India, Dec. 28 -- Economic reform is often described as a continuous process, incremental corrections made as technology, demographics, and markets evolve. That is how reform appears in textbooks. In reality, reform arrives in bursts. Long periods of institutional inertia are punctuated by short windows when political, economic, and strategic constraints bind simultaneously. In hindsight, 2025 will be remembered as one such year for India.

What made 2025 distinctive was not any single policy change, nor the scale of ambition alone, but the clustering of reforms across domains that rarely move together. Taxation, labour, capital markets, energy, regulation, and welfare were all touched within a compressed period. It reflected a recognitio...