Mint Techcetra

Mint Techcetra is a Mint podcast from HT Smartcast that treats technology as a national story, following AI and the IT business through India's markets, regulators and global ambitions. It works in two distinct modes. One is a conversation between co-hosts Leslie D'Monte and Shouvik Das, a regular pairing with an easy rapport whose sign-offs wish viewers and listeners a lovely weekend. The India AI Impact Summit threads through several of their conversations, and Shouvik returns from it and from the NASSCOM Summit with a read on the state of the IT sector. Davos also gets a mention as another gathering where AI dominated. These co-hosts do not play neutral narrators. Under the title Are Indian IT Firms Ready for the AI Era?, one of them calls the market's battering of IT stocks unfair and premature. The same conversation credits India's rising leverage as an option in a China-plus-one world, then turns to critics asking where the money behind big commitment figures will come from. Regulation gets the same treatment. In the episode titled Two hours to delete unpalatable AI content. But how enforceable are short takedown deadlines?, the pair note how tricky moderation becomes around caste and read the timing of the move, days before world leaders and tech CEOs gathered in New Delhi, as a statement of sorts. They also set it against the India-US trade agreement, under which the US has pressed for digital trade barriers to come down, and wonder how Meta, Google, YouTube and X will react. The conversation titled Why IMF perception about India being a ‘Second-Tier’ AI Player, needs a revisit leans on digital public infrastructure, the approach that carried UPI into healthcare and is now being extended to AI. Language is part of that case, since regional languages and dialects are thin on an English-heavy internet, and the pair weigh the claim that most sovereign AI efforts are not foundation models in the true sense. The second mode is the guest interview, hosted by Nelson John, where the register moves from banter to briefing. Sovereignty dominates. One guest argues that control now reaches past data to infrastructure, access rights and the AI workloads running on top, and that it should be designed in and monitored around the clock instead of audited once or twice a year. In The Sovereign AI Playbook for India’s Energy Sector, the guest spells out the cost: a sovereign cloud gives up the scale and energy pricing that hyperscalers enjoy, which is why the guest calls for a clear national mandate covering defence, critical workloads and data-heavy uses like oil exploration. A conversation about Zafin starts from basics, asking what its banking software does and how the company has changed to meet banks' current needs. There are lighter moments too, such as a closing aside that plenty of LLM builders are Gen X and boomers. What a listener gets is Indian tech news with the argument left in, and a steady interest in who controls the infrastructure AI runs on.