Best of BS Opinion: Why India must leave retrospective taxes behind

From retrospective taxation and quality reforms to polymer notes, exam glitches and middle-class stress, today's opinion pages examine key policy challenges

Hello, and welcome to Best of BS Opinion, our wrap of the day's Opinion page. 

  India needs to end the uncertainty created by retrospective tax and policy actions, writes Laveesh Bhandari. The recent Supreme Court ruling against online gaming platforms in a GST dispute may help the government recover large past dues, but Bhandari argues that such retrospective action damages the investment climate. Businesses already operate in a complex regulatory environment, with grey areas across taxes, fees, royalties and compliance. If firms fear that any part of government can reopen past decisions years later, they will price that risk into investments or avoid projects altogether.

 

 

Rajeev Kher, Anil Jauhri and Om Stutee argue that India needs a National Authority on Quality to strengthen trust in its standards, certification and export-quality systems. India has built a large quality infrastructure, with more than 22,300 standards in force and 94 per cent harmonised with international standards. Yet setbacks in organic certification, pharmaceuticals and agri-food exports show that the system remains fragmented. The authors say standards, technical regulation, certification, accreditation, market surveillance and international recognition cannot function in silos. They call for clearer roles for line ministries, better separation between rule-making and certification, stronger surveillance, and export-quality regulation that earns global acceptance.

 

Our first editorial says the Reserve Bank of India’s plan to revive polymer banknotes deserves careful consideration, even in an era of rapid digital-payment growth. Currency in circulation grew by over 11 per cent in 2025-26, while expenditure on printing banknotes rose to more than ₹6,300 crore in 2024-25 and nearly 24 billion soiled notes were withdrawn. The editorial argues that polymer notes, especially in lower denominations such as ₹10 and ₹20, could reduce replacement costs, improve durability, strengthen security and ease the inconvenience of handling damaged notes. However, upfront costs, ATM calibration, cash-handling systems and public acceptance will need careful assessment.

 

The month of May exposed serious flaws in India’s centralised public-examination system, notes our second editorial. The latest problem involved discrepancies in the on-screen marking system for Class XII board exams, with students finding blurred or missing pages, unmarked answers and even the answer copies of other students. The CBSE portal crashed after 125,000 students applied for scanned copies of more than 1.1 million answer books. The editorial says that digitised evaluation may have been intended to reduce mistakes and speed up assessment, but poor pilot testing, inadequate teacher training and weak implementation left students exposed to avoidable stress. It also links the episode to broader failures under the National Testing Agency.

 

V Kumaraswamy reviews Break Point: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work as a warning about the weakening fortunes of India’s middle class. The book argues that this group has powered consumption-led growth and supports wider employment through forward linkages, but is now under pressure from inflation, automation, unemployment, debt and weak income growth. Kumaraswamy finds the book useful for its warning signals, though more descriptive than analytical, and points out weaknesses in some definitions and calculations around savings, families and employment multipliers.