Best of BS Opinion: India's bold visions, sour gaps, and ripe debates

Business Standard

5 days ago

Every monsoon, when the fruit cart rolls into our lane, we usually spot the cherry box and instinctively reach for the reddest ones, until an old neighbour chuckles and informs us that the darkest ones are sweeter. Not all cherries are the same — some are crimson and glossy, others dusky and firm, a few are unexpectedly sour. Yet together, in one basket, they tell a richer story of variation than uniformity. That's what today's policy landscape feels like: a mix of bright ideas, deep-rooted challenges, and uncertain flavours. Taken separately, each issue raises its own questions. Taken together, they speak to the complexity of India's ongoing transformation. Let's dive in.
The draft National Telecom Policy 2025, for instance, is a glossy red cherry, plump with promises of universal 5G, Rs 1 trillion in annual investment, and sweeping employment. But when you bite into it, the lack of short-term strategy and blind spots around industry stress, spectrum clarity, and PSUs leaves a sour aftertaste, notes our first editorial. If it has to deliver, the final version will need to ground itself in the messy soil of current telecom realities.
A deeper red cherry, full of nostalgia and earthy depth, comes in the form of India's new National Cooperative Policy. Once a purely agrarian pillar, cooperatives now span 30 sectors. The government envisions a 30 per cent jump in cooperatives and digital revamps of PACS. But many cherries in this basket are bruised, like 40 per cent of PACS are defunct, and regulatory overlaps persist, highlights our second editorial. If digitisation, governance reforms, and export-readiness don't come together, this vision could rot on the tree.
In his column, Ajay Tyagi cautions that India's grand cherries — Net-Zero 2070 and Viksit Bharat 2047 — might be all glossed if we don't define what sweetness actually means. Without measurable targets, time-bound plans, and political consensus, these could become overripe dreams that fall before harvest.
Meanwhile, Tulsi Jayakumar peels back the skin on another kind of cherry — India Inc's promoter-run firms. Built for continuity, they are now exposed to boardroom fissures and weak governance. She argues it's time to evolve the model: rebalancing control, reforming boards, and restoring investor trust.
And in The New Geography of Innovation: : The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies, Ajit Balakrishnan offers a fresh handful altogether. Mehran Gul's debut isn't a tech brochure, it's a global tasting tray. From Station F in Paris to China's AI breakthroughs, Gul dismantles the myth that Silicon Valley has the sole recipe for invention. What makes this book juicy isn't the data alone, but the 200 voices inside it, each shaping a new geography of ideas.
Stay tuned!