Archives: All articles

The collective decisions by authors, academics, activists, filmmakers and scientists to return awards given to them may be dismissed as “politics by other means” and as “ideological intolerance” by those who are “pathologically opposed” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP and its ideological parent RSS. But these protests are now taking a different turn and hitting the government where it hurts: the economy. What is worse is that leading corporate captains are hauling up the government —...

On October 15, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India answered the prime minister’s call for action. Not long after Narendra Modi criticised the countrywide phenomenon of calls drops, the regulator laid down rules to penalise mobile telephone operators in a knee-jerk reaction. From January 1 next year, according to these new rules, telecom operators will have to pay consumers Re 1 for every call dropped, limited to a cap of three call drops per day. Much of the discussion on the subject has...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a particular fondness for what are supposed to be smart cities. He wants many dozens of them across the country. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party is no different. He wants to build Amaravati, a "greenfield" capital city where four million people would eventually reside. He wants the new city to be not just bigger but "better" than Singapore. The two men together with many very, very important persons are scheduled to...

Judges have in the past castigated India's premier police investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). But the manner in which Special CBI Judge Om Prakash Saini has flayed the agency has raised more than a few eyebrows. Saini is adjudicating over a slew of criminal cases related to the mis-allocation and mis-pricing of second-generation telecommunications airwaves, popularly called the 2G spectrum scam. On 15 October, the judge, himself a former cop, described CBI's...

An article that appeared in thehoot.org in November 2013 has suddenly been attracting considerable attention. Reason: the article was about how Peter and Indrani Mukerjea sold their stake in the INX/NewsX media group of companies and how India’s biggest private corporate entity, Reliance Industries Limited, headed by the country’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, acquired control over these firms for a period of time in a convoluted manner. The Hoot stories looked into the examination of these...

The Narendra Modi government’s new scheme to unearth black money kept by Indians outside the country has yielded just about Rs 4,147 crore from 638 declarations. On average, this figure works out to a relatively small amount of Rs 6 crore per declaration — either about holding assets abroad illegally or earning income outside the country which has not been disclosed. Nearly two-thirds of this money, or Rs 2,488 will come to the exchequer by way of taxes. This measly sum is a clear indication...

Under what circumstances can the executive overrule of the judiciary? Obviously, by enacting a law to overturn a court judgment. There are a number of examples of this kind. However, in an unusual - and perhaps unprecedented - move, an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM), led by former Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, has been accused of not adhering to the letter and spirit of a judgment of the Supreme Court, in a series of draft reports prepared in the office of the Comptroller &...