Hello, and welcome to the Best of BS Opinion, our wrap of the day’s Opinion page.
India needs to move beyond its dependence on low-skilled overseas migration and align its workforce with growing global demand for skilled labour. Ageing populations, shrinking workforces, and skills shortages in advanced economies present opportunities across technology, healthcare, logistics, construction, hospitality, and green industries. According to today’s first editorial, the policy response should include better migration information systems, foreign-language training, recognised certification, employer partnerships, and state-level mobility resource centres to reduce workers’ dependence on intermediaries. Stronger diaspora representation and grievance mechanisms are also needed. Promoting circular migration can help transfer skills and capital back home, but overseas opportunities must complement, not substitute for, domestic job creation and productive employment.
India’s weak implementation of mandatory workplace crèches highlights a broader constraint on women’s participation in paid employment, notes our second editorial. Despite a 2017 mandate covering establishments with 50 or more workers, the government has neither assessed compliance nor maintained data on covered establishments. This is significant as female labour force participation remains low, while women bear a disproportionate share of unpaid care work, with child care and personal commitments keeping many outside the workforce. Affordable, accessible child care could help women remain employed after motherhood, particularly given India’s relatively young age of motherhood. However, workplace crèches alone are insufficient. India needs broader community-based care infrastructure, better data, and stronger enforcement.
India’s young population could drive faster growth, but high youth unemployment and inadequate education spending risk turning its demographic dividend into a demographic disaster, writes Nitin Desai. Over four decades, access to tertiary education has expanded sharply, helping fuel the country’s information technology exports, global capability centres, and overseas remittances. Yet graduate employability remains weak, with poor-quality education leaving companies to provide substantial post-recruitment training. Public spending on education has remained around 4 per cent of GDP, below the 6 per cent policy target, while the Centre’s share has declined. The situation calls for stronger Centre-state coordination, better educational standards, and labour-intensive manufacturing to create decent jobs.
Artificial intelligence is becoming integral to financial services, where errors can have significant consequences for customers and markets. India’s regulators are responding by emphasising governance and accountability rather than prescribing detailed rules for rapidly evolving technology. The Reserve Bank of India’s FREE-AI framework recommends board-approved policies covering AI systems throughout their lifecycle, with emphasis on explainability, fairness, cybersecurity, and consumer protection. Sebi has proposed similar safeguards for AI used in securities markets and issued operational guidance on AI-related cybersecurity risks. Amit Tandon highlights the implications for corporate boards, which must understand critical AI applications, data quality, model risks, vendors, failures, and accountability.
Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments: Bearing Witness to a War offers a deeply personal account of life during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, placing the experience within the country’s wider geopolitical and civil-war history. Writing from the perspective of an Arab Christian woman and member of a Palestinian family, Makdisi captures the confusion, fear, grief, and psychological dislocation of civilians caught between competing forces. Her observations of disrupted time, domestic routines, and the destruction of Beirut bring an intimacy often absent from strategic analyses of conflict. Chintan Girish Modi praises the book for restoring ordinary human lives to narratives dominated by armies, states, and statistics.
