India's biggest share sales tell the story of a country glued to its phones

Image source, NurPhoto via Getty ImagesImage caption, Jio is expected to raise around $4bn (£3.02bn) with an estimated valuation of $120-160bn

India's largest stock exchange and its biggest telecoms operator will both go public by the end of this year in what experts say could be landmark listings for the country's capital markets.

Jio Platforms, the digital arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) - the world's largest derivatives exchange and among the top three equity exchanges by trading volume - filed draft papers for their initial public offerings just days apart last month.

Jio is expected to mop up around $4bn (£3.02bn) from the market at an estimated valuation of $120-160bn, while NSE's issue will reportedly offer 6% equity for $3.3bn, valuing the bourse at $57bn.

Beyond the unprecedented scale of the offerings - which could take India's overall market capitalisation up by several notches - investors are closely watching the listings because they represent the sweeping changes in the way Indians have come to live, consume, invest and transact in the last decade, Yatin Singh, CEO - Investment Banking at Emkay Global, told the BBC.

"These are unique businesses which don't get built often. NSE is a direct proxy of the 'financialisation' of Indian household savings into mutual funds and stocks, while Jio is the story of a company that single handedly ushered in a digital revolution, becoming a driving factor for several new-age Indian businesses," said Singh.

"Their listings could be seminal for the Indian markets in the way the marquee offerings of software companies became many decades ago," he adds.

Jio's belated entry into India's crowded telecom market in 2016 consolidated a highly fragmented industry of 17 operators and turned it into a virtual duopoly, as the Ambanis sparked a fierce pricing war by offering virtually free data to hundreds of millions of new users.

Barely 200 million Indians used the internet decade ago. That number is now inching closer to the billion mark with Jio alone amassing 525 million of those subscribers. They use its data to make payments, watch web shows and shop online.

In fact, Indians are now the largest consumers of mobile data globally, surpassing even developed markets like the US and China. And this has largely been driven by Jio's cheap tariffs that democratised smartphone use.

The way the country spends money and time has also changed dramatically as a result of this digitisation.

India's United Payments Interface (UPI), launched in the same year as Jio, went from processing near zero digital payments to 228 billion transactions in 2025, according to Zerodha, a brokerage. And paid subscribers to OTT platforms jumped 40% between 2019 and 2026.