Best of BS Opinion: Quality of spending matters more than the quantum

From education to PSUs to advertising to tariffs, how we address the quality of spending matters as much as the quantum of it

Hello and welcome to BS Views, our daily wrap of today’s opinion page. 

Spending is at the heart of all economic activity, be it by consumers or by governments. But it can be a tricky thing: the key is to spend wisely on things that will give returns, else it is simply wasteful expenditure. In other words, the quality of spending matters as much, if not more, than the quantum of it. It is in this light that we can read today's editorial pieces and columns. 

Our first editorial looks at PM Modi's trip to the US in the backdrop of an impending tariff war. The logic driving President Donald Trump's tariffs is, of course, to balance out trade, but also to raise more money to be able to spend on tax cuts. PM Modi is also expected to expend some of his personal as well as political capital in dealing with the US President over anticipated tariffs against India. 

The quality of education in India is, bar a few exceptions, questionable. Our second editorial looks at a Niti Aayog policy report which suggests that the main problem is not just a lack of investment in education, but more importantly, the poor quality of that spending. Given that education is largely a state subject, the Niti Aayog study suggests solutions for states to get better returns on their spends, given that India's global competitiveness is critically dependant on the quality of its higher education. 

Our lead columnist AK Bhattacharya finds himself at odds with the government's reluctance to hold on to public sector units (PSUs). Over the past five years, even as it spends more on PSU equity, there has been no significant rise in the Centre’s dividend income, and no increase in receipts from disinvestment. While disinvesment of inefficient PSUs has almost disappeared, there have been, on the contrary, instances of the government reinvesting in beleaguered PSUs to revive them. The only silver lining in the latest Budget is that its contribution to the PSUs’ capital outlay by way of equity and loans will decline. 

In our second column, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar points out that media spends - be it in newspapers, TV, or digital - are operating in a black hole of data. Newspaper publishes are loath to share their numbers, the Broadcast Audience Research Council has been barred from making its data public, and most digital apps and sites do not allow third-party measurements. And in the absence of a national Census since 2011, there is no way to map demographics to viewing or reading patterns. Advertising spends, she argues, have become a case of the blind leading the blind. 

In our book review, Chintan Girish Modi tips his hat to Amitava Kumar's 'The Green Book: An Observer's Notebook'. In an age where our time is consumed by screens, Kumar spends his days watching and writing about the destruction humans have wrought upon the environment. The author lavishes his writerly skills on places and people, even as he experiments with a genre that defies stereotypes of what a book should be.