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In November 2024, Bangladesh’s highest court ordered the government to form a committee of experts to review the country’s power contact with Adani. This follows years of controversy over the deal, struck not long after a meeting between Indian PM Narendra Modi and the now-deposed Bangladeshi PM, Sheikh Hasina. In February 2023, AdaniWatch revealed that the contract failed to take account of generous financial concessions made by the Modi government to the relevant power plant, Adani’s Godda...

Written by two investigative journalists working with the New York Times and published a little before Donald J. Trump was elected as President of the United States of America (POTUS) for a second term of four years, this book is an extremely detailed exposé of how he acquired his wealth through inheritance, fraud, and deceit. Based on 20 years of confidential tax information and business records obtained by leaks from whistleblowers and off-the-record interviews with insiders, the authors...

To contend that the indictment of Gautam Adani, his nephew, and their associates, in the United States has dealt a blow to the ambitions of one of India’s, and the world’s, richest men, would be an understatement. The prominent tycoon, whose proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the stuff of legends, has never before been hurt like this. His reputation is at stake. And with it, his business plans. The 30,000-word report of the New York-based short-selling firm Hindenburg Research...

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Ayush Joshi Nov 23, 2024 According to a government body in India, documents were falsified so that a coal mine being developed by an Adani company could proceed. The Chhattisgarh State Scheduled Tribes Commission released a report on 6 November 2024 stating that the environmental approval given to the Parsa coal project relied on falsified documents purporting to be records of consent by village councils. When trees were felled in preparation for the coal mine in...

As early as 2015, a prominent Indian newspaper reported that everywhere that Modi went, 'Adani was sure to go'. This support has not always helped India. On the contrary, by brazenly promoting the oligarch’s ambitions, Modi has sometimes hurt his country’s relations with her neighbours as well as with other countries. The growth of the Adani Group outside India over the past decade or so has been closely aligned with the diplomatic efforts of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Many of Adani’s...

The Reliance group headed by Mukesh Ambani has been eyeing a prime plot of land in south-central Mumbai’s Breach Candy area over the last four years. In fact, so keen was it on acquiring it that, at one point, it allegedly made a “backdoor attempt” to wrest control of the family trust that owns the land. It is quite another matter that India’s biggest privately-owned corporate entity did not make much headway as the Seth Damodar Madhavji Charity Trust (henceforth, DMT), controlled by the...

Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba was born in 1967 to a family of poor farmers from Amalapuram in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. The exact date of his birth is not known, as his parents did not record it. He died on October 12, 2024, aged 57, in Hyderabad following post-operation complications after a surgery to remove stones from his gall bladder. After he was afflicted by polio, he used a wheelchair from the age of five. A brilliant student, Saibaba topped his batch of undergraduate students...

However, the government’s plans to create jobs for young Indians are unlikely to be successful because these are dependent on the goodwill of big businesses in the organised sector and not small enterprises in the unorganised sector that have created employment. On the contrary, little is being done for MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) who have been battered and bruised by first, the November 2016 demonetisation, then, the hurriedly implemented goods and services tax (GST) regime and...

On 5 December 2023, President of Kenya William Ruto met Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi at New Delhi’s Hyderabad House, the Indian government’s opulent guest house for visiting dignitaries. As the meeting between the heads of government and their officials was proceeding, there was a ‘surprise visitor’. It was Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men and an industrialist who is perceived to be close to Modi. A person who was present at the meeting told one of the writers of this...

The PPF scheme – introduced in all head post offices of India with effect from January 1979 – is popular not only because of its relatively higher rate of interest as compared to fixed deposits, but also because the interest earned from it is free from payment of income tax. The Modi government has amended rules whereby PPF accounts held by NRIs will henceforth earn “zero” interest with effect from October 1, 2024. An order to this effect was issued on August 21, 2024, by the financial services...

Mumbai: Never in the history of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the regulator of the country’s financial markets, has its chairperson’s credibility been questioned in such a dramatic manner. Although Madhabi Puri Buch – the first woman, the first person who was not a civil servant and the first person from the private sector to head SEBI – had promptly responded to the allegations made in the second report of the US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research released on 10 August, her...

Basic facts and figures Name of coal-power plant: Godda power plant Location: Near the town of Godda, state of Jharkhand, India Adani subsidiary: Adani Power (Jharkhand) Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Adani Power Limited Capacity: 1600 MW Countries involved: India, Bangladesh, Australia Exactly a week after ousted Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, left Dhaka on a military aircraft and landed on the outskirts of Delhi on 5 August 2024, the government of India amended guidelines...

In April 2021, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), a quasi-judicial body in India that adjudicates issues relating to bankrupt companies, admitted the case of a Mumbai-based real estate company, Radius Estates and Developers Private Limited (henceforth Radius), to adjudication through the insolvency process. More than three years later, Adani Goodhomes, a subsidiary of Adani Infrastructure and Developers, acquired the bankrupt firm in a deal which certain creditors have alleged was...

Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister for Railways has had a rather unusual career trajectory. A former officer of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) who served former Prime Minister of India Atal Behari Vajpayee as his personal secretary, Ashwini Vaishnaw quit the civil service to become a corporate captain before joining politics. He is the only first-time member of the Rajya Sabha to hold two important ministerial portfolios, over and above that of the Railways. As a cabinet...

In the Union Budget 2024-25 presented in Parliament on July 23, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi allocated Rs.2.652 trillion (lakh crore) towards capital expenditure in the Railways. The sum is a marginal increase of roughly 2 per cent over the revised estimate for 2023-24. In what can be construed as the government’s neglect of the preferred mode of long-distance travel for the majority of India’s population, the word “railways” figured...

Despite the rhetoric that the regime’s record in employment generation has not been all that bad by citing questionable data, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has stolen more than a few leaves from the pre-election manifesto of the biggest Opposition party, the Congress, while announcing schemes such as the internship programme in the country’s top companies, the employment-linked incentive programme, abolition of the “angel tax” to spur investments and by not reducing the budget allocation...

On 4 June 2024, the day it become known that India’s ruling party, the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, would return to power for a third five-year term but as a weaker head of government, the prices of the shares of Adani Group companies collapsed amid a general meltdown of the country’s stock markets. Opposition politicians have called for an inquiry into allegations of stock-price manipulation. The story starts on Friday 31 May when there was frantic buying and selling of shares in...

More than a decade ago, when media and civil society were going gung-ho against the then UPA government for the “Coalgate” scandal, the furore was focussed on a report prepared by an independent institution, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, that revealed evidence implicating the Union government and multiple coal mining companies. The CAG had found that the government had allocated a slew of coal blocks to privately-owned mining companies without conducting fair auctions. The...

Half-way through the heat and dust of India’s general elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sprung a surprise on the country, including his most ardent supporters. He suggested during a public speech on 8 May 2024 in Karimnagar, Telangana, in southern India, that the country’s two richest men Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani were sending carloads of cash to the largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress. Opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, pledges to institute a parliamentary probe into...

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the regulator of the country’s financial markets, has sent ‘show cause’ notices to six listed companies in the Adani Group. This was revealed by the companies themselves in recent filings to stock-exchange authorities. A notice to show cause is a formal document issued to a party in a dispute that sets out details about an alleged offence or misconduct. Such a notice is usually issued by a law-enforcing authority. The receiving party has a...

A decade ago, in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Narendra Modi, then still the Chief Minister of Gujarat, famously declaimed: “Na khaoonga, na khaane doonga” (Neither will I take bribes, nor will I let others take bribes). He added that he would bring back illegal wealth stashed away in tax havens abroad by rich Indians and distribute the money among the poor—Rs.15 lakh for each poor family. Modi projected himself as a crusader against corruption in general and the corrupt Congress...

THE DEMOLITION, THE VERDICT AND THE TEMPLE: THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON THE RAM MANDIR PROJECT By Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay Speaking Tiger, Rs 699 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party, are hopeful that the ‘inauguration’ of the incomplete Ram temple at Ayodhya would consolidate the Hindu vote in favour of the incumbent regime in the run-up to the general elections. Prime Minister Narendra Modi thinks that whipping up religious fervour with the pran pratishtha...

Example 1: Ajay Mishra Teni, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, is the BJP member of the Lok Sabha from the Kheri constituency in Uttar Pradesh. In October 2021, his son, Ashish Mishra Monu, allegedly drove into a crowd of protesting farmers in Lakhimpur Kheri, killing four farmers and a journalist. The junior Mishra is under trial for murder. The government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi resisted immense pressure to dismiss Teni from the Cabinet at the time and he has now been...

Sreedhar Ramamurthi was a scientist as well as an activist who worked to ameliorate the condition of those impacted by reckless mining all over India. He worked with many others who shared his ideals about the need to conserve the planet with care. He was no starry-eyed social worker who believed he could change the world overnight. He was down to earth and practical about what could be achieved and what could not, and the extent to which the government could be convinced to support the under...

Here is a tentative list of entities in corporate groups that purchased electoral bonds and the controversies surrounding some of these groups. We know that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got more than half the funds from the redemption of bonds between 2018 and 2024. One of the companies that bought the bonds is Future Gaming and Hotel Services. This company bought bonds worth Rs 1,368 crore. The person behind this company is Santiago Martin, often called India’s “lottery king.” There have...

A bureaucrat, sometimes described as a civil servant, is, more often than not, a sophisticated slave of his political masters. Not all are, however, equally supine. Among them, a minority displays a strong spine. The privileged lot belonging to the elite IAS who are supposed to hold up the proverbial “steel frame” of the country, are a mixed bunch of the subservient (the majority) and the rebellious (a few). The author of the book under review may consider himself as belonging to the latter...

A trust associated with the Reliance group inaugurated the world’s largest private zoo on February 26. The zoo is the “pet project” of Anant Ambani, son of group head Mukesh Ambani. The zoo is the venue of Anant’s pre-wedding celebrations where the world’s richest and most famous are expected to be in attendance. The project was set up under the shadow of a series of legal challenges around the country by the petitioners concerned, with allegations of illegal transfer of elephants from different...

The Supreme Court judgement on electoral bonds on Thursday is reminiscent of two apparently contradictory cliches. First, it is too little too late. Secondly, it is also better late than never. When the then finance minister, the late Arun Jaitely introduced the proposal to have electoral bonds in his budget speech, it took the government 11 months before it was formally fleshed out. Even then, the law that was struck down by the apex court had to be introduced as a money bill, which does not...

If there were some who were expecting big-ticket announcements to be made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman while presenting the Interim Budget for 2024-25, the last “budget” before the general elections, they were disappointed. An interim budget is a vote-on-account to provide a grant to the Union government to meet its expenditures for four months. However, since the Narendra Modi government has broken many a convention after he became Prime Minister in May 2014, expectations of populist...

In the wake of recent diplomatic tensions between India and Canada, New Delhi-based BLS International, a company providing outsourcing services to India’s diplomatic missions under the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), including the issuance of visas electronically, encountered operational disruptions in Canada. Then came accusations that the private firm had botched up the implementation of an e-residency programme in Estonia, a country in northern Europe. The company claims the problems...

Book: India's Experiment with Democracy : The Life of a Nation Through Its Elections Author: S.Y. Quraishi Published by: HarperCollins Price: Rs 699 Conscious that his personal life coincides with that of politically-independent India, the former chief election commissioner, guitar player, the first Muslim officer of the Indian Administrative Service from “old Delhi” after 1947, born into a family of Islamic scholars and the son of a man who insisted that his children be benefitted by “modern...

‘Geo… Jeeoh.’ The constable from the Special Cell of the Delhi Police who was interrogating me that afternoon was finding it difficult to pronounce his proper name. I gently butted in. ‘It’s spelt Geoff but pronounced Jeff.’ ‘You have been speaking to this person in Australia?’ he asked. ‘Yes. Of course, I have,’ I explained. ‘He runs a website called AdaniWatch and I am a contributor to the website.’ The constable had earlier asked me two questions: ‘Do you use Signal?’ I promptly replied ‘yes’...

A feisty opposition woman member of India’s Parliament has vowed to continue her scrutiny of the links between PM Narendra Modi and the Adani Group, despite attacks on her by a government member. Mahua Moitra has been dragged before the parliamentary Ethics Committee for alleged misdemeanours. She has responded defiantly, saying the BJP has picked the ‘wrong person’ to bully. Many of her questions in parliament pertain to Adani’s business operations. A hearing of the Committee on 2 November...