South Asia Investor Review

The Indian government has hired Jason Miller, a former Trump aide, to lobby for India in Washington, DC for a monthly sum of $150,000 per month. Pakistan has retained Keith Schiller, also a former Trump aide, for a monthly compensation of $50,000 to help Pakistan get favorable treatment by the Trump Administration. It shows that India is outspending Pakistan by 3 to 1 on lobbying in Washington, but it does not appear to be paying off for New Delhi.  Singh's X message said: "Pakistan is paying $50,000 a month to their lobbyist in DC, while India is paying $150,000. Perhaps the lobbyists don't count. It is what Trump think and does that matters, and his personal equation with the leaders of the countries". He also shared a photo of a Times of India report by Chidanand Rajghatta.   Jason Miller served as spokesman for the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign and the Trump Transition Team. Keith Schiller worked as Deputy Assistant to President Trump and Director of Oval Off...

President Donald Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on India's exports to the United States. This is far higher than most countries facing US tariffs. Explaining the punitive India tariffs, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: "India came to the table early. They’ve been slow rolling things. So I think that the president, the whole trade team has been frustrated with them. And also, you know, India, India has been a large buyer of sanctioned Russian oil that they then resell as refined products. So, you know, they have not been a great global actor".  Indian Cartoonist Satish Acharya on Trump-Modi Dialog. Source: Satish Acharya Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump has been signaling his intent to apply tariffs on India's exports repeatedly. Trump has been singling out India as a country with the highest tariffs it applies on exports from the US.  Indian cartoonist Satish Acharya published a caricature of Modi-Trump conversation portraying Modi's i...

The United Nations World Food Program has ranked Pakistan fourth among donor countries and sixth overall in 2024.  Among the largest 15 donors worldwide, the United States topped the list with $4.45 billion, followed by Germany ($995 million), the United Kingdom ($610 million), European Union ($593 million), private donors ($335 million), Pakistan ($228 million), South Korea ($203 million), France ($196 million), Sweden ($183 million), Canada ($166 million), Norway ($158 million), Japan ($155 million), UN Central Emergency Fund ($135 million), other UN agencies ($120 million) and Switzerland ($88 million), according to the  World Food Program .  Top Donors to World Food Program in 2024. Source: WFP The  World Food Program  says that 319 million people in 67 countries are facing acute hunger, and the scale of the current global hunger and malnutrition crisis is massive. "A total of 1.9 million people are in the grips of catastrophic hunger – primarily in Gaza and...

Pakistani civilian and military leaders have recently met with top leaders from China and the US. While Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar has met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistan's military chief Field Marshal Asim Munir has had lunch with President Donald Trump and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during July, 2025.   “Our foreign policy is not a zero-sum game,” Dar said at a presentation to the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington DC. “We hope to see friendly relations between the US and China and do not wish to embroil in bloc politics.”  Pakistan's close ties to both the US and China go back to the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. It was Pakistan which helped arrange the first China-US dialogue in July 1971 when the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew from Pakistan to China to hold the first face-to-face meeting with Chinese leaders.  With increasing US-China rivalry on the world stage today...

Most countries in the world today borrow money from various sources to finance their budget deficits. So do India and Pakistan. So why is it that only Pakistan's borrowing money gets labeled "begging"? Is it not begging when India borrows a lot more money than does Pakistan? Or is it that only borrowing money from the IMF qualifies as "begging"? Let's look into this double standard.  Currently, India's public debt to GDP ratio is 80% while Pakistan's is about 74%. India's private debt to GDP ratio is 17%, twice that of Pakistan. Do these figures mean that India is a bigger beggar than Pakistan?  Debt-to-GDP Ratios Around the World. Source: Visual Capitalist India is consistently among the largest borrowers from International Financial Institutions (IFIs), particularly the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). It has been the top debtor to the World Bank for several years and a major borrower from the ADB.  India’s outstanding loan bala...

Recent data shows that there are nearly 10,000 Pakistani students attending colleges and universities in Germany. This figure is second only to the United Kingdom which issued over 35,000 student visas to Pakistanis in 2024. The second most popular destination for Pakistani students is Australia which is hosting nearly 24,000 students from Pakistan as of 2023, according to the  ICEF Monitor .  Top Countries of Origin For International Students in Germany 2024. Source: Study in Germany Here's a list of the top 15 countries of origin of foreign students in Germany in 2024:  India 49,008 China 38,687 Turkey 18,084 Austria 15,379 Iran 15,159 Syria 13,379 Russia 10,593 Italy 10,154 Ukraine 9,914 Pakistan 9,873 Egypt 8,060 Morocco 7,398 Tunisia 6,852 Cameroon 6,789 France 6,759 This year, Pakistani students won 114 Erasmus Mundus EU Scholarships, the highest number in the world. This makes Pakistan the top country receiving these scholarships for t...

While the Israeli weapons supplied by the "civilized" West are destroying the lives and limbs of thousands of Gaza's innocent children, a Pakistani  startup  is trying to provide them with free custom-made prostheses, according to media reports. The Karachi-based startup Bioniks was founded in 2016 and has sold prosthetics that use AI and 3D scanning for custom designs.  Gaza's Child Amputee Sidra Al Bordini with Bioniks CEO Anaz Niaz. Source: Instagram Bioniks has recently delivered its first prosthetics made for Gaza's children using remote imaging to design custom arms at low cost.  The demand for such prosthetics is high because, according to the United Nations, Gaza has 4500 new amputees since October 7, 2023 Hamas attack which triggered Israel's brutal response and started the ongoing  genocide  in Gaza.  A recent Reuters story cites the examples of two girls,  three-year-old Habebat Alla and 8 year-old Sidra Al Bordini, who recently receive...

The Indian military leadership is finally beginning to slowly accept its losses in its unprovoked attack on Pakistan that it called "Operation Sindoor". It began with the May 31 Bloomberg interview of the Indian Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan in Singapore where he admitted losing Indian fighter aircraft to Pakistan in an aerial battle on May 7, 2025.  General Chauhan further revealed that the Indian Air Force was grounded for two days after this loss.  General Chauhan was followed by Navy Captain Shiv Kumar, the Indian Defense Attache in Jakarta, Indonesia, who explained last month that the Indian Air Force losses occurred due to "constraint by (the Indian) political leadership" imposed on the Indian Air Force. He said the Indian forces had been directed not to target Pakistan’s military infrastructure or air defenses. “Only because of the constraint given by the political leadership to not attack the military establishment or their air defenses,” he s...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to discuss promoting “a durable peace between Israel and Iran,” the State Department said in a statement, according to  Reuters .  Both leaders "agreed to continue working together to strengthen Pakistan-US relations, particularly to increase trade", said a statement released by the Pakistan government. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio The call came after Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire to end what President Donald Trump described as a "12-day war". It is yet another indication of Pakistan's close ties with both Tehran and Washington. Pakistan strongly condemned Israel's "unprovoked attack" and the US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities. It also  shows Washington’s growing engagement with Islamabad at a time when the Trump administration is exploring a new diplomatic initiative with Tehran, possibly “as early as ne...

Anysphere, founded in 2022 by Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell, has been approached by investors about a deal that would more than double its valuation in a new funding round to $18 to $20 billion, according to  Bloomberg .  Sualeh Asif , 25, the Chief Product Officer and co-founder, hails from Karachi, Pakistan.  He studied at Nixor College in Karachi before going to the United States in 2018. He met the other three co-founders while studying at the Massachusetts  Institute of Technology (MIT). One-half (Sualeh Asif and Aman Sanger) of the startup’s founding team is of South Asian origin. The company moved to  San Francisco  soon after its founding in 2022.  Sualeh Asif, Anyshphere Inc's Pakistani-American Founder Anysphere’s lead product is an AI code editor called Cursor AI.  It works as an AI assistant that writes code and also anticipates code developer's needs, identifies inefficiencies, and helps solve compl...

Pakistan imported an estimated 1.25 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of lithium-ion battery packs in 2024 and another 400 megawatt-hours (MWh) in the first two months of 2025, according to a research report by the  Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis  (IEEFA). The report projects these imports to reach 8.75 gigawatt-hours (GWh) by 2030. Using  5.2 hours  per day of peak sunlight translates into 1,898 hours per year. It means that each gigawatt of installed solar capacity can produce up to 1.8 terawatt-hours of electricity in a year, and each gigawatt-hour of battery capacity can store up to 1.8 terawatt-hours of electricity over a year. Currently, Pakistanis consume about 110 terawatt-hours of energy from the grid in a year.   Battery Storage Growth in Pakistan. Source: IEEFA Chinese battery packs have become particularly affordable with rapidly declining prices due to falling raw material costs, overcapacity in manufacturing, and increased production ...

A London-based startup builder.ai, founded by an Indian named Sachin Dev Duggal,  recently filed for bankruptcy after its ‘neural network’ was discovered to be 700 Indians coding in India. The company promoted its "code-building AI" to be as easy as "ordering pizza".  It was backed by nearly half a billion dollar investment by top tech investors including Microsoft. The company was valued at $1.5 billion. This is the latest among a series of global scams originating in India.  In recent years, India has emerged as a major hub for global scams. The US government has alleged in court documents that a large enterprise originating from India was involved in stealing nearly $1.5 billion from elderly Americans. Recently, two Indian nationals, Pranay Mamindi and Kishan Patel, were found guilty of participating in a money laundering conspiracy, concealing the source of the money, and using the illegally gained money to further promote a criminal enterprise.  Six other defen...

Using a homegrown datalink (Link-17) communication system, Pakistan has integrated its ground radars with a variety of fighter jets and airborne early warning aircraft (Swedish Erieye AWACS) to achieve high level of  situational awareness in the battlefield, according to experts familiar with the technology developed and deployed by the Pakistan Air Force. This integration allows quick execution of a " kill chain " to target and destroy enemy aircraft, according to experts. This capability was demonstrated recently in the India-Pakistan aerial battle of May 7-8 that resulted in the downing of several Indian fighter jets, including the French-made Rafale.   Pakistan PAF's Homegrown Link-17. Source: Secret Projects Pakistan Air Force (PAF) pilots flying Chinese-made J10C fighter jets fired the Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missiles and shot down at least two Indian Air Force's French-made Rafale jets in history's largest ever  aerial battle , according to multiple media ...