--- title: "India Web3 PR Playbook: Inc42, ET Tech, and the Tax Problem" description: "India leads global crypto adoption with 119M users yet a 30% flat gains tax traps most pitches. Here's how to frame your story for Inc42, ET Tech, and Business Standard reporters in 2026." author: "Shilika Jain" date: "2026-10-15T11:27:51.781+00:00" tags: ["india", "apac pr", "web3 pr", "crypto pr", "depin"] canonical: "https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/india-web3-pr-playbook-inc42-et-tech-business-standard" --- # India Web3 PR Playbook: Inc42, ET Tech, and the Tax Problem By [Shilika Jain](https://www.shilikajain.com/authors/shilika-jain) - 10/15/2026 India leads global crypto adoption with 119M users yet a 30% flat gains tax traps most pitches. Here's how to frame your story for Inc42, ET Tech, and Business Standard reporters in 2026. --- # India Web3 PR Playbook: Inc42, ET Tech, Business Standard, and the 30% Tax Narrative Problem Founders Must Solve First India ranks first in global crypto adoption for the third consecutive year, according to the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with approximately 119 million crypto owners accounting for roughly 15% of the world's entire user base. That is a bigger crypto community than the populations of most European nations. And yet, when I look at how most Western-founded or globally-distributed Web3 teams pitch the Indian press, the coverage rate is dismal. The problem is almost never the product. It's the narrative setup. I spoke at India Blockchain Week and moderated panels on exactly this gap. The founders who got picked up by Inc42, Economic Times Tech, and Business Standard weren't necessarily building better protocols than the ones who got ignored. They had solved one problem first: they had a clear, legally defensible answer to the question every Indian reporter silently asks in the first ten seconds of reading a pitch. *"How does this company relate to India's crypto tax and regulatory reality, and is it a headache for me to run this story?"* If your pitch doesn't answer that question before it's asked, it dies in the inbox. --- ## Why the 30% Tax Is a Narrative Problem, Not Just a Policy Problem India has maintained a flat 30% tax on all gains from virtual digital assets since the Finance Act 2022, with no loss set-off allowed and a 1% TDS on every transaction. The 2026 Union Budget left this unchanged despite significant industry lobbying. Research by policy think tank Esya Centre found domestic exchange trading volumes declined sharply following TDS implementation, with some estimates putting the drop at 81% in the four months after launch. That policy context doesn't disappear when a journalist opens your pitch email. It sits in the background of every India crypto story a reporter writes. The trap most Western pitches fall into: they write as if India is a neutral market with a lot of users. It isn't. It's a market with the world's largest grassroots crypto user base *inside* a tax and regulatory regime that creates legitimate editorial sensitivity. A pitch that talks about "yields," "guaranteed returns," "currency-like utility," or "financial sovereignty" will get a hard pass from any Economic Times or Business Standard editor who has a legal desk looking over their shoulder. Back in early 2022, when the 30% tax was first announced, I was publicly debating whether it would push Indian users toward DeFi and away from centralized exchanges. That question still shapes how savvy Indian founders frame their narrative today. The founders who do it well don't fight the tax narrative. They route around it. > "I definitely agree to this. This is so so required to onboard the next set of users to Crypto & Web 3.0." > > [Shilika Jain on X, 3 Feb 2022](https://x.com/Shilika_jain/status/1489219666283495425) I was quoting Pushpendra Kumar's call to the government to rationalize the tax structure. Two years later, the tax is still there, but the PR lesson has crystallized: the founders who ignore the tax framing issue get stuck. The ones who address it head-on in their positioning get coverage. --- ## What Inc42, ET Tech, and Business Standard Actually Want These three outlets are not interchangeable. Treating them as a single list to blast is a fast way to burn your credibility with all three. **Inc42** is India's largest startup media platform, reaching over 10 million people monthly. Its editorial focus is the Indian startup ecosystem: funding rounds, founders, growth stories, and tech-forward business angles. For a Web3 story to land at Inc42, it needs a startup angle. A foreign protocol with no Indian co-founders, no Indian VC on the cap table, and no articulated domestic use case will struggle. Inc42 wants to know: who are the Indian founders or investors in this story, and why does it matter to India's startup community? When I handled Bullieverse's $4M fundraise, we got the placement in Inc42 because we framed it as an Indian-founded metaverse gaming startup backed by Web3 venture funds, not as a generic crypto raise. The Economic Times headline read "Metaverse platform Bullieverse bags $4 million funding led by Web3 venture funds." That's a startup funding story, not a crypto story. The crypto context was there, but it wasn't the lead. **Economic Times Tech** follows a tighter filter. For a Web3 story to land here, you generally need one of three things: a fundraise with a recognizable Indian VC co-leading, a named Indian co-founder or executive, or a product story with a clear domestic user growth angle. ET Tech serves a broad business readership that includes people who don't follow crypto closely. Your pitch needs to explain why this matters to that reader, not just to a crypto-native audience. **Business Standard** is where your story becomes credible to India's institutional investor class. A placement there carries different weight than crypto-native coverage. But Business Standard applies its own filter: the story has to connect to finance, regulation, or economic infrastructure. A token launch pitch that reads like a whitepaper summary will not make it past the editor. The operational implication: you need three different pitch angles, built from the same underlying news, for these three outlets. That means more work upfront on the narrative layer. It's not optional. --- ## The Regulatory Posture Frame You Have to Build First Before you pitch any of these outlets, you need a clear regulatory posture statement. This is a two-to-three sentence articulation of how your protocol or product relates to India's VDA (virtual digital asset) tax framework, what compliance posture you operate under, and whether you have legal counsel in India. It doesn't have to be long. It has to be present and unambiguous. What this sounds like in practice: - "We are a [DePIN / RWA / infrastructure] protocol. Our token is [utility/governance/not publicly offered to Indian retail users]. We operate under [Singapore / UAE / US] jurisdiction and have Indian legal counsel reviewing compliance for any domestic-facing activity." - "We are not a financial product. We build [developer tooling / decentralized compute / tokenized asset infrastructure]. Our India community uses [describe the non-speculative use case]." That framing does several things. It tells the reporter they're not walking into a compliance minefield by covering you. It signals that you've thought about the regulatory context rather than just hoping it doesn't come up. And it gives the editor a defense if a legal reviewer asks why they ran the piece. Reporters at Business Standard and ET Tech have killed stories where the PR team couldn't answer basic regulatory framing questions. I've seen it happen. It's a fast and quiet death. --- ## The Dual-Track Structure That Actually Works India Web3 PR that converts into meaningful coverage runs on two tracks simultaneously, and most founders only run one. **Track one: domestic India media.** This is Inc42, ET Tech, Business Standard, Entrackr, YourStory, VCCircle, and the Hindi and regional-language crypto YouTube channels that carry enormous reach in tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities. The editorial angle here is startup narrative, domestic use case, and regulatory posture. A recognizable Indian co-founder or investor is a credibility multiplier. **Track two: global crypto-native media.** This is CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Block, Blockworks. The editorial angle here is the protocol's global position, technical differentiation, or category narrative. India as a user base can be one data point in the story, but it's not the lead. The two tracks reinforce each other. When CoinDesk covers your DePIN infrastructure play and your team shares that link with Indian press, the tier-1 global credibility changes the editorial decision threshold at Inc42 and ET Tech. When Inc42 covers your Indian founding team and user growth, that credibility travels back to global crypto reporters who now have a hook for the emerging market angle. I ran this dual-track on the Bullieverse raise: India gaming startup angle for domestic press, Web3 gaming infrastructure story for international titles. The Indian mainstream coverage we landed in Economic Times and Inc42 weren't just domestic PR wins. They became social proof assets for the global pitch deck. --- ## Why DePIN and RWA Are the Highest-Traction Editorial Angles for 2026 Not every Web3 angle works equally well in the Indian press in 2026. Through the campaigns I've run and from watching what actually gets picked up, two categories are consistently getting through the editorial filter right now. **DePIN** has a genuine India narrative that reporters can feel. India has a population-scale infrastructure gap in energy, logistics, and connectivity. DePIN networks that can credibly address those gaps, whether in distributed compute, wireless coverage, or clean energy coordination, aren't just abstract crypto stories in India. They're infrastructure stories. That's a different editorial category with a different set of reporters who will take the pitch. The work I did positioning Fluence's co-founder Tom Trowbridge as a DePIN thought leader through CoinDesk op-eds and Cointelegraph podcast appearances created a template: DePIN is not a meme, it's buildable infrastructure with measurable economics. That frame traveled well. CoinDesk India and Inc42 can build editorial angles around a DePIN story if the India use case is concrete, not hypothetical. **RWA (real-world asset tokenization)** hits a different nerve in India: the wealth management audience. India has a large and growing retail investor class that is deeply familiar with mutual funds, gold, and real estate as asset classes. An RWA protocol that tokenizes any of those categories has a mainstream financial story available to it, not just a crypto story. Business Standard and Mint have run RWA coverage because it connects to conversations their readers were already having. If your protocol has neither a DePIN application nor an RWA angle, your best bet is the developer tooling or enterprise infrastructure frame. Web3Auth's Google Cloud and Firebase integration story is a reference example: a technology partnership narrative that travels globally and captures the domestic readership through multilingual syndication. --- ## The Common Pitfalls That Kill Indian Press Pitches I've seen enough failed India pitches to know the patterns. **Sending a global press release without India localization.** A release written for a US or European announcement cycle, with no India angle, no mention of Indian co-founders or users, and no regulatory posture statement, reads as a copy-paste send. Indian journalists notice. **Leading with token price or speculative upside.** Any pitch that implies investment returns will get binned immediately by ET Tech and Business Standard editors. Crypto-native outlets in India are more tolerant of this framing, but even CoinGape and CoinDesk India have shifted toward utility-first coverage in 2026. **Ignoring the Hindi and regional media layer.** The English-language tier-1 press is not the only audience that matters in India. YouTube channels in Hindi covering DeFi education have subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands. Podcasts in Tamil, Telugu, and Gujarati reach retail investor communities that English outlets don't. If your product has any retail user component in India, this layer is worth mapping. **Treating KOL activation as a substitute for earned media.** Indian crypto influencers on X and YouTube drive awareness. They don't build the kind of credibility that an Inc42 or ET Tech placement creates with VCs or institutional partners. You need both. They serve different functions. **No on-ground presence at India Blockchain Week.** IBW is still the single best moment to compress journalist relationship-building in India. I've given talks there on Web3 PR. The reporters and editors you want to know are physically in the room. A booth and a badge is not enough. You need conversations with journalists before and during the event, not just booth traffic. --- ## How to Sequence a Six-Week India PR Sprint If you're a global founder who has identified India as a priority market and has a specific announcement coming up, here is how I'd structure the six weeks before the announcement goes live. **Weeks 1 and 2:** Build or sharpen the India narrative layer. Identify your India co-founder or investor hook. Finalize your regulatory posture statement. Map which of the three outlet tiers (mainstream, crypto-native, regional/vernacular) the story genuinely serves. **Weeks 3 and 4:** Secure the relationship layer before the pitch. If you're working with a fractional operator who has existing relationships at ET Tech and Inc42, this step is already done. If you're building cold, use this window to follow the journalists covering your beat, engage with their existing coverage, and make one introduction that isn't a pitch. **Weeks 5 and 6:** Run the pitch under a 72-hour embargo. Tier-1 India outlets (ET Tech, Inc42, Business Standard) get exclusives or first-call access on different angles simultaneously. The crypto-native India outlets (CoinDesk India, CoinGape) and the global crypto press get parallel embargoed releases at the same lift time. The sequence matters. If CoinDesk breaks the story before ET Tech has filed, ET Tech loses its exclusive and pulls out. The embargo discipline in the Indian press cycle is tighter than most Western founders expect. --- ## What This Means If You're Building for India Right Now India isn't a market you activate with a translated press release and a KOL drop. It's a market with 119 million crypto users, a punishing tax regime that shapes editorial sensitivity, a media tier structure that requires distinct pitches for distinct audiences, and a two-track campaign architecture that most single-country playbooks don't account for. > "To onboard the next million users in web3, projects must run more on-ground initiatives than sharing the narrative in their marketing copies!" > > [Shilika Jain on X, 20 Jan 2023](https://x.com/Shilika_jain/status/1616463309934596096) I wrote that before I had a neat framework for it. The India playbook makes it concrete. On-ground presence at IBW, direct journalist relationships at Inc42 and ET Tech, a clear regulatory posture, and a narrative that earns its India angle rather than borrowing one. The founders who do that work get the placements that move institutional credibility in India. The ones who don't get the inbox silence. --- **Book a 30-min teardown with Shilika** to map your India PR approach before your next announcement: [https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/](https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/) --- **Book a 30-min teardown with Shilika** - https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/ Canonical: https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/india-web3-pr-playbook-inc42-et-tech-business-standard