Best of BS Opinion: Fix the infection first, not just the surface symptoms

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

You can keep changing the bandage, but if the wound is festering, the rot spreads deeper. That’s the thing about patchwork solutions, they cover up the mess, but they don’t fix it. In policymaking, in industry, even in the stories we tell ourselves, surface-level corrections often distract from foundational decay. The balm of a scheme, a reform, a big bet, none of it works if the root cause stays untouched. You can’t fast-forward progress while sidestepping the infection underneath. Let’s dive in. 

Take India’s celebrated decline in poverty, from 27.1 per cent in 2011-12 to 5.3 per cent today under the World Bank’s updated benchmark. On the surface, this is a healing wound. But as our first editorial argues, the data hides gaps: rural-urban disparities, outdated metrics, and the government’s continued reliance on global estimates. Without India defining its own poverty benchmarks and conducting regular evaluations, targeted policy becomes guesswork, just more gauze over a still-bleeding wound. 

 

Similarly, reforms in India’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) offer a modern dressing for a decades-old failure. As our second editorial explains, relaxing land and sourcing rules aims to attract semiconductor manufacturing, but the structural issues persist: fractured ecosystems, poor infrastructure, and policy inertia. Without fixing these systemic flaws or passing crucial legislation like the shelved DESH Bill, SEZs will keep limping along, all bandage, no cure. 

That same ecosystem blind spot haunts India’s critical minerals strategy. Laveesh Bhandari highlights how mismatched timelines between mining, processing, and manufacturing create market failure. The solution? Not just easing regulations but syncing the entire value chain. Because speeding up one link while others lag doesn’t heal the system, it just transfers the stress. 

In entertainment, too, deeper shifts are happening. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar tracks the rise of regional OTT platforms. While profitable, these players succeed not through cosmetic tweaks but by deeply understanding their local audiences, proof that sustainable growth demands tailored, embedded strategy, not surface-level scale chasing. 

And in Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk, Prosenjit Datta reviews Faiz Siddiqui’s take on Elon Musk, a man constantly in crisis, yet always rebooting. But even Musk may find that without true introspection, you can only bandage over chaos for so long before it infects the empire you’ve built. 

Stay tuned!