Best of BS Opinion: Policy promises and practical limits across key sectors

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

Policy debates this week reveal a familiar tension between ambition and execution. Across markets, mobility, state finances, trade policy, and literature, the common thread is not drama but design: how rules are written, enforced, revised, and lived with over time. Today’s newsletter reads these arguments closely, focusing on institutions, incentives, and outcomes rather than rhetoric, and asking what durability in policy and ideas actually requires. Let’s dive in. 

The Securities Markets Code Bill, 2025 moves to merge three foundational market laws while keeping their basic architecture intact. Its main changes sit in governance and process: a larger SEBI board, stricter conflict rules, clearer separation between investigation and adjudication, time limits on probes, and stronger investor redress. Our first editorial highlights that the promise is clarity and efficiency, but the unresolved question is whether power will be matched by checks. 

 

Delhi’s forthcoming EV policy recognises that adoption alone cannot clean the city’s air. Electric vehicles have grown, mainly among two- and three-wheelers, yet pollution persists because older, dirtier vehicles remain, notes our second editorial. The proposed fixes — scrappage-linked incentives, local charging expansion, and continued tax relief — move in the right direction. But without strict enforcement across the NCR and firm disincentives for combustion engines, gains will stay limited over the coming years. 

R Kavita Rao writes that uneven investment across states continues to block broad-based growth. Using CMIE project data from 2015 to 2024, she shows that income levels alone do not explain flows. Public capital spending strongly pulls in private investment, and states that complete projects attract more announcements. The lesson for lagging regions is practical: invest publicly, build capacity, and deliver projects on time consistently. 

Meanwhile, Abhishek Anand examines the rollback of quality control orders and warns against mistaking reversal for reform. He traces how QCOs expanded after 2020, raised input costs, and hurt exporters before being quietly withdrawn. Similar cycles mark tariff hikes and duties. The damage, he argues, lingers because supply chains and investments do not reset easily. What India needs instead is predictable, accountable trade policy going forward. 

Finally, Dwight Garner reviews the first volume of Albert Camus’s complete notebooks and finds them colder than the reputation suggests. The journals offer little biography and function mainly as working notes for fiction and ideas. They are dense, fragmented, and often unrewarding, though patience brings occasional clarity on politics, fear, and criticism. The notebooks are not inviting, but they do record a guarded mind at work. 

Stay tuned!