Numbers don’t lie. But they do hallucinate.

If you spent any time at the ET Now Global Business Summit this week, you saw the hallucination in real-time. It was rendered in high-definition 4K on massive LED screens. The magic number is one trillion. That’s the share of the GDP Maharashtra is expected to shoulder to drag the rest of India toward its $5-trillion finish line. It’s a nice, round, heavy number. It’s also a hell of a lot of weight for one state to carry while its primary city is literally sinking into the sea a few millimeters at a time.

The vibe in the room was exactly what you’d expect from a high-level junket in 2026. Cold air conditioning, expensive espresso, and men in sharp suits talking about "synergies" as if they’ve discovered a new element. They haven't. They’ve just found a new way to repackage the same old grind.

The math here is brutal. To hit that trillion-dollar mark, Maharashtra needs to grow at a clip that would make a venture capitalist blush. We’re talking double digits, sustained, without a single hiccup in the global supply chain or a single political spat at home. It’s an ambitious play. Maybe too ambitious. While the speakers on stage talked about "leapfrogging" tech cycles, the reality on the ground is more about trying to get a permit to build a data center without losing your mind to bureaucracy.

Let’s talk about the friction. You can’t build a trillion-dollar sub-economy on vibes alone. You need land. In Mumbai, land is more expensive than moon dust. To make this work, the state is betting big on the "New City" model—expanding into the hinterlands, praying that the infrastructure reaches those spots before the capital dries up. There’s a specific $100 billion gap in infrastructure spending that nobody likes to talk about during the keynote speeches. It’s the "missing middle" of the balance sheet. Who pays for the roads that don't flood? Who pays for the power grid that doesn't buckle when every factory turns on its server racks at 9:00 AM?

The talk of the summit was, predictably, the shift from services to manufacturing. The "China Plus One" strategy is the ghost that haunts every panel. Everyone wants the factories. No one wants the labor strikes. The trade-off is simple: automation. If Maharashtra wants to be the trillion-dollar engine, it’s going to do it with fewer humans on the factory floor. That’s the quiet part they don't say out loud while they’re talking about "inclusive growth." You don't get to a trillion by being nice to the old ways of doing business. You get there by cutting the fat until you hit the bone.

Then there’s the tech. They’re calling it the "Intelligence Era" now because "AI" got too cringe in 2025. The plan is to turn Pune and Nagpur into silicon hubs that rival anything in the West. It’s a tall order when the talent is still eyeing the exit door for a visa to Dubai or Amsterdam. To keep the brains at home, you need more than just a big GDP target. You need a city that works. You need a life that doesn't involve a two-hour commute in a humidity level that mimics a sous-vide cooker.

The state government is pushing "ease of doing business" like it’s a religious mantra. They’ve cut some red tape. They’ve digitised a few more forms. But the friction remains. It’s in the hidden costs. It’s in the price of electricity, which remains some of the highest in the country for industrial users. It’s in the logistical nightmare of moving a container from a factory in the interior to the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust without it getting stuck in a bureaucratic vortex.

We’ve seen these summits before. We’ve seen the Memorandums of Understanding signed with gold-plated pens. Most of them end up as digital dust in a forgotten cloud server. This time, they say it’s different because the pressure from the top is immense. New Delhi needs Maharashtra to win. If Maharashtra fumbles, the $5-trillion dream doesn't just stall—it evaporates.

So, we watch the charts go up. We listen to the ministers tell us that the "momentum is undeniable." We look at the $1-trillion target and we wonder if anyone checked the plumbing. It’s easy to project a trillion dollars when you’re standing in a ballroom. It’s much harder to find it when you’re looking for it in the mud.

What happens when the spreadsheets finally meet the monsoon?