India's top business leaders, including billionaires Gautam Adani and Sunil Bharti Mittal, on Monday endorsed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to reduce consumption of import-dependent commodities like fuel and gold to conserve precious foreign exchange as a protracted West Asia war fuels price rise.
They also called for strengthening domestic investments, accelerating energy transition, and ensuring self-sufficiency in compute for artificial intelligence (AI) to help insulate the economy from future global shocks.
The industry leaders were speaking at the Annual Business Summit 2026 of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
“We need to get away from this obsession of gold. We need to lower our energy cost. We need to move faster towards renewable energy in our industry,” said Mittal, the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, the promoter group of telecom company Bharti Airtel Ltd.
Mittal pushed for more investments in India, citing the example of his company Bharti Airtel Ltd. The company invested ₹31,000 crore in India in FY25, even more in FY26, and intends to top it in FY27, he said.
“This is not the moment to shy away. This is the moment to double down in our own country. Because the underlying growth is there,” he said.
Adani urges energy and AI self-reliance
Adani Group chairperson Gautam Adani made similar remarks. For any country to be truly self-reliant, it cannot depend on foreign sources for its energy and intelligence, he said. To illustrate his point, he cited the example of the world’s two largest economies, the US and China. He emphasized that despite their completely different systems, they converge on two principles - securing energy and data.
“Energy and intelligence are now inseparable. They must be treated as national priorities,” Adani said. “Because a nation that does not build capability in peace is forced to pay for its exposure in a crisis.”
India's biggest advantage is its large domestic market, Adani said.
“India’s advantage is simple,” Adani said. “Everything we build will already have demand waiting for it. The task before us is to build the capacity that can keep pace with the demand.”
India has already made significant strides in renewable energy, with over 500 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity, and more than half of it coming from renewable sources. He urged a similar push on the AI stack across power generation, compute capacity, and application.
Venu Srinivasan, the chairman emeritus of TVS Motor, said that India must have a trade surplus of manufactured goods just like it does in services. That would ensure that events like the West Asia war do not put a strain on the economy.
“To win the war for the world markets, we have to develop products, processes and services that are timely and of high quality at low cost,” he said. “This is the challenge that our country faces.”
“We welcome the Hon’ble Prime Minister’s call for greater awareness and collective action towards fuel preservation and energy security," Anish Shah, the group chief executive & managing director of Mahindra Group, said in a press statement on Monday evening. "At a time when the world is navigating heightened energy volatility, these measures underscore the importance of responsible consumption and long-term sustainability."
PM’s remarks spark market chatter
Modi on Sunday urged Indians to adopt covid-era measures to save foreign exchange amid a global oil crisis, recommending a return to work-from-home (WFH) practices, reducing personal fuel consumption, and avoiding non-essential foreign travel and gold purchases for a year. His comments resulted in the stock markets falling on Monday, with the Sensex closing with losses of 1,300 points, or 1.7%, at 76,015.
At the CII conference, away from the formal speeches, the real buzz was in the huddles and side chats. The PM’s comments, its timing, and the fact that he said it at a public rally got executives talking. Several executives and industry insiders wondered aloud if the government had picked up some fresh information or was quietly recalibrating its approach to the economy and public messaging. “Why say this now?” was a question heard more than once.
There was another theory doing the rounds: that this could be early preparation for higher fuel prices. With global tensions keeping energy markets on edge, some felt retail fuel price hikes may not be far away — and that the Prime Minister was perhaps trying to prepare the public for tougher economic conditions ahead.