Best of BS Opinion: India's half-open shutters and half-fixed systems

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

The smell of the street in the morning with dust rising, carts creaking, and the metallic clatter of half-lifted shutters of shops is something we have all experienced. You can hear the slow yawn of a bazaar waking with simmering tea, registers thumping open, and conversations resuming after a long pause. India feels a bit like that street currently with the shop shutters half open — not business as usual, but getting there. Some corners are bright with new ambition, others still wrapped in shadow. Policy, politics, and promise are all caught in that halfway hum as reform inches up, debt piles quietly and the world outside adjusts to its own tempo. Let’s dive in. 

 

Take the Ministry of Commerce’s fresh deliberation on allowing foreign direct investment in inventory-based ecommerce. The current regime keeps FDI locked within the “marketplace” model, a rule crafted for an earlier era of fledgling traders and fragile retail. Letting FDI into inventory-led models, at least for exports, could turn that creak into a swing. It could link farmers, artisans, and small firms to both domestic and global markets, as our first editorial argues. To complete the reform would be to raise the shutter fully by trusting regulation, not restriction, to keep the balance. 

Something similar is happening by the water. As India launches a Rs 69,725 crore revival for shipbuilding, backed by a new Maritime Development Fund, the country is reclaiming a trade it once mastered at Lothal, notes our second editorial. With China, South Korea, and Japan burdened by overflowing order books, India’s half-forgotten dockyards might hum again. But execution, like the perfect pulley, will decide if this ambition lifts. 

Meanwhile, R Jagannathan’s column peers outward, into a world where even superpowers can’t pull the shutters all the way up. The supposed “G2” of the US and China, he notes, is more myth than might, an illusion in a multipolar bazaar of competing stalls. In this disorderly marketplace, India’s quiet pragmatism may prove steadier than the loud bargaining of giants. 

However, Amarendu Nandy warns that some shutters are being forced open with borrowed screws. States, chasing electoral applause, are piling debt with cash giveaways. The Fiscal Health Index paints a sobering picture, that interest payments are eating revenues and off-budget borrowings are swelling. Populism, he cautions, isn’t free, it’s paid for in postponed infrastructure and mounting interest. 

Finally, as Shyam Saran notes in his review of Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, progress itself depends on how widely truth is shared. Common knowledge, Pinker says, binds societies. It turns the private flicker of awareness into a collective dawn. Perhaps that’s what this half-open moment is, India, blinking in shared realisation that the day’s work has begun. 

Stay tuned!