Best of BS Opinion: How India is applying new fixes to old wounds

Business Standard

12 hours ago

There's a particular discomfort in swallowing the same pill day after day and still feeling no better. At some point, whether it's for a persistent cold or a stubborn fever, you head back to the doctor — not for reassurance, but for a new prescription. Something different. Something that might actually work this time. That's where we are today, as a country, as a region, even as a workforce. Tweaking the dosage. Changing the medicine. Because the old ways aren't healing like they used to. Let's dive in.
That shift is clearly visible in TCS's decision to let go of 12,000 employees, mostly from the middle and senior rungs. The reason? AI is becoming the new workforce. Like a treatment that makes older therapies obsolete, automation is reshaping how companies see value. But for India, where jobs are the lifeblood of growth, this change demands a rethink of skilling, education, and labour policy, argues our first editorial. We need a new formulation, and fast.
In diplomacy too, there's been a shift in dosage. As tensions with the Maldives threatened to flare up, India quietly switched from confrontation to calibration, replacing troops with technicians, and aid with patience. Our second editorial notes how this non-invasive strategy is yielding a gradual thaw, possibly proving more potent than muscle-flexing.
Akash Prakash, on the other hand, shows what the right medicine looks like. India's PLI scheme for smartphones, crafted carefully and administered diligently, has turned Apple into a believer and India into a serious contender in global electronics. The challenge now is to scale that formula to other sectors, with new incentives and coordinated policy muscle.
Rama Bijapurkar writes that even the middle class, once thought to be the immune system of a stable economy, is mutating. Today's middle class isn't built on pensions or permanent jobs. It's a patchwork of gig workers, first-gen graduates, and economic tightrope walkers. Aspirations have become modest: not upward mobility but just a break from the grind. We need to redefine what it means to be 'middle class,' before our policies misdiagnose the patient.
Finally, in The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence, reviewed by Amritesh Mukherjee, Ashis Ray reminds us that sometimes, history turns on a prescription no one expected. His retelling of the INA court-martial is less about law and more about contagion — how a courtroom drama spread outrage like wildfire, igniting mutinies, uniting a fractured country, and hastening the end of British rule. Sometimes, even the most unexpected prescription can trigger a revolution.
Stay tuned!