Best of BS Opinion: Brace for return migration, overseas listing, and more

Here's a selection of Business Standard opinion pieces for the day

Bihar is considered one of India’s more lawless states yet a three-phase election is being conducted there relatively peacefully. It is fairly certain that the results will be declared on a specific date (November 10) and accepted by all parties concerned. None of these certainties can be assumed for the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, where the counting for the presidential election is underway. Law and order problems have broken out in some battleground states, the president has filed a barrage of lawsuits, and who knows when the results will be declared – or accepted. The high percentage of mail-in ballots is only part of the roiling controversy; the Republican candidate’s willingness to accept only one outcome plays a much bigger part. 

While the world watches in bemusement, the opinion pages focus on more immediate issues at hand. Kanika Datta sums up the views.
 

Migrant workers who left the cities during the national lockdown were instrumental in the increase in demand for work under the rural employment guarantee scheme. With the harvest in, rural economies will not be able to support workers. So Union and state governments must brace for the return of migrants to the cities where job shortages are rising. How they manage this transition will determine India’s growth story, the lead edit points out. Read it here
 

The Fifteenth Finance Commission (FFC) submits its final report to the president on November 9. Rathin Roy, a former member of the PM’s economic advisory council, explains why this report assumes particular importance at this juncture. Read it here
 

The Defence Acquisition Policy of 2020 released on September 30 appears not to have accounted for the revision in the limit for foreign direct investment in defence by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade just 13 days earlier. Such anomalies in defence FDI policy are not new, says Ajai Shukla, in this assessment of the policy in the past few years. Read it here
 

The rules that the ministry is finalising for Indian companies to list overseas will remove a major bottleneck for start-ups and medium and small industries, says the second edit. Read it here

QUOTE OF THE DAY

‘This is my last election’

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar