Best of BS Opinion: UPI glitches, dollar doubts and Biden's decline

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

A major UPI outage over the weekend disrupted digital payments across India, raising fresh concerns about the system’s reliability. It was the sixth such failure in a year, despite assurances from the National Payments Corporation of India that a root-cause analysis had been conducted. With UPI handling over 600 million daily transactions, even short downtimes cause serious disruptions — especially for small vendors. Our first editorial notes that while NPCI has transformed India’s digital payments space, the Reserve Bank of India must now take a more active role in ensuring resilience.  

In another major development, the Cabinet Committee on Security has cleared the purchase of 26 Rafale-M jets from France for €6.6 billion (Rs 64,000 crore), a move — our second editorial highlights as crucial for enhancing India’s naval air capabilities. The jets will address persistent integration issues with Russian MiG-29Ks on INS Vikrant and supplement the earlier 36 Rafales procured for the Indian Air Force. However, this spotlight on the Navy only sharpens the urgency in the IAF, whose squadron strength has dropped to 32 — far below the sanctioned 42-45. The government must accelerate its decision on 114 multirole fighter jets to plug this growing capability gap. 

Meanwhile, economists Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah reflect on the return of Donald Trump and the revived talk of a global monetary pact — a so-called “Mar-a-Lago Accord” aimed at devaluing the dollar. But they argue that today’s fragmented geopolitics, weaker US credibility, and deeper currency markets make such coordination unlikely. More telling, they suggest, is the quiet erosion of the dollar’s safe haven status — already reshaping global finance more deeply than any formal accord could. 

And at CERAWeek, Chris Wright’s call for “energy addition” over energy transition marked a policy reversal that alarmed Sunita Narain. She cautions that this pivot towards fossil fuels risks derailing global climate goals, especially for developing nations relying on US leadership. 

Finally, Fintan O’Toole, reviewing Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple, sees a sobering portrait of denial inside the Democratic Party as Biden’s 2024 campaign unravelled, with advisers enabling a run despite clear signs of decline. 

Stay tuned!