Best of BS Opinion: Government must continue with trimming its QCO list

Today's Best of BS Opinion looks at Bihar's fiscal test after NDA win, pushback against QCOs, Trump's tariff stance and India's options, India Inc earnings vs GDP, and a biography of Francis Crick

Hello, and welcome to the Best of BS Opinion, our daily wrap of the Opinion page.  With the results of the Bihar Assembly elections now indisputably on the side of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), it is time for the incoming administration to get down to work, says our first editorial. For starters, the state needs significantly higher levels of investment to grow fast enough to catch up with the rest of the country and to be able to pull more people out of poverty; as things stand, a third of its residents are still multidimensionally poor. However, the NDA's promises threaten to muddy the fiscal matters, given the debt stock is already at 37 per cent of gross state domestic product. Going forward, the state will need to induct more women into the workforce, given that the mandate also owes much to the higher turnout in women voters. The practice of announcing cash handouts, even if disguised as a self-employment dole, must be questioned because of the inherent advantage to the incumbent government. 

The government seems to be enamoured of Quality Control Orders (QCOs), it would seem, with Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal going so far as to say he would like to see 2,500 of them for various goods. But, as our second editorial notes, QCOs have caused chaos in supply chains, raised compliance costs for small businesses, and attracted the negative attention of trade partners. In short, they run counter to the idea of 'ease of doing business'. Now, a brace of ministries have pushed back, shutting QCOs down for several items, with a third said to be following in their footsteps. A panel of government officials have also voiced its concerns over this arbitrary exercise of bureaucratic powers. Rent-seeking, protectionism and regulatory capture are threatening to become part of the process of identifying QCOs, turning them into a virtual non-tariff barrier. The rollback of some QCOs is a good start, and must be continued, because they are a dangerous tool, to be used extremely sparingly. 

Mihir S Sharma writes that, by now, it is amply clear that United States President Donald J Trump fully intends to go ahead with his tariffs, and that there's little that the US judiciary or legislature can do about. Even if they were to try and block him, he argues, the Presidency can always find a workaround. Given the situation, it is best if India were to take Trump at his word, and continue its efforts to come to an agreement with the US to reduce the current tariff rate of 50 per cent. The good thing is that Trump himself has hinted at such a reduction. But for this to happen, the Indian side will have to hand the US President some sort of a win, perhaps by way of some concessions in agriculture and dairy, that he can tom-tom. Any delay exposes labour-intensive sectors that face these tariffs to more disruption. Meanwhile, the government must open up additional markets for exporters, and reduce the compliance burden on them that QCOs currently impose. 

There is a stark gap between India's projected GDP growth and corporate earnings, observes Debashis Basu. Growth in FY26 has been pegged at 7.1-8.8 per cent by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. India Inc, however, has seen a meagre 7 per cent revenue growth (Nifty50 firms), with operating and net profit at 13 and 9 per cent, respectively. The old model of corporate revenues being 3-4 percentage points ahead of GDP has fallen by the wayside. The cause is complicated: most GDP growth is coming from private final consumption expenditure and government spending. Private sector capital expenditure, which combined with consumption, can boost GDP, has not budged. The problem is that there just isn't enough demand to justify large private capex, thanks to dampened real wages. Until demand and capex grow in tandem, GDP growth numbers will continue to be false comfort. 

Janice P Nimura's review of Crick: A Mind in Motion notes that the book tries to walk a tightrope between deciphering the man and his work. Two earlier biographies of Francis Crick, the British biologist who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for figuring out the form and function of DNA, have already bookended those two biographical styles. Matthew Cobb's new book straddles the middle, situating the science in the context of the man: a life vivid enough to engage readers who haven’t thought about the double helix since high school, and detailed enough to satisfy the scientists. Cobb maps Crick’s life through his Edwardian-influenced origins to Cold War innovation, and on to countercultural California. As a scientist himself, though, Cobb seems more comfortable with the geneticists and conferences and journal articles.