Best of BS Opinion: Breathing easy, but the dance will have to wait

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

In hospitals, there’s a hush before recovery. The beeping slows, the tubes come off, and the room fills with that nervous optimism you feel when the patient first opens their eyes. You want to cheer, but you don’t. You watch and wait. That’s India right now, like the patient off the ventilator, breathing on its own, but not ready to dance just yet. The fever of crises from telecom bankruptcies to tax shocks, inflation spikes to regulatory paralysis has broken and the vitals look better. Yet, as the monitors flash promising numbers, the doctors know that post-recovery is when the real test begins. Let’s dive in. 

 

You could see it at the India Mobile Congress this week, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi showcased the nation’s indigenous 4G tech stack, one of only five globally. After years of trauma (2G scam, AGR dues, Vodafone’s tax saga) the telecom sector has found a steady pulse. But beneath the oxygen mask lies a truth, that survival doesn’t mean stamina. As our first editorial notes, with a looming duopoly and ultra-cheap data plan models wheezing under financial strain, the sector needs regulation that prevents the next digital infection, not just celebrates recovery. 

In another wing of the hospital, Niti Aayog’s tax reform paper is studying the old wounds that never quite healed. The idea of a “Permanent Establishment”, the legal phantom haunting foreign investors, still scares capital away. As the paper notes, India taxes with zeal but defines with ambiguity. The proposed presumptive tax scheme could finally put this fever to rest, offering predictability to investors, highlights our second editorial. But, like a new drug trial, its dosage will matter as much as its design. 

T T Ram Mohan sees recovery through another lens. Despite tariff fevers and inflation tremors, the RBI’s growth forecast is up, inflation is down, and RBI is steady on its pulse with no premature rate cuts, just careful deregulation. By letting banks fund mergers and easing corporate lending, the central bank is adding muscle without overexertion. Yet, he cautions that the body must build strength gradually as credit growth without governance could relapse into crisis. 

And Ajay Kumar reminds us that governance itself needs rehabilitation. After ten years of streamlining, India’s bureaucracy still generates more paperwork than progress. He urges a “Why-based” reform, asking why a rule exists before automating it. True recovery, he argues, lies in trust-based governance, not procedural oxygen. The old administrative lungs, built for control, must learn to breathe transparency. 

In the literary ward, Neha Kirpal reviews Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China, a memoir of China’s long illness under Mao and its uneasy recovery after. Through her mother’s memories, Chang chronicles a society relearning to walk after decades of ideological paralysis. Her story of pain, defiance, and cautious hope mirrors our own moment: the joy of breathing free, shadowed by the fear of falling again. 

Stay tuned!