Arthanomics doesn't exist in isolation — it's built on the foundation of a college known for its academic culture and a department that treats economics as something to be practised, not just studied.
Arthanomics is India's largest and biggest Business and Economics Festival, held every year to give students a stage where classroom economics meets real-world decision-making. 2026 marks its 13th edition, running across three days — 4th, 5th and 6th August 2026.
Each edition, the committee builds an entirely new universe of events around a single theme. For 2026, that theme is The Unaccounted Economy — the informal markets, underground trade, grey-area branding and off-the-books systems that quietly shape real economic outcomes, even though they rarely appear in a textbook. Across nine flagship events, participants run underground business empires, sit on live auction floors, trace the collapse of a fictional economy, pitch morally ambiguous brands, trade in volatile alternative markets, and publish original research on the informal workforce.
It's a legacy built one edition at a time: every committee inherits a festival that works, and is expected to leave it stranger, sharper and more ambitious than they found it. This year's plan was simple — stop simulating "the economy" as a clean, textbook system, and start making participants sit inside the parts of it that never make the news.
Arthanomics is organised and run by the Department of Economics at Jai Hind College — a department that anchors the festival's academic rigour, from designing event briefs to bringing in judges and speakers from the world of business and policy.
The department's committee of student organisers works through the year to plan, fund and execute the festival, treating it as their own applied economics project as much as a college event.
Jai Hind College, located in Churchgate, Mumbai, is the host institution for Arthanomics — providing the campus, community and academic backing that has let the festival grow into what it is today. The college's culture of student-led societies and festivals is what made an event on the scale of Arthanomics possible in the first place.
A festival that has grown edition after edition into India's biggest of its kind.
Nine events, one world — informal markets, underground trade and grey-area business.
Conceived, organised and executed entirely by the Department of Economics committee.