eNews
Moneycontrol exclusive: PM Narendra Modi on G20, global affairs, economy, and more
Mumbai: In an exclusive interview to Moneycontrol days before India readies to host the G20 Leaders Summit, PM Narendra Modi spoke at length on global issues, India’s growth prospects and its role in G20 and the overall economy.
In an hour-long conversation at his 7, Lok Kalyan Marg office with Network 18 editors (Network18’s editor-in-chief Rahul Joshi, Network18 chief content officer Santosh Menon, Network18 managing editor (digital) Karthik Subbaraman, Moneycontrol’s chief content & strategy officer Javed Sayed), the prime minister also shared his views on inflation and the dangers of freebies.
Talking about the India growth story, the prime minister said, “India’s growth is not only good for Indians but also for the world. India’s growth is clean and green growth. India’s growth is being achieved with a human-centric approach that can be replicated in other countries too. India’s growth helps further the interests of the Global South.”
It’s the prime minister’s first interview to a digital-only publication in his second term. The full interview will be published on Moneycontrol.com at 7:30 am on Wednesday 6 September.
Sharing his views on India’s role in the G20, the prime minister said that India has been advancing the interests of the developing world, including the interests of nations not represented in the G20, such as the countries of the African Union.
“Perhaps for the first time in the history of G20, the troika is with the developing world—Indonesia, India, and Brazil. This troika can amplify the voice of the developing world, at a crucial time when there are increased tensions due to global geopolitics.”
The prime minister said that India has been proactive in finding solutions for global issues and the same is also reflected in the country’s agenda for G20. “When we laid out our agenda for the G20, it was welcomed universally, because everyone knew that we would bring our proactive and positive approach to help find solutions for global issues.”
Prime minister Modi also said that the world is now convinced that India will play a larger role in shaping the global future.
“When global leaders meet me, they are filled with a sense of optimism about India due to the efforts of 140 crore Indians across various sectors. They are also convinced that India has a lot to offer and must play a larger role in shaping the global future. This has also been witnessed in their support for our work through the G20 platform.”
Talking about the G20 events and conferences that took place across the length and the breadth of the country in the last few months, the Prime Minister said, “Our democratization of the G20 Presidency is our investment in the capacity building of the people, especially youth, of various cities across the country.”
Asked about India’s guiding principle for engaging with the world, the prime minister said it was no different from what his government followed at home.” We have followed the approach of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, Sabka Prayas in our country over the last 9 years…. This is our guiding principle in global relations as well.”
Talking about the problem of heightened inflation globally and its impact on India and countries of the Global South, prime minister Modi said, “As far as India is concerned, we have taken a number of steps to control inflation. Even in the face of adversities and global dynamics, India’s inflation was two percentage points lower than the global average inflation rate in 2022. Yet, we are not resting at that and are continuing to make pro-people decisions to boost ease of living. For example, recently on Raksha Bandhan, you saw how we reduced the prices of LPG for all consumers.”
Sharing his views on debt vulnerabilities and damage to the economy from freebies, “The long-term implications of such policies destroy not only the economy but also society. The poor pay a heavy price. Yet again, the good thing is that people are becoming increasingly aware of the problem,” the prime minister said.
“In this information age, news about the debt crisis in one country is travelling to many other countries. People are analysing the situation and awareness is spreading. This is helpful for other countries to take precautionary steps to avoid a similar situation in their own countries, with the people’s support. In our own country too, on multiple platforms, I have spoken about the need to be alert against financially irresponsible policies,” he added.
The prime minister said that India’s political stability is the main reason why every sector could see deep reforms which led to stronger economic prospects for the country. “Due to this political stability, every other sector could see deep structural reforms. The economy, education, social empowerment, welfare delivery, infrastructure – I can keep on mentioning sectors that have seen reforms.”
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
