Latest news with #NitinDesai
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: India's race with reforms, reality, and risks
We've all watched those nail-biting Olympic relay races — where one fumbled handoff, one split-second hesitation, can undo a team's entire rhythm. There's something profoundly frustrating about that race where everyone runs their stretch with gusto but the baton keeps slipping between handovers. The track is well-laid, the runners well-trained, the goal clear. Yet, without a clean pass, all that effort unravels because no matter how fast the sprinters are, it's the baton pass that decides victory. Today's editorials and columns draw our attention to something similar — everyone sprinting, but few managing a smooth exchange. Let's dive in. Take the Centre's renewed urgency to reform the Goods and Services Tax system. It's been eight years since GST was introduced, and it was meant to be the ultimate baton pass — unifying the nation under one tax regime. Now, with Amit Shah reportedly entering the fray and the Prime Minister's Office giving the green light for structural overhaul, rate slab simplification and compliance easing are back on the agenda. But, as our first editorial cautions, unless these proposals are handed down with precision and not fumbled through political hesitation or procedural hurdles, the finish line will keep drifting. Agriculture, too, is in transition mode. The new PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana, as our second editorial notes, marks a shift from blanket subsidies to district-level problem-solving. Yet, stitching together 36 schemes across 11 departments while tracking 117 performance metrics is no small feat. And if climate adaptation isn't baked in from the start, and bureaucratic bulk isn't streamlined, the baton risks falling before the first lap is done. Globally, Nitin Desai warns that a faltering America is no longer the dependable lead runner in the global relay. To avoid a collapse in multilateral cooperation, he advocates forming 'coalitions of the willing' on agriculture and climate — groups that can bypass Washington's gridlock. These coalitions won't rewrite the rules, but they can keep the baton in play while the superpowers stumble. And Ranjan Mathai's column on India's rare earths dilemma is a study in potential lost to poor handovers. Despite having the world's third-largest reserves, India's production chain is stuck at the starting block. China, meanwhile, controls the full mine-to-magnet relay. Without cleaner mining models, tech investment, and faster regulatory clearances, India's baton will stay grounded. Finally, in The Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, Prosenjit Datta reviews Kaunain Sheriff M's harrowing exposé of how J&J knowingly delayed recalling faulty hip implants in India. Patients suffered while the firm minimised compensation and regulators hesitated. It's a brutal reminder: when the baton is dropped in healthcare, lives — not medals — are lost. Stay tuned!
Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
World needs willing allies to counter adverse impact of US actions
A major area of success that was important for speeding up development in the post-World War II era was the trade agreement among nations Nitin Desai Listen to This Article Eighty years ago, an international organisation, the United Nations, was set up and its agreed charter defined the legality of relations between States and established diplomatic practices that favoured restraint and mutual respect. This global standard of behaviour by countries was also reflected in the charters of several other international institutions. To a certain extent, this held true even during the first four and a half decades of its existence that were dominated by tension between the United States and the USSR. Over the past three decades, polycentrism has emerged with substantial rise in the global impact of China, particularly
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Business Standard
24-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Fragile power and rising risk in geopolitics and policy
A loaded gun in a trembling hand, that's what anxiety looks like, sometimes. Like a loud bang waiting to go off in a quiet room. The instability and ready to harm triggers capture the volatility of our current moment. Power, when unanchored by accountability or foresight, ceases to be a stabilising force and becomes a threat in itself. Across geopolitics, technology, tax reform, and economic theory, decisions are increasingly driven by impulse rather than strategy, amplifying the risks of miscalculation and unintended consequences. Let's dive in. Nowhere was this more evident than in the United States' sudden bombing of Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. Using stealth bombers and bunker-busting weapons, the Trump administration bypassed international consensus and strategic restraint. As our first editorial warns, such unilateral action may not delay Iran's nuclear ambitions but accelerate them, pushing more nations to believe that only weapons guarantee security. In the tech world, a different kind of arms race is underway. The scramble for AI talent has become frenzied, with top companies offering astronomical salaries to a scarce pool of researchers. Despite soaring innovation, the entire sector rests on a fragile foundation of overstrained human capital, as our second editorial outlines. The very systems designed to bring control and predictability are themselves dependent on an unstable and overstretched workforce. That fragility extends to India's development ambitions as well. Nitin Desai shows how the country's long-term economic goals risk being derailed by chronic underinvestment in R&D. Without structural change and targeted support, India's journey to becoming a high-income nation could stall, its potential energy left dangerously untapped. V S Krishnan argues that GST, though stabilised after eight years, still lacks the coherence needed for inclusive growth. His proposed reforms aim to simplify the tax system and align it with employment and equity goals, but like all fiscal overhauls, the challenge lies in execution, steady hands in a charged environment. Finally, Sanjeev Ahluwalia's review of Ray Dalio's How Countries Go Broke reminds us that macroeconomic collapse rarely arrives all at once. It builds gradually, through political missteps, ignored debt cycles, and overconfidence, a trembling hand gripping levers of power for too long. Stay tuned!
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Business Standard
27-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: A fuse already lit across India's every front
We've all seen it: the candle you lit in the dark during a power cut, the firecracker fuse you dared not go near again, the tangled mess of cords behind the TV that heats up but never sparks. You sense it, the heat building just before the flare. That moment before everything shifts. A series of slow burns, and quiet tensions coiling quietly until they're no longer silent. The sparks are already there. In money, in monsoons, in mindsets, all waiting to blow. Let's dive in. Start with America, where the House has passed a remittance tax that hits Indian H1B and F1 visa holders hardest, notes our first editorial. A 3.5 per cent fee slapped on their family support, not offsettable against US taxes. For thousands of Indian students, workers and families, it's not just about money. It's about being told, again, you're welcome to work but not to belong. The fuse is lit, in the hearts of students juggling fees and families, in global goodwill that once seemed mutual. Meanwhile, in India's mandis, another spark is flickering hotter, temperature spikes are distorting vegetable prices more than any monsoon ever could. The Reserve Bank of India finds a 1 degree Celsius rise now triggers a 1.3 per cent jump in vegetable inflation. Short harvest cycles and lack of cold storage only amplify the volatility, highlights our second editorial. Even with a good rain forecast, farmers remain vulnerable to the heat's unseen fuse, set to burst without notice. And then there's growth, or the longing for it. Nitin Desai points out that India's entrepreneurs often shy away from risk, opting for low-tech retail finance over building the next Samsung. Without a nudge toward bold innovation and global ambition, India risks becoming the world's back office forever. Smart minds kept safe but never sparked. Rama Bijapurkar adds to the slow combustion: household consumption is both booming and breaking. Stock market dreams push one narrative; FMCG realities say another. The optimism, especially in rural India, may be real, but it's also reined in. When wages rise, or jobs feel secure, expect a surge. But right now, we're all waiting with a match in hand, unsure if it will light. Even history feels like a flame rediscovered. A K Bhattacharya revisits John Matthai, India's forgotten second finance minister, whose brilliance and contradictions shine in a new biography Honest John – A Life of John Matthai by Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy. A man who quit over the Planning Commission, spoke extempore in Parliament, and whose personal story, including his son's tragic scandal, reveals both integrity and its limits. Stay tuned!
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Business Standard
26-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
India needs entrepreneurship 2.0 with risk-taking, visionary founders
India, in fact, was a major exporter to West Asia, where two large empires - the Safavid and the Ottoman - provided a lucrative marketing area Premium Nitin Desai Listen to This Article The entrepreneurship that India requires must have two key characteristics. First, it must be willing to be innovative in the sense that it takes on new products and processes as part of its business. Second, it must be global in its marketing orientation so that it can compete with foreign suppliers in India and in global markets. This was the case in the past. A very readable book by Lakshmi Subramanian provides useful information about entrepreneurship in the pre-Independence era. In Mughal times, innovation was not prominent, as it was a pre-Industrial Revolution era. What mattered was finance, where the
