Best of BS Opinion: China gaining traction, corporate frauds, and more

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

Findings of the latest Asia Power Index by the Lowy Institute, Australia’s most respected think tank, shows that India’s overall score declined by 1.3 points compared to 2019. Lowy damns India, Asia’s third largest economy, with faint praise by describing it as a “middle power”. But China is gaining traction. Our lead editorial talks about how India can play the game when it is losing ground. Read here
 

Other opinion pieces talk about the Hunger Index, flexible fiscal deficit targeting, and securities market regulation.

The conclusions of this year’s Global Hunger Index are grave enough to underscore the need for revamping the country’s food security-related programmes, argues our second editorial 
 

If the goal of a range-bound fiscal deficit targeting is to reduce “accounting engineering”, then making the internal finance ministry discipline of revenue forecasting more robust and realistic should yield quicker and more durable outcomes, writes AK Bhattacharya
 

The market regulator can no longer be selective about the cases in which it would flex its muscle and those in which it would plead an absence of power, writes Somasekhar Sundaresan

 

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“To give our lives some momentum, and to keep our homes running, we are slowly venturing out again. It [Covid-19] is still very much a threat. The state that India is in right now, we should not let it go down. We must strive to improve it.” 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi