Sandeep Roy

India has officially overtaken the US in EV car sales as a percentage of new car sales. As fuel prices are being increased in India, we are already at 6%+ in May!

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it. Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak. Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people." 1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support. 2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade. 3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility. 4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing. India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

This isn’t an edit of Libertango. It’s the birth of a new Libertango. Nothing but awe from start to finish. 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐨💃 [𝐁𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧] 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐨𝐧 𝐱 𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐧,𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨,𝐩𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐨 (𝐀.𝐏𝐢𝐚𝐳𝐳𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚) / 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 고상지