Hello and welcome to Best of Business Standard Opinion, our wrap of the day’s editorial page.
The Union Cabinet’s approval of an Integrated Transport & Logistics Authority is a welcome step towards ending fragmented planning across roads, railways, ports, aviation, waterways, and urban transport. Today’s first editorial notes that ITLA will prepare a long-term National Transport Master Plan, appraise major projects, monitor implementation, and create a unified transport data repository. Integrated planning could improve capital allocation, reduce duplication, and lower logistics costs, but the authority must have sufficient influence over project selection and investment priorities. Duplication with PM Gati Shakti must also be avoided, while data integration requires interoperability and safeguards. ITLA should ultimately be judged by whether planning changes implementation. The government’s three-month extension of Rodtep provides continuity but little certainty for exporters, who finalise orders well in advance. Keeping existing rates and value caps unchanged does not address concerns arising from the scheme’s uncertain future and sharply lower budget allocation. The second editorial notes that Rodtep refunds embedded taxes rather than providing a conventional export subsidy, making predictability essential for competitiveness. Previous policy changes, including rate restrictions and subsequent restoration, have highlighted the costs of volatility. With exports gaining momentum, the editorial urges a longer extension, greater funding, consultation, a defined transition period, and policy stability to support exporters. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) delayed rate hike has left it confronting higher oil prices, surplus liquidity, rising US Treasury yields, narrowing India-US bond spreads, and renewed FII outflows. T T Ram Mohan contends that the central bank should have acted earlier, while arguing that conventional monetary policy frameworks are inadequate in a world where geopolitical disruptions are increasingly routine. He proposes creating a Strategic Affairs unit within the RBI that would bring together expertise in international relations, defence, energy, and economics. Such an unit would assess geopolitical developments, construct scenarios for oil prices, inflation, and exchange rates, and assign probabilities to them, enabling better-informed decisions. India’s family-owned businesses face a new governance challenge: control can now be contested from within, rather than threatened by outside acquirers. Amit Tandon uses the Tata Sons dispute to suggest that promoter stakes may no longer guarantee boardroom control. Families could respond by retaining executive authority, favouring accommodating directors, strengthening governance charters, and simplifying ownership structures. Yet evidence on family control and performance is mixed, with studies showing that professional managers can outperform family CEOs, while family ownership can support stronger returns. The column concludes that succession planning, governance, professional management, and trust between owners and boards will become crucial. Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine offers an extensively researched account of Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the quest for superintelligence. In his review of the book,Devangshu Datta traces Hassabis’ extraordinary journey from chess and gaming prodigy to neuroscientist and AI pioneer, highlighting DeepMind’s development of AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaFold, whose protein-folding breakthrough has accelerated drug research. Mallaby, drawing on hundreds of hours of access to Hassabis and his associates, also chronicles DeepMind’s financial struggles, Google’s acquisition, and Silicon Valley’s corporate rivalries and ethical disputes. Datta praises the book’s meticulous sourcing but finds Mallaby less effective at explaining complex technology and insufficiently critical of Hassabis, suggesting that extraordinary access may have compromised objectivity.
