Hello, and welcome to the Best of BS Opinion, our wrap of the day’s Opinion page.
N Chandrasekaran’s exit as Tata Sons chairman, following months of turbulence involving Tata Trusts, exposes weaknesses in the group’s governance structure. A decade after Cyrus Mistry’s removal, the latest episode underscores the need for greater transparency and a clearer separation of roles between the holding company and its principal shareholder. Today’s first editorial suggests that listing Tata Sons could improve accountability and dilute the extensive veto powers exercised by Tata Trusts’ nominee directors. With the group now searching for a successor, it calls for a thorough reimagining of the relationship between Tata Sons and Tata Trusts to restore professionalism and stability.
Despite the removal, simplification, digitisation, or decriminalisation of more than 47,000 compliances, businesses continue to face a formidable regulatory burden across multiple levels of government. Our second editorial contends that the focus must shift from counting provisions removed to measuring whether firms can secure approvals and meet requirements without navigating multiple departments and unpredictable delays. Overlapping licences, fragmented inspections, and uneven implementation by states and local authorities remain major obstacles. The four Labour Codes also show that legal consolidation need not ensure practical simplification. Integrated regulation, risk-based inspections, time-bound approvals, and greater administrative accountability are therefore essential.
Nine years after its introduction, GST has unified domestic consumption taxes, reduced compliance and transport costs, and helped create a more integrated national market. Yet its revenue performance has fallen short of expectations, while exemptions, partial coverage, and the exclusion of petroleum products have weakened its self-enforcing character and created distortions. M Govinda Rao calls for the next generation of reforms to focus on widening the tax base and improving revenue productivity. He proposes moving towards fewer rates, raising the threshold for smaller taxpayers, and bringing petroleum products within GST to expand input tax credits and improve competitiveness.
West Bengal’s hopes of reviving its investment fortunes through a transformative mega-project confront deep-rooted political, administrative, and economic challenges. Kanika Datta traces the state’s chequered experience with large investments, from the protracted Haldia Petrochemicals saga to failed foreign ventures, aborted privatisations, and the controversies surrounding Singur and Nandigram. It suggests that ideological shifts alone cannot overcome problems of poor planning, regulatory uncertainty, labour politics, and difficult land acquisition. The new government’s approach will therefore be a test of whether it can create conditions for sustained investment rather than rely on a single project to transform the state’s economic prospects.
The stories of entrepreneurs who have confronted failure and rebuilt offer considerable potential, but Down But Not Out: Gritty Comebacks of India’s Diehard Founders – written by Subrata Mitra and Pankaj Mishra, and and illustrated by Rajesh Subramanian – squanders much of it through an awkward hybrid format. Prosenjit Datta finds that its combination of illustrations and essay-like narratives leaves crucial gaps, assumes excessive prior knowledge, and often introduces characters without sufficient context. The non-linear structure also leads to repetition, while the stylised prose can become overly dramatic and resemble the cadence of generative AI. Despite flashes of insight and compelling subjects, the book leaves too much unsaid. Datta suggests that presenting the material as 10 fully developed stories might have made for a far stronger book.
