Best of BS Opinion: Growth, power and the imminent fear of the spill

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

You remember those moments when you were handed a tray full of teacups and told to carry it from the kitchen to the main hall, where guests waited? Suddenly, the weight felt heavier than it should as the hands tightened, the steps slowed, and the more you concentrated on not spilling anything, the more the cups began to tremble. The fear was not abstract because you could already imagine the clatter, the stains, and the embarrassment. At that exact point, it would take very little to knock the ceramics over. That sensation of responsibility-induced instability appears to be a useful way to think about the world right now. Let’s dive in. 

That same tremor ran through global markets when US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell issued a rare, unscheduled statement, as outlined in our first editorial. President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to browbeat or reshape the central bank have now acquired sharper edges. And the risk is not confined to Powell’s remaining months. It signals to his successor that independence comes with consequences. If the Fed loses its balance, inflation expectations, dollar credibility and global financial stability, including for economies like India, could quickly feel the spill. 

In India, another tray is being carried briskly across the room. As the second editorial notes, global technology firms are committing vast sums to AI, cloud infrastructure and data centres, drawn by India’s digital scale and policy clarity. The opportunity is enormous, but so is the load. Data centres are hungry for power and water, and early choices on energy sourcing and cooling will decide whether this investment settles securely or starts shaking under environmental strain. Here growth will have to be carried with foresight. 

Zooming out, T N Ninan reminds us that India’s macro tray looks calmer than before with low inflation and stable balance sheets, but the cups are arranged much as they were pre-pandemic. If the post-Covid rebound is stripped out, it becomes clear that the economy has not efficiently shifted to a higher sustainable trajectory. Consumption remains constrained by weak income growth at the bottom and rising debt at the top, while job creation outside agriculture is inadequate. Manufacturing has failed to gain share, while services remain largely informal, and urbanisation has progressed slowly. Stability today, he suggests, should not be mistaken for structural strength. 

Trade policy adds another layer of concentration. As C. Veeramani and Himanshu Jaiswal point out, India’s expanding FTA agenda will not automatically deliver gains unless firms can actually respond. Low utilisation, complex rules of origin and domestic rigidities in land, labour and logistics blunt the impact of market access. Without parallel internal reforms, FTAs will just rearrange the cups without steadying the tray. 

Finally, the most fragile cup, as Ananya Singh’s review of Mike Bird’s The Land Trap shows, is land itself. Fixed supply, speculative demand and deep financialisation turns property into a recurrent source of instability. Hence, once land prices wobble, credit systems and growth models built around them tend to topple together. And as history suggests, when this cup falls, the rest rarely stay upright. 

Stay tuned!