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Over the last week, a document of unknown origin has been circulating in the capital. The two-page document listing eight court cases is reportedly doing the rounds of offices of the judges of the Supreme Court of India and senior lawyers. The document, a copy of which is with NewsClick, lists eight cases that have been taken up by the country’s apex court, each of which involves the Adani group and each of which has been heard by a bench of judges headed by Justice Arun Kumar Mishra. The...

Gurugram: Election Commissioner of India Ashok Lavasa is yet to decide whether or not he should accept the offer to hold the post of vice president of the Manila-based multilateral financial institution, Asian Development Bank (ADB). A source close to Lavasa who spoke to NewsClick on condition of anonymity said he would be consulting his family members and confidantes before taking a decision on whether he should become one of ADB’s six vice presidents. He has been offered the position of vice...

Mumbai/Gurugram, July 16, 2020: On July 12, the Cabinet of the Government of Gujarat announced that it had decided to revoke a government resolution (GR) of December 2018 that would bring down electricity tariffs. A number of news reports have described the decision as a “blow” to three major private power producers in the state––including the owners of two of the largest power plants in India, located near the coast of Gujarat––that are owned by companies from the Adani, Tata and Essar groups...

The largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, is in a tizzy. Reason: there is a possibility that the Congress government in Rajasthan led by Ashok Gehlot may lose its majority following a revolt by the state’s Deputy Chief Minister and Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Tonk Sachin Pilot who is reportedly in talks with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Will Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi be able to defuse the crisis and prevent Rajasthan from going the Madhya Pradesh way...

Mumbai/Gurugram: There’s a classic tale. One cold night, a camel asks his master if he could put his nose inside his tent for warmth. “By all means and welcome,” says the man, and the camel stretches his nose first, and then his head into the tent. Soon afterwards, the camel asks the man if he can bring his neck and front legs inside the tent. Again, the master agrees. Finally, the camel asks: “May I not stand wholly within?” With pity, the master beckons him into the warm tent. But when the...

Mumbai/Gurugram: The price of the share of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), headed by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, jumped to a record high of more than Rs 1,804 on Monday June 22. RIL thus became the first Indian conglomerate with a market capitalisation in excess of $150 billion or nearly Rs 11,44,00,00,000,000. (Market capitalisation is the amount arrived at by multiplying the price of a company’s share at a particular point in time with the total number of its shares.) RIL’s Chairman...

New Delhi: After signing a binding concession agreement on February 14, 2019, to take over the operations of the international airports at Mangaluru (Karnataka), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and Ahmedabad (Gujarat) from the Airports Authority of India (AAI) within six months, Adani Airports Limited has invoked a “force majeure” clause and requested the AAI to postpone till February 15, 2021, the execution of the agreement it signed with the public sector corporation. The Adani group company has also...

I am writing this personalised opinion piece at the invitation of Outlook because I am supposed to have a viewpoint, having spent 43 years as a journalist, that could add to the discussion currently going on about an article published on June 17 written by Salik Ahmad titled “Dear Editor, I Disagree With Your ‘Both-Sides’ Journalism.” First and foremost, my heartiest congratulations to Ahmad for writing what he did and I am overjoyed that his “open letter” has gone viral on social media at a...

Gurugram/Mumbai: “Today I am both delighted and humbled to announce that we have fulfilled our promise to the shareholders by making Reliance net debt-free much before our original schedule of 31st March 2021. Exceeding the expectations of our shareholders and all other stakeholders, again and yet again,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) on June 19, as the company’s stock price hit a record high. He added: “….on the proud occasion of...

Mumbai/New Delhi: Two months ago, on April 18, the Indian government placed restrictions on the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into India by Chinese investors. After concerns were raised about a stake sale of 1.75 crore shares (representing 1% of the total equity capital) of HDFC to the People’s Bank of China (that country’s central bank) worth Rs 3,000 crore between January and March, the government modified rules governing foreign direct investment (FDI) through the “automatic route...

Mumbai/Delhi, June 7, 2020: The “largest-ever” rights issue of shares by India’s biggest private corporate entity, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), closed on June 3, having been over-subscribed by 1.59 times of the announced value of Rs 53,124 crore. RIL will receive this amount from its shareholders after it receives the full pay-out from subscribers to its rights issue scheduled for the end of 2021. As the authors explained in a previous article for NewsClick on May 20, RIL’s rights issue...

From May 20 till June 3, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) will conduct what is being touted as India’s “biggest ever” rights issue, seeking to raise at least US$7 billion (or Rs 53,215 crore). Every eligible shareholder in the company will be entitled to purchase one discounted share for every fifteen shares they hold. The fundraising effort is the latest step in RIL’s effort to become “debt-free.” Over the past three months, as India and the world has grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic, a...

Note: This interview was recorded and broadcast by the Newsclick web portal before a formal request was made on Thursday, April 30 by the Governor of Maharashtra Bhagat Singh Koshyari to the Election Commission of India to conduct elections to fill the vacant positions in the state Legislative Council “at the earliest.” The Commission is scheduled to meet on Friday, May 1 to decide on the dates of the elections. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (PGT): We are going to discuss the likely Constitutional...

Delhi/Mumbai: On April 22, American social media giant Facebook announced an investment of US$5.7 billion (about Rs 43,574 crore) to acquire a 9.99% stake in Reliance Jio, the Reliance group’s internet data and telecommunications wing. This was soon after a reshuffle within the family in the shareholding of India’s largest private corporate entity Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), which is the Reliance group’s flagship company and of which Reliance Jio is a subsidiary. According to data on...

Instead of promoting a scientific temper among people, much of the media in India is today supporting superstition and injecting communal poison in the hearts and minds of viewers and readers, NDTV India Managing Editor and Magsaysay Award winner Ravish Kumar told Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in an interview published on Sunday April 12, 2020. Here is an edited version of the video interview translated into English. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta: We are going through an unprecedented international crisis...

The media may never be the same in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic collapse that will accompany and follow the health emergency across the world, and in India. Many governments across the globe are claiming that state control over information flows is essential, not just to combat fake news over the internet and social media, but also to confront and combat the ongoing multi-facetted crisis. In this country, there is a distinct possibility that rules could be interpreted...

In his second address to the nation after March 19, announcing a complete lockdown of the country for three weeks from midnight of March 24-25, the Prime Minister of the “world’s largest democracy” omitted addressing several key issues relating to the survival of the bottom 25% of India’s population of 1.3 billion. How would they be fed if they had no work? Even as he urged everyone to stay at home, Narendra Modi did not mention those who had no homes. In his second half-hour speech in five days...

The legal tussle over allegations of fraud and racketeering began a decade ago. The individuals and corporate entities involved are, or have been based, in different countries across the globe. The countries and cities where the dramatis personae have been located, or have operated out of, include: Hyderabad in India; Pittsburgh, Washington and Delaware in the US; Toronto in Canada; Bahamas and British Virgin Islands (tax havens); Singapore; and Hong Kong. This international dispute may not be...

On February 9, Shubanso Pul, the 20-year-old son of former Chief Minister (CM) of Arunachal Pradesh, Kalikho Pul, was found dead under mysterious circumstances in his apartment in Sussex, England. Shubanso was studying law in the country. His death reminds us of the tragic suicide of his father three-and-a-half years ago on August 9, 2016. While news from Arunachal Pradesh often remains under the radar of much of the mainstream media in India, Kalikho Pul’s death did attract considerable...

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Gujarat legislative Assembly recently prepared a report to follow up audit observations that had been submitted in 2014 by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India to the Gujarat government sharply criticising it for bestowing “undue” favours on a company in the Adani group that operates India’s largest private port. Gautam Adani heads the Adani group of companies. He is the country’s second richest man, according to one estimate. The...

The relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mukesh Ambani, the richest Indian and Chairman of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), appears to be souring. Some observers are reading a lot into certain recent actions of the income tax (IT) Department, while some others argue that what has taken place is a mere tax dispute that may soon get resolved. According to a report in Business Standard (linked here), the IT department plans to approach the Supreme Court after its objections to...

Why have so many young people across India come out on to the streets to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the attempt by the Narendra Modi government to put together a countrywide National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR)? Is it simply because the CAA and the NRC are perceived to be discriminatory against a particular religious community that comprises one-seventh of the country’s population, namely, Muslims, and that this is the first time...

In December 2012, Adani Realty, the real estate wing of the Adani group, announced the establishment of a joint venture (JV) with the Delhi-based M2K group. The JV, called Adani M2K projects, was set up to develop a housing project named, Oyster Grande, in Gurugram, Haryana, involving an investment of around Rs 1,000 crore. The M2K group, headed by Mahesh Bhagchandka, has a presence in biotechnology, infrastructure, real estate, multiplexes, aviation and defence equipment. It made headlines in...

The Bharatiya Janata Party is exuding confidence that it will be able to win the floor test in the legislative assembly of Maharashtra, presumably on 30 November, after a Speaker from the party has been elected. How easy or how difficult will this task be? This is a difficult question to answer at present. The BJP has access to huge financial resources to “persuade” MLAs to switch sides, make them suddenly absent themselves from the assembly or even, in extreme situations, allow themselves to be...

On November 1, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the investigative arm of India’s customs authorities, filed an affidavit before the Delhi High Court clarifying the status of its investigations into alleged over-invoicing of imports by a number of companies. The imports – which included a range of capital goods and raw materials like coal that were brought into the country by companies operating in core infrastructure sectors, such as power generation and transmission, ports and...

On October 17, the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of a company in the Adani Group by passing an order quashing the issuance of letters rogatory (LRs) to various foreign government bodies by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the investigative arm of India’s Customs authorities. The LRs—that are formal requests for information issued by Indian courts on behalf of the country’s law-enforcing and investigative agencies to courts in foreign jurisdictions to facilitate the gathering of...

Why is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), so keen on appropriating the legacy of the “father of the nation” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi? The answer is very simple: the Sangh Parivar or the family of organisations owing allegiance to the RSS, the BJP and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance coalition, the right-wing supporters of Hindutva and the ardent advocates of a Hindu Rashtra, just do not have in their midst a tall...

For several years, a clutch of companies in the Mukesh Ambani-headed Reliance group have been under the scanner of a slow-moving multi-agency investigation by the government of India. At the centre of one of the main strands of the investigation is the D-6 natural gas block in the Krishna-Godavari basin off the coast of Eastern India that Reliance Industries Limited – the Reliance group’s flagship company – operates together with British Petroleum, and a cross-country pipeline that carries gas...

The decision of a bench of the Delhi High Court of comprising Justices D N Patel and C Hari Shankar on Friday September 27, to issue notices to different government bodies – the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and its wings, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) and the Registrar of Companies (RoC), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Housing Bank (NHB) – to investigate the allegations levelled in a public interest...

On September 17, the regulator of the country’s financial markets, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) passed an interim order barring Gautam Thapar, former Chairman of Crompton Greaves (CG) Power and Industrial Solutions Limited from participating in capital market transactions. Similar restrictions were imposed on two former Directors of CG Power, Madhav Acharya and B Hariharan, and the company’s former Chief Financial Officer (CFO), V R Venkatesh. This move has come less than...

Since the arrest of former Union Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in the INX Media case by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on August 21, and even earlier, there has been widespread coverage in the news media about this controversial media organisation. Chidambaram is in judicial custody and lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. In May 2017, the CBI had registered an FIR on the alleged irregularities committed by persons associated with the INX Media group while receiving funds to the...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated that India aspires to generate 100 gigawatt (GW) of solar energy by 2022. He wants the country to become a “ hub” for the manufacture of solar power batteries. Given the recent flip-flops in the government’s tax policies, this goal is unlikely to be easily achieved. An analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think-tank, has concluded that the decision of the Ministry of Finance to impose a safeguard duty on...

The Narendra Modi government’s decision to allow 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in coal mining has been opposed by the Left on the ground it would enable multinational mining companies to “plunder” the country’s mineral resources. Those supporting the move, however, argue that foreign investment in coal mining is needed because the public sector Coal India Limited (CIL) is “over-stretched” and will not be able to increase domestic production substantially to curtail imports. At the same...

On August 16, senior advocate Dushyant Dave wrote to the judges of the Supreme Court of India alleging that two cases involving companies in the Adani group “in complete contravention of the settled practice of the Supreme Court as also its established procedure...were listed, taken up and heard without any justification...causing grave injury to public interest and public revenue.” Dave alleged that “it is disturbing that the Supreme Court of India should take up regular matters of a large...

New Delhi, India - A few days after Jammu and Kashmir's (J&K) special status was eradicated, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the now-abolished Article 370 of India's constitution - the provision that had guaranteed special rights to Muslim-majority J&K – had also hampered its economic development. "There must be investment and job opportunities in Jammu and Kashmir," Modi told CNN-News 18. "No one goes there to invest." Article 370 had bestowed numerous special rights on J&K, including...

Seventy two hours of music with 400,000 people in attendance. Woodstock Music & Art Fair opened in a lush farm in New York on August 15, 1969. Half a century later, it has became the most important festival of its kind for the manner in which it mixed music and politics. An allegory on the loss of innocence of an entire generation of popular musicians in the West, Don McLean’s song American Pie, written and sung for the first time in 1971, had these lines: “Oh, and there we were all in one place...

In 2014, when the number of Members of Parliament belonging to the Left shrunk to ten from 24 in 2009, some of us (including this writer) believed the Parliamentary Communists and their allies could not become weaker still. We were wrong. Congress has not gained significantly. But the presence of the Left has further diminished with only six seats in the current Lok Sabha. Why did this happen? And what is the way forward for those who still believe there are alternatives to right-wing populism...

In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, a committee set up by the Election Commission of India (ECI) had examined the critical gaps in the regulation of political campaigning. The panel looked at the provisions in Section 126 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951 – which defines a “silence period” starting 48 hours prior to the conclusion of polling in any particular area, during which all political campaigning is supposed to cease. The committee was supposed to identify...

Strange indeed are the ways of the some of India’s electricity regulatory authorities. An interim order issued by the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) in September 2018 had directed the public sector electricity distribution companies (discoms) in three cities in Rajasthan—Ajmer, Jodhpur and Jaipur—to pay ₹3,591 crore to Adani Power Rajasthan Limited (APRL) that owns and operates a 1,320-megawatt capacity thermal power plant in the state in Kawai town of Baran district. On an appeal by...

Let us assume electronic voting machines (EVMs) cannot be manipulated. Let us assume the number in each and every EVM perfectly matches the number in the corresponding VVPAT (voter verified paper audit trail) machine. Let us assume the election administration in the soon-to-become most-populous country on the planet is impartial and transparent, that all personnel involved in the biggest exercise of its kind in the world’s largest democracy do not influence voters to exercise their franchise in...

New Delhi, India - On April 6, speaking at the University of Delhi, India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley waxed eloquent about how the world's most-populous democracy would become the third largest economy on the planet by 2030 after the United States and China. By then, the size of India's economy would have more than trebled to $10 trillion from around $2.9 trillion at present, he said. What was noteworthy was that Jaitley's speech hardly dwelt on the performance of the government headed by...

A report in the Caravan published last Friday written by Nileena M S and Aathira Konikkara that created a political storm pertains to diaries allegedly maintained by Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa, leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka legislative assembly and former Chief Minister of the state belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The diaries reportedly indicate pay-offs made by the controversial politician to several members of the BJP’s top brass – besides ₹1,000 crore to the...

A public procurement exercise initiated in September 2017 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) asked bidders to present ‘proximity payment solutions’ for the United Payments Interface (UPI), an inter-bank mobile payments platform it set up a year earlier. Sixteen months have passed since then. Yet the name of the bidder chosen remains either undecided or has been decided but not yet been disclosed. What has consequently surfaced are several questions relating to the terms and...

On February 4, 2019, Facebook will complete 15 years of existence. The first version of the website was called FaceMash and was set up in November 2003 as an application that let students at Harvard University in the US rate one another based on their “attractiveness”. Two weeks later, the academic community at Harvard was disgusted by what the then 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had done. He was hauled before the university’s administrative board for using images and information from directories...

If ever there was a prominent Indian politician who epitomised the phrase “bundle of contradictions,” it was none other than George Fernandes, former Union Defence Minister and nine-time member of the Lok Sabha, who passed away on the morning of January 29 at the age of 88, after having been bedridden for a few years with Alzheimer’s disease. The son of a poor Christian from the South Kanara district in the Mangalore region of Karnataka, Fernandes gave up life in a seminary for a chequered...

It was a gold import-export scheme that began when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power and continued six months into the tenure of the Narendra Modi regime. That the scheme was a scam has been widely acknowledged by, among others, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the constitutional authority responsible for overseeing the country’s public finances. Representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have...

On 14 December, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice of India dismissed all petitions calling for a court-monitored investigation into alleged procedural violations committed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that led to a rise in the price of Rafale fighter jets purchased for the Indian Air Force. Even as government spokespersons and a large section of the media celebrated the apex court’s order for giving a “clean chit” to Modi, the order appears to be deeply...

For those who are opposed to the Narendra Modi government but do not belong to the Indian National Congress, the outcome of the elections to the Assemblies of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh could not have been better. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Prime Minister and the BJP President Amit Shah have been shown their place. For them, the road to the 17th Lok Sabha elections scheduled to take place in April-May 2019 has become perilous. At the same time, Tuesday’s results...

We have argued in this series of five articles that Facebook has not been a politically agnostic platform in India and elsewhere. In this country, it has helped the ruling regime. Given its past record, it is not surprising that serious doubts are being raised about how neutral Facebook will be in the months leading up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article, we examined allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in spreading disinformation and hate...

Is Facebook truly a politically agnostic platform? Far from it. Serious doubts have been expressed about how neutral Facebook was in the past and how neutral it will be in the run-up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article in this series of reports, we examined allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in disseminating disinformation, hate speech and incendiary information. In the second, we reported how Facebook arrived at the dominant position it is...