Best of BS Opinion: Forging a spine of steel in a forever shifting world

Here are the best of Business Standard's opinion pieces for today

Sometimes the world tests your resolve, like the one we live in currently. It feels like it’s handing out molten metal and telling everyone, from policymakers to markets to pension funds, to grow a spine of steel. Not the loud, brittle kind that clangs at the first sign of trouble, but the quiet, tensile one that holds steady under pressure, flexible enough to bend yet strong enough not to break. Because everywhere you look from climate diplomacy, retirement savings, or data-led infrastructure planning, someone, somewhere, is being asked to stand firm in a world that’s shifting beneath their feet. Let’s dive in. 

The EPFO, India’s largest retirement fund, is right at the anvil. It’s been beating market benchmarks with an 8.25 per cent return compared to 10-year bonds yielding 6.86 per cent. But even that shine can hide a hairline crack. Its equity-fuelled gains are thrilling but fragile, and the Reserve Bank of India has now stepped in with the tongs and hammer, highlights our first editorial. It’s time to modernise the investment strategy, diversify risks, and invite professional fund managers into the fold.  

Meanwhile, in another corner of the forge, the PM GatiShakti Public platform is being welded into existence. Imagine a digital skeleton of the nation with the bones of highways, nerves of fibre optics, and arteries of rail, all stitched together through data from 57 ministries. With 230 datasets open for collaboration, it’s a chance to replace India’s messy infrastructure sprawl with one coordinated frame, notes our second editorial. But accuracy, security, and constant maintenance will decide if this new frame holds or bends. 

Across the global furnace, Shyam Saran surveys the ashes of climate diplomacy. Once, the world’s environmental promises were cast in moral metal with rich nations bound to act first, pay up, and lead. But by 2015’s Paris Agreement, that spine had melted into a weak wire of voluntary pledges. The distinction between rich and poor vanished, accountability dissolved, and the planet’s backbone slumped. With COP30 in Belem on the horizon, Saran urges developing nations to harden their stance, call out hypocrisy, and reforge the principles that once held the system upright. 

Back home, Prasanna Tantri examines India’s monetary alloy. Inflation has cooled, yes, but at what cost? The metal looks polished, yet it’s been kept rigid through tight policy and high interest rates. True strength, he argues, would come not from stiffness but from credibility. It’s time for the RBI to measure expectations better, broaden its band, and temper policy with both science and instinct. 

And then, like a black-and-white reel flickering in the firelight, Zachary D. Carter’s review of 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History reminds us what happens when the spine snaps entirely. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s retelling of the Great Crash glitters with greed and corruption, a system collapsing under the weight of its own gold. Nearly a century later, the reflection in today’s speculative bubbles is unmistakable. 

Stay tuned!