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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...