in more on World Environment Day, like for example, it has a theme and a host (the Republic of Azerbaijan, this year), here’s just a suggestion on where to start:
https://www.worldenvironmentday.global/2026/about/theme-and-host
Next week
On Tueday, I’ll publish Part 2 of a conversation with Naganand Doraswamy and Suryaprakash Konanuru, founders of Ideaspring Capital, a leading early-stage deep tech venture capital firm in India, based in Bengaluru.
Ideaspring celebrated their 10th year anniversary earlier this year, and we covered a lot of ground in the interview. Part 1 starts with a discussion of their latest investment, the $13 million Series A fuding at HrdWyr, a chip design startup that the vc firm led. Check out the episode below.
That’s it for today. A couple of other things I did in recent weeks are, I tried to clean up and declutter the website. Think it looks decent now, but work in progress, as always. And I went back to Transistor to host my podcast, so you the listener gets a clean and efficient podcast player on every page and post.
Let me know what you think. I’ll try my best to be consistent. Please support my work by sharing this with your friends. I wish you a great rest of the day.