Best of BS Opinion: Finding clarity in a shifting economic spectrum

Business Standard

30-05-2025

On some days, have you caught yourself squinting at headlines like you're holding a magnifying glass over a world that refuses to be flattened into black-and-white clarity. But magnifying only zooms in, it doesn't reveal the layers. Like watching sunlight hit a prism, you need angles, reflection, dispersion. That's how the full picture — flawed, fractured, vivid — comes into view, revealing a world more kaleidoscopic than chaotic. Let's dive in.
Take the sharp twist in India's FDI story. On paper, $81 billion sounds like a gold rush, but zoom out and the prism reveals a streak of nervous exits: $51 billion repatriated, and Indian companies themselves rushing abroad, notes our first editorial. The net number, just $0.35 billion, isn't a whisper, it's an alarm. Foreign investors seem unsure whether India's glow is real or refracted. At the same time, Indian firms are chasing confidence offshore, reflecting a deeper discomfort at home.
And yet, right alongside, corporate earnings shimmer with hints of revival. In Q4FY25, profits quietly rose and taxes paid surged nearly 14 per cent, a sign of businesses stepping out of the shadows. Capital goods, logistics, and pharma sectors bounced back with double-digit PAT growth. FMCG and IT still feel the squeeze, but this broad-based upturn could be the start of a new business cycle, highlights our second editorial. Not a spotlight moment, but a refracted, emerging glow.
But what happens when we stare too hard at numbers without adjusting the lens? R Kavita Rao breaks down India's tax gaps, not just what's missing, but why we might be misreading it. Strong in personal and consumption taxes, weaker in corporate and trade, India's performance isn't bad, but it's not benchmark-proof either. Differences in exemptions, valuation, and regime structure mean we must resist lazy comparisons. It's not about sharpening the magnifier, it's about tilting the prism.
Meanwhile, Himanshu Pathak and P K Joshi take us to the fields, where Indian agriculture dreams big. Food surpluses mask shrinking land, drying wells, and climate uncertainty. The path to a developed nation by 2047 runs through AI-driven seeds, smart irrigation, and agri-entrepreneurship. Innovation isn't just a light bulb, it's a spectrum of actions, from lab to land.
And as Gunjan Singh reviews The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, we see a different kind of prism, ideological, rigid, curated. Xi's China refracts every citizen through the Party's lens. Individual identity dissolves into national narrative. History is shaped not by what happened, but by how it's illuminated. In Xi's vision, the state is the sole source of light, and shadows aren't allowed.
Stay tuned, and remember, the world isn't monochrome, it's full-spectrum!