India's Multi-Path Road to Clean Mobility

Walk into a small roadside kirana store in rural Maharashtra or the bustling lanes of a Delhi colony, you’ll find a tiny strip of plastic hanging near the cash counter—shiny sachets of shampoo, often priced at just Rs 1 or 2. They’re modest reminders of a moment of reckoning that made global companies rethink their playbook for India.

In the early days, multinational brands entered the Indian market with the same logic that worked elsewhere: large, family-sized shampoo bottles, often expensive and meant for bulk purchase. But they missed a critical insight—India doesn’t move in uniform patterns. Millions of ...