Best of BS Opinion: New GDP series welcome, but more needs to be done

A new GDP base year, US-Israel strikes on Iran, India's urban planning crisis, and artificial intelligence's impact on the IT sector dominate today's Opinion page

Hello, and welcome to Best of BS Opinion, our wrap of the day's Opinion page.  The Indian government's Department of Statistics earlier this week released a new series to measure the country's gross domestic product (GDP), using a base year of 2022-23. While the new series boosted FY26 GDP growth projections by 20 basis points to 7.6 per cent, the nominal size of the economy is projected to decline by Rs 11.66 trillion. While the expanded ways of measuring the economy are welcome, a producer price index that could map the gap between nominal and real GDP is still missing, says our first editorial. The real impact of the new series, however, will lie in how the government addresses structural gaps that it uncovers, such as the contribution of the manufacturing sector.  The military strikes launched Saturday by the United States (US) and Israel on Iran have muddied the waters in West Asia, notes our second editorial. Nor is the proximate cause for the strikes clear, given that the US had last year claimed to have destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities, and talks were on for further restrictions. Any projections of the leadership folding after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death seem unfounded at this time; instead, it raises prospects of asymmetrical warfare by Iran's proxies or sleeper cells. For India, critically, the attacks put a question mark on its energy security - which is heavily dependent on flows from West Asia - as well as the well-being of its roughly nine million citizens in that region. The need of the hour is, as India has urged, is for the aggressors to return to the negotiating table.  Sunita Narain, a multi-generational Delhiite, laments the conditions, not just of her city but also the many that are sprouting mile after blighted mile with nary a thought for urban planning. It is as if India is urbanising without a thought to what being an urban centre entails. There are no plans for civic infrastructure or urban governance. The master plan is only an idea on paper, rarely followed, she notes. And mobility, key to a city's health, is paid the least attention to, pushing the middle class to the peripheries where housing is cheaper, but ultimately adding to the strain on already-ancient transportation systems. The nature of urbanisation, she argues, must be resource-efficient, inclusive and capable of ensuring livelihood security and all that makes life worth living.  Ajay Shah addresses the elephant in the room - the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on India's information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services industry, in which India has achieved global competitiveness at scale. Shah argues that corporations with large, embedded systems will actually need more work once AI models are incorporated into their systems for the simple reason that they will not want to risk any system-wide disruptions. In fact, this technological upheaval may actually catalyse a new breed of global product companies out of India, he says, but first, Indian firms must double down on producing, owning, and growing intellectual capital.  Julia Cookes' book Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World follows the lives of  Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, and Emily “Mickey” Hahn between the 1930s and the 1950s, when they flourished as journalists who habitually rejected the conventions of cold objectivity in favour of a memorable first-person point of view. All three women wrote fiction in addition to their journalism, which sometimes blurred the lines to the point of confusion, but offered them freedom to explore a range of circumstances and emotions. The idiosyncratic lives of these writers, notes Jennifer Szalai in her review, make for an enthralling read.