Best of BS Opinion: India, US must push for a quick trade agreement

Today's opinion pieces look at the US tariff issues, NCR's air pollution hazard, India's diversity as a counter to AI, and the need for knowledge-industry linkages

Hello, and welcome to Best of Business Standard Opinion, our daily wrap of the Opinion page.  

China has demonstrated its trade heft by getting US President Donald Trump to reduce tariffs from 100 per cent to 47 per cent, lower than what India faces, without conceding much. It has also made clear that there is not alternative to China for rare earth magnets. It is time to develop a counter to it, notes our first editorial. India can possibly get lower tariffs if the terms of the proposed bilateral trade agreement are sweetened considerably, and if Prime Minister Narendra Modi brings his reputation for personal diplomacy to bear. Those who continue to believe in the partnership believe there are ways the two democracies can work together, as the six-month Chabahar exemption for India suggests. Some of that spirit must now be brought back to trade, and both sides must address all pending issues to arrive at a mutually beneficial deal. 

 

  A sobering piece of data sums up the gravity of Delhi's air pollution hazard: it beats out risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure in mortality rates, with one in seven deaths linked to poor air quality. Delhi's recent cloud-seeding experiment is itself under a cloud, with the state government going ahead with the expensive trial despite warnings that it wouldn't succeed because of poor weather conditions. Urban administrations, notes our second editorial, must look for institutional solutions rather than expensive silver bullets. Tackling pollution demands joint solutions among affected states and the Union government. The key challenge is taking hard decisions and dialling back populism. Diminishing farm fires contribute less to pollution than vehicular pollution and bursting of crackers during Diwali week. Both of the latter causes need urgent redressal to enable the NCR’s citizens to breathe easily again.  

  Ajit Balakrishnan explores India's shift from the fears of overpopulation to what is now termed its demographic dividend, and whether the vast army of artisans that populate India's diversity might actually be its stand against robotic AI-made assembly-line lookalike products - the 'automation paradox', as he calls it. Can India's diverse artisanal crafts - handmade and region-specific - become India's advantage, at scale? In a new world where prices of mass-produced identical goods will fall, the rarest and most valuable commodity may the touch of a skilled hand and the cultural narrative behind an object. Value will shift from utility to provenance. Consumers will pay a premium for a story and a connection to a real person and place. India’s future ‘Made in India’ tag may well go from ‘low-cost manufacturing’ to ‘high-value, authentic, human craft’. 

  There is a very real risk of a global stock market crash, thanks to cross-holdings between the tech giants and shadowy private financing practices, warns Debashis Basu. The artificial intelligence boom has led to what he calls the 'incestuous investment loop' between software and hardware giants cross-subsidising each other, leading to ever higher valuations for both sides; a crash would send a tsunami of wealth loss across global markets. Worse, unlike the dotcom crash, there are no fiscal cushions available to Washington this time. Increasing the risk is the jump in non-bank lending, with most banks opening their purses to private-credit firms, hedge funds and other non-bank lenders. A crash would also hit these banks' Tier-I capital, which was intended as a backstop against such crises. The contagion, he says, will also spread to emerging markets like India. It would be wise for investors to have risk mitigation measures in place.  

  A new book, written by Scott Miller, explores one of the earliest Indian anti-colonial resistance that sprung from foreign shores - the Ghadar movement, which found its origin primarily in the Sikh farming community in California. Its roots, ironically, lay in anti-immigrant sentiment there, and drove the Sikhs to form alliances with Left-leaning intelligentsia at the universities of Berkeley and Stanford. Hari Kunzru notes that while Miller has excavated a fascinating trove of archival material, the book is thin on the nuances of revolutionary politics, connections between Ghadar’s nationalist programme and its involvement in local labour struggles among Punjabi farm workers. It also doesn't adequately address the pan-Asian intellectual and cultural networks cultivated by the Ghadarites.   (Correction: An earlier version of this article had an incorrect version of Debashis Basu's column. The error is regretted.)