Best of BS Opinion: Setting alarms without knowing what's at stake

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

It’s that peculiar feeling when you tap your alarm, to set a reminder for the next morning. No meeting invite, no class schedule, no clarity of tomorrow. Just an urge to be ready for something, anything. We live in times like that. Everyone’s setting alarms but no one’s quite sure what they’re waking up for. The result? A rhythm built on guesswork, a world swaying between sleep and action, between urgency and unpreparedness. Let’s dive in. 

At the 51st G7 summit, this uncertainty was almost theatrical. Trump arrived in Kananaskis with bluster, exited early, and left the Western bloc scrambling to assemble coherence in his wake. No joint communique, no ceasefire call, and barely a whisper on Ukraine. Yet, as our first editorial notes, India managed clarity amid chaos, reviving ties with Canada, nudging Trump into the Quad, and keeping its diplomatic clock ticking, even as the others hit snooze. 

But not all alarms lead to direction. In rural India, drones are whirring above fields, ushering in a digitised farming age. From Chennai’s new drone hub to Agri Stack’s digital IDs, the agriculture ministry’s vision seems future-ready. Still, patchy Wi-Fi, privacy gaps, and cost barriers make it feel like we’re trying to fly before we’ve fully woken up. As our second editorial observes, this tech leap could widen divides if not grounded in rural realities. 

Ajay Tyagi captures another foggy wake-up call: India’s carbon market. The Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, set to launch by 2026, aims to cut emissions via trade. Yet high-emitting sectors remain exempt, benchmarks are fuzzy, and overlap with older schemes like PAT leaves us unclear whether we’re reforming or repeating. 

In the cities, Amit Kapoor sees tier-2 towns rising as new job magnets. But without empowered local bodies or smart planning, these growth bursts risk becoming yesterday’s metros, overbuilt and overwhelmed. The momentum is there, but the map isn’t. 

Finally, in Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a Revolutionary Uprising in Iran, reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta, Chowra Makaremi chronicles Iran’s defiant women rising from the fog of state control. Here, too, they resist without a blueprint but with remarkable clarity of purpose. 

Stay tuned and remember, even when the times are uncertain, some must still rise!