Best of BS Opinion: When access becomes power

From AI access and workforce disruption to economic reform and market opportunities, this edition explores how nations and industries navigate narrowing gateways

Hello, and welcome to Best of BS Opinion, our wrap of the day's Opinion page.

  Gates are rarely neutral. They decide who enters, who waits, who is kept out, and who must build another road. They can be physical, like a strait that controls the movement of oil. They can be technological, like access to frontier artificial intelligence. They can be economic, deciding whether capital, exports or smaller firms have room to grow. They can also be political, determining whether dissent can pass through or is forced underground.

 

One such gate has suddenly narrowed, with the US government’s directive restricting non-American access to Anthropic’s powerful AI models. As our first editorial, “AI with borders”, points out, the directive has made it clear that frontier AI is no longer just a commercial product. The curbs, imposed on national-security grounds, follow concerns that the models could be jailbroken and misused for cyberattacks or even bioweapons. The editorial argues that this should compel India to rethink its AI strategy. It may no longer be enough to focus only on use cases built on foreign models. As with earlier technology sanctions after Pokhran-II, India may have to build its own strategic capability in AI, compute and model development.

 

The second editorial, “The upskilling imperative”, brings the same “access” question to jobs. TCS Chairman N Chandrasekaran has warned that the company may have as many AI agents as human employees in three years, suggesting hiring will slow. For India’s IT industry, long seen as a gateway to white-collar employment, this is a serious signal. The editorial does not claim the gate is closing forever, but that the terms of entry may be changing. Companies, universities and governments must act quickly on upskilling, reskilling and new career pathways so that employees and new graduates are not locked outside an AI-driven labour market.

 

In his column, “Echoes of 1990-91?”, Shankar Acharya turns our attention to India’s macroeconomic gates. He sees echoes of 1990-91 in today’s balance-of-payments pressure, triggered by the oil shock, weak goods exports, falling net FDI, volatile portfolio flows and limited fiscal space. The government and the RBI have bought time through exchange-rate flexibility and measures to attract foreign borrowing. But Acharya argues that borrowed time must lead to real reform: Lower tariffs to revive goods exports, more investor-friendly bilateral investment treaties, and fiscal correction, including reform of fertiliser subsidies.

 

Debashis Basu’s column, “The rise and rise of smallcaps”, finds a different opening in the stock market. While the Nifty 50 looks weak, smallcaps and microcaps are showing robust growth. In sectors such as power equipment, pharmaceutical services, data centres, engineering, defence, financial services, health care and retail, specialised smaller firms are benefiting from strong sectoral tailwinds. The main gate of market attention may still be guarded by large companies, but much of the growth is coming from businesses outside the usual spotlight.

 

“Iran’s many revolutions”, Reza Aslan’s review of Stolen Revolution, returns the metaphor to Iran. The US-Israel bombing campaign, far from opening the door to regime change, has strengthened hardline forces. Yet the book also shows that Iran’s democratic impulses have not disappeared. Across generations, dissent has survived through civil society, protest, memory and organisation.

 

Across these pieces, the question is not merely whether gates open or close. It is whether nations, industries, investors and citizens are prepared for the moment when they do.