July 19, 2026

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THE NEW VEDANTA

WE CHOOSE DIFFICULT businesses, but they are also the right businesses to be in," says Anil Agarwal.Few sectors test that conviction like natural resources, where fortunes are shaped as much by commodity cycles and regulation as by operational execution. Agarwal, the founder of the Vedanta Group, has spent decades navigating both. Now, after restructuring Vedanta Ltd into five separate listed companies, he is preparing for his next big wager--a $20-billion investment plan over the next three-five years, funded largely through internal cash generation.Based in London, he makes time in Mumbai for a chat with Business Today on the eve of public listing of the new companies. This follows a demerger of Vedanta Ltd, the listed entity that he heads as the Non-Executive Chairman. The stated rationale is unlocking shareholder value, though reducing debt at Vedanta Resources--the holding company--is equally critical.Agarwal is known for his ambition and tenacity. It's no different this time. He believes each of the five listed entities--Vedanta Aluminium, Vedanta Iron & Steel, Vedanta Oil & Gas, Vedanta Power and Vedanta Ltd--can become a $100-billion revenue company.The ambition is underpinned by a portfolio of market-leading businesses. Hindustan Zinc Ltd (HZL) is the world's largest integrated zinc producer and commands nearly 74% of India's primary zinc market. Vedanta Aluminium is India's largest aluminium producer and the third-largest globally, backed by a fully integrated operating model. Vedanta Oil & Gas is the country's largest private sector crude oil producer with a strong asset base, while Vedanta Power is the

INDIA'S QUANTUM MOONSHOT

FOR DECADES, we've been told that the secret to digital safety is complexity. Add uppercase letters. Throw in numbers. Sprinkle special characters like #, %, and &. The more random the password looks, the safer your bank account, email, and identity supposedly become.In classical computing, this logic has held firm. Modern encryption is protected by mathematics so vast that even the world's fastest supercomputers would need billions, sometimes trillions, of years to crack it. Our financial systems, military communications, cryptocurrencies, and even WhatsApp messages rest on one assumption: that the math is too hard and the clock will run out before hackers ever succeed.But the foundations of that digital trust are beginning to shift.An emerging generation of machines--quantum computers--does not play by the rules of conventional computing. If a traditional computer is like a locksmith testing one key at a time, a quantum computer can explore countless possibilities simultaneously. Problems that would take today's most powerful computers thousands of years could, in theory, be solved in hours or minutes. In that world, the strength of passwords may no longer matter.The fear surrounding Q-Day--the expected moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to crack encryption algorithms that secure the internet--is one facet of the story. Quantum computing represents a much larger technological shift, one that could reshape industries ranging from healthcare and materials science to finance and energy. Here is how it works: Traditional computers process information step by step using bits that exist as either 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously, allowing them to process many possibilities at once instead of checking every option sequentially. Experts say this could help in areas such as drug discovery, battery design, logistics optimisation, climate modelling, and advanced financial simulations, tasks where the number of variables overwhelms conventional systems.This has triggered an intense global push towards mastering the technology. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel are racing to build stable quantum systems, while governments, from the United States to China, are treating quantum capabilities as strategic assets comparable to artificial intelligence or advanced semiconductor infrastructure. Having missed out on semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence revolutions, India has launched a National Quantum