The domestic benchmark indices opened higher on Monday amid positive global cues, as selling was seen in the IT, PSU bank and financial services sectors in the early trade.

At around 9.29 am, Sensex was trading 396.06 points or 0.50 per cent up at 78,949.26 while the Nifty added 98.20 points or 0.41 per cent at 23,949.85.

Nifty Bank was up 862.25 points or 1.59 per cent at 55,152.45. The Nifty Midcap 100 index was trading at 52,891.30 after adding 233.50 points or 0.44 per cent. Nifty Smallcap 100 index was at 16,460.35 after climbing 50.15 points or 0.31 per cent.

According to market watchers, after the positive opening, Nifty is likely to find support at 23,700, followed by 22,600 and 22,500. On the upside, 24,000 may act as the immediate resistance, followed by 24,200 and 24,500.

“Bank Nifty charts indicate potential support at 54,000, followed by 53,700 and 53,500. If the index moves higher, resistance could emerge at 54,500, with subsequent levels at 54,700 and 55,000,” said Mandar Bhojane of Choice Broking.

Large private banks took the lead, surging to new all-time highs. Their quarterly results over the weekend aligned with market expectations and will continue to drive markets higher, said experts.

According to analysts, US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to India comes with hopes that both countries can secure a quick deal and a reprieve from weightier levies while maintaining a 10 per cent baseline tariff.

As earnings season progresses, market participants will scrutinise corporate commentaries for insights into how businesses adapt to the new tariff regime and what they observe throughout their supply chains and customer bases, said Devarsh Vakil, Head of Prime Research at HDFC Securities.

Meanwhile, in the Sensex pack, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, HCL Tech, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank were the top gainers. Whereas, Asian Paints, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Titan, Sun Pharma and UltraTech Cement were the top losers.

In the last trading session on Thursday, Dow Jones in the US declined 1.33 per cent to close at 39,142.23. The S&P 500 added 0.13 per cent to 5,282.70 and the Nasdaq declined 0.13 per cent to close at 16,286.45.

In the Asian markets, China and Bangkok were trading in green. Whereas Jakarta, Japan and Seoul were trading in red.

The foreign institutional investors (FIIs) extended buying on third day on April 17 as they bought equities worth Rs 4,667.94 crore. However, Domestic institutional investors (DIIs) extended their selling on third session as they sold equities of Rs 2,006.15 crore on the same day.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Indian shares continued to fall sharply on Monday, with the Sensex and Nifty crashing about 5 per cent in early trade, mirroring a sharp fall in global equities.

Sensex, a pack of India’s top 30 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, lost 3,939.68 points or 5.22 per cent to 71,425.01, while Nifty, the National Stock Exchange index, dropped 1,160.8 points or 5.06 per cent to 21,743.65. 

The collapse reportedly wiped out investors’ wealth worth Rs 20.16 lakh crore in early trade.

Other Asian markets also slumped, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropping nearly 11 per cent, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 plunging nearly 7 per cent, Shanghai SSE Composite index tumbling over 6 per cent, and South Korea’s Kospi index declining 5 per cent.

Last week, the Sensex sank 2,050.23 points or 2.64 per cent, while the Nifty dropped 614.8 points or 2.61 per cent.

Why Indian Stock Market Is Down Today

The Indian stock market crashed as US President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes and retaliation from China fuelled investors’ jitters amid fears that a full-blown trade war will impact economic growth across the world.

President Trump has sparked a market meltdown after he unveiled sweeping tariffs against US trading partners last week. China also hit back, saying it would impose retaliatory levies of 34 percent on all US goods from April 10. 

The tit-for-tat moves have now raised concerns of a prolonged trade war.

“Reciprocal tariffs, even if temporary, highlight the increased uncertainty for companies and investors,” Reuters quoted Kotak Institutional Equities analyst Sanjeev Prasad as saying.

“The performance of Indian markets in the next few weeks will depend on whether there is a reconciliation or retaliation in the tariff situation and behaviour of India’s retail and domestic institutional investors,” he said.

VK Vijayakumar, the Chief Investment Strategist at Geojit Financial Services, said that the markets globally are going through “heightened volatility caused by extreme uncertainty”. 

“No one has a clue about how this turbulence caused by Trump’s tariffs will evolve. Wait and watch would be the best strategy in this turbulent phase of the market,” he was quoted as saying by the news agency PTI.

It is not a well-known yet an interesting fact that Vinod Khosla, often described as the hottest venture capitalist on the planet and a technology pioneer who was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, had relocated to Delhi, the city he grew up in, around the mid-1990s to be closer to his parents, not far from IIT Delhi where he studied. But the Internet opportunity that followed saw him move back to Silicon Valley, where he remains a cutting-edge figure in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), medical technology and cryptocurrency.

My days tracking and meeting the man who now runs Khosla Ventures after leaving Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm that funded companies like Amazon and Google, came to mind last week as I heard the timely but controversial statement by India’s commerce and industry minister at the ‘Startup Mahakumbh’ jamboree. “Are we going to be happy being delivery boys and girls… Is that the destiny of India? This is not a startup; this is entrepreneurship… What the other side is doing—robotics, machine learning, 3D manufacturing and next generation factories,” Goyal said, showing a slide titled ‘India vs China. The Startup Reality Check’.

What To Learn From Khosla

The word ‘startup’ is often used loosely, but ideally should refer to technology-driven companies that can grow big through innovations. My view is that cutting-edge entrepreneurship is more about adventurous ambition than just growth. People like Khosla have a mental streak that shows passion for novelty, not mere get-rich-quick ideas. We need more like him.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the entrepreneurial plumbers and builders of new technologies as such, but there is more to the future than that. When technology companies like Infosys were built in the 1980s and 1990s, the word ‘startup’ was not even in vogue. But then, it became the first Indian company to list on the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in 1999.

A subsequent rush of VCs in India became less about technology and more about demographics. India’s surging, increasingly affluent population and an Internet boom made VCs fuel a greed to build the so-called ‘unicorn’ startups that commanded a valuation of a billion dollars or more – usually with an eye on IPOs.

A ‘This Of That’ Culture

What we had as a result was what tech investor Kashyap Deorah calls a “this of that” culture: Paytm became the PayPal of India, Flipkart was dubbed the Amazon of India, Swiggy and Zomato cloned Delivery Hero and Yelp with some tweaks. They mostly addressed a local market and built local brands, but not real intellectual property (IP) based on novelty on a global scale. That requires guts and an outlook of a different kind. Somewhere along the way, we started mistaking upstarts for startups. VCs and naive journalists fed into the hype.

The irony is that India has had real startups that are less celebrated. InMobi, a mobile ad platform that rivals Facebook-owner Meta, was hailed as India’s first unicorn and is expected to have an IPO this year, nearly two decades into its existence. InMobi is the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, engaging more than 750 million consumers across 165 countries. It is said to have turned down an acquisition offer from Google a decade ago.

I-flex solutions, built in the 1990s, was acquired by Oracle for close to a billion dollars. It was a cutting-edge banking software company with a global footprint. Chennai-centred productivity software company Zoho competes with Microsoft.

However, we are yet to produce a breathtaking product like Google. China is not quite there yet, either. But it is trying hard and big, as we have seen with the arrival of DeepSeek, a disruptive AI model.

India has had a long, credible history of nurturing research through the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and other state-run bodies that set the base for cutting-edge innovation. Even ISRO and the Defence Research and Development Organisation have made quiet innovations. What we lack is new-age thinking by entrepreneurs that goes from ambition to adventure and closer innovation links with these establishments.

When Steel Was Like AI

Let’s now raise a toast to the memory of Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, who dared to think of making steel in the middle of a rural jungle in a colonially oppressed country in 1907. For the India of those times, steel was like AI. Verghese Kurien built Amul in rural Anand when the word ‘startup’ did not exist in the Indian lexicon. The kind of adventurous streak shown in those ventures is something current entrepreneurs could learn from. Patience, patents, and perseverance separate the men from the boys and women from the girls in a true startup universe. Not scale, speed and salesmanship.

But it must be admitted that risk appetite requires context. You have to feel comfortable enough not to confuse a gamble with entrepreneurial chutzpah. We also need to cut down on a dubious culture of startup wannabes wanting corporate freebies from the government – from land to capital to subsidies.

It is worthwhile to point to less-known Indian companies like Hyderabad-based MOSChip Technologies, which has been in the field of semiconductors without being part of the VC-fuelled unicorn hype. Electric carmaker Reva, founded in Bangalore, is now part of the Mahindra group, and deserves praise for its early start and passion.

A few listed small-cap companies fall in that league. Intellect Design Arena and Nucleus Software have built products and intellectual property, but perhaps have not taken the big bets needed to capture glamorous headlines. They were never called startups, but certainly were in the league when they started. 

Let Adventure Reign

What I would like to see is some of India’s 200-plus US dollar billionaires throwing a hundred million dollars each at a patent-seeking team of cutting-edge innovators based on deep research. They all may not succeed or grow very big, but some will. Even more important in the current context is a sense of adventure that people like Vinod Khosla, or rival Elon Musk, are famous for.

From AI to quantum computing to genomics, opportunities for discovery and invention are different from those based on scale and speed. New discoveries are ushering in new opportunities. The minister’s timing is just right. China’s DeepSeek is best seen not as an inspiration but as a wake-up call. As a nation where Jawaharlal Nehru chose to nurture research and development amid and despite a colonially battered, impoverished state, we have no excuses.

(Madhavan Narayanan is a senior editor, writer and columnist with more than 30 years of experience, having worked for Reuters, The Economic Times, Business Standard, and Hindustan Times after starting out in the Times of India Group.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author