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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...

Is Facebook truly a neutral and an agnostic platform for all to use? Far from it. After interviewing nearly 50 people over the last five months, we have put together evidence (some of it circumstantial) to indicate that senior employees of Facebook in India have worked, and continue to work, very closely with the country’s ruling regime. Given past experience, the question is how neutral Facebook will be in the run-up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article in this series...

Is Facebook truly an agnostic platform for all to use? After interviewing nearly 50 people over the last five months, we collated evidence (some of it circumstantial) to indicate that senior employees of Facebook India have worked, and continue to work, very closely with the country’s ruling Right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Its close links with the BJP existed well before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in May 2014 and got strengthened thereafter. Given past experience...

Facebook, the biggest online social media group in the world, is under unprecedented attack following the publication on 14 November of a 5,000-word investigation by the New York Times alleging a host of questionable practices by the digital conglomerate, that includes WhatsApp and Instagram. The company’s share prices have come down and particular investors have called for the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Facebook and his 49-year-old...

In an unprecedented move that took place before and after midnight on 23-24 October, the Narendra Modi government suspended – in bureaucratic parlance, “sent on leave” – Alok Verma, Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, supposedly India’s premier police investigating agency. A day earlier, the second-in-command in the agency, Special Director Rakesh Asthana, met a similar fate by being stripped of all his powers and responsibilities, and getting placed on “compulsory wait.” The...

There is an ancient parable from the Indian subcontinent about a group of blind men who touch different parts of an elephant, the side of its body, its trunk, its tail, its ears and its tusks, to arrive at a variety of conclusions about what they have touched. The moral of the parable is that many of us human beings tend to claim superior knowledge on what are supposed to be “absolute” truths based on our partial, incomplete and subjective experiences. Take the case of India’s electricity sector...

A draft report prepared by a high-powered committee appointed by the government of Gujarat has come up with a plan to rescue stranded power projects in the state run by the Adani, Essar and Tata groups. While there have been news reports indicating what the report may recommend, Newsclick has obtained a draft copy of the entire report, which we are placing in the public domain. The three-member committee comprising former Supreme Court judge Justice R K Agrawal, former Deputy Governor of the...

A year after Gauri Lankesh was shot outside her home in Bengaluru, there is every reason to believe that the environment for free expression of views has deteriorated in India. Pressures on civil society and the media to conform to the ruling regime have intensified. Self-censorship is on the rise. Many mainstream media organisations prefer to play safe and have become overly cautious when it comes to criticising those in power, as well as advertisers. Over 43 years after the imposition of the...

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first individual who became Prime Minister of India without ever having been a member of the Indian National Congress, was one of the founding members of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the predecessor party of the Bharatiya Janata Party) when it was formed in 1951. He became a protégé of the first President of the Jana Sangh Shyama Prasad Mookerjee after he had been inducted into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh by Balasaheb Deoras as a student in the 1930s. The second...

Even as Reliance Jio threatens to devour its competitors, including the leading telecommunications brand, Airtel – which has alleged that the petroleum and petrochemicals-funded, Mukesh Ambani-owned, Reliance Industries Limited has indulged in predatory practices – Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Telecom Limited (or BTL, Airtel’s holding company) has been accused of “oppressing” minority shareholders in a “squeeze-out” manoeuvre. While a BTL spokesperson told NewsClick that the company...

On 31 May, a customs tribunal in Mumbai rejected an investigation conducted by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) – the investigative wing of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (renamed as the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs) in the Department of Revenue in the government of India’s Union Finance Ministry – into one of a number of instances of alleged over-invoicing of coal imported from Indonesia for use in power plants. The case before a Mumbai bench of the Customs...

The American author Mark Twain had described the last decades of the 19th century as the Gilded Age, a period when on the surface everything appeared to be glittering like gold concealing the filth and ugliness that lay beneath. This was an era that witnessed brazen corruption in public life, a phase when economic growth was fuelled by the corrupt nexus between big business and politics. Among the “robber baron” capitalists who epitomised this phase in the United States were a clutch of...

On 30 July, the Ministry of Finance notified a two-year safeguard duty regime on imports of solar cells and modules. The decision ratified a 16 July recommendation by the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry that is ostensibly meant to protect Indian manufacturers of equipment to generate solar energy from incurring losses on account of “dumping” of cheap imports. However, the decision will benefit only a small section of the domestic industry...

The government of India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry on 16 July proposed that a 25% safeguard duty be imposed on imported solar cells and panels. This proposal is based on a complaint lodged by a group of Indian solar energy equipment manufacturers led by the Adani group’s Mundra Solar PV which owns the largest facility of its kind in the country. The manufacturers have argued that their businesses were facing “heavy losses” due to a surge in cheap imports of solar equipment from China...

On 7 May 2018, the Delhi High Court ruled against the government of India’s attempt to restrict multinational telecommunications bigwig Vodafone from pursuing simultaneous international arbitration proceedings before two different tribunals on the same dispute. The Ministry of Finance has been trying every possible route since 2007 to collect tax to the tune of ₹12,000 crore or around US$2 billion (at the then prevailing currency exchange rates) – a figure that has ballooned to around ₹22,000...

The sting operations conducted by CobraPost, among other things, highlight how pervasive the phenomenon of paid news is at present in much of the mainstream media in India. Corruption in the media is hardly new or unique to India. Over the last decade or so, in the wake of the Great Recession worldwide, there has been a squeeze in the flows of advertising income to many media organisations across the globe. This period has also coincided with the exponential growth of the internet, a platform on...

The 28 May decision of the Tamil Nadu government to shut down the copper smelting plant of the Vedanta/Sterlite group in Tuticorin has come not a day too soon. It is being argued that this decision may soon be overturned by a court of law, that many jobs would be lost and the working of the economy would be disrupted. Nevertheless, it is evident that the Vedanta group headed by Anil Agarwal – who thought he would be able to get away with brazenly flouting the country’s environmental laws...

A recent notification by the Union Ministry of Shipping has relaxed restrictions on the movement of export-import cargo by foreign ships between and among Indian ports along the country’s coastline. The move could have disastrous consequences for the domestic shipping industry and the country’s economy. This is the biggest-ever change in India’s shipping policy undertaken by the Narendra Modi government and is expected to endow huge benefits to a small clutch of international and domestic...

Internal documents of the Income Tax Department relating to an investigation into the assets held in various offshore accounts by Indians tell an amazingly convoluted story of how the late Dhirubhai Ambani’s international personal investments were channeled into a complex corporate structure involving holding companies located in multiple tax haven jurisdictions and bank accounts in Switzerland, following his death on July 6, 2002. This structure allegedly sought to stash more than ₹2,100 crore...

The elections to the legislative assembly of Karnataka have proved to be more dramatic than any work of fiction could ever have hoped to be. At the time of writing this article, the story is not over and the end of the tale is not known. It is not clear whether it will be a happy ending for the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian National Congress. Even for the Janata Dal (Secular), does it have every reason to rejoice having become the “king” as well as the “king maker”? For former Prime...

On the morning of May Day, former finance minister of West Bengal, member of parliament, prolific writer, bureaucrat, economist and Marxist thinker Ashok Mitra passed away in a Kolkata nursing home. He was born in 1928 and had turned 90 on April 10 this year. To describe him as a multi-faceted personality would be more than an understatement. His career as an academic, an administrator, a politician, an activist and, above all, a writer of amazing eloquence and insight in both Bengali and...

On 16 February, two days before Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s most controversial president since apartheid ended in 1994, was forced to step down after losing a protracted power struggle within his own African National Congress party, Saharanpur-born businessman Atul Gupta was declared a fugitive from justice in that country. Gupta, tog­ether with Laxmi Goel, vice-chairman of Essel group of companies, and Zuma’s son, Duduzane Zuma, own a company called Infinity Media, that runs a television channel...

Surendra Nihal Singh was truly privileged as a journalist. His professional experience was about as varied as varied could have been. He wrote on a diverse range of subjects from art to politics, worked across continents, wrote novels and non-fiction books, engaged with the high and mighty across the planet and obtained a ringside view of important historical developments in this country and the world. His passing away in Delhi on 16 April marks almost the end of an era - there are possibly only...

Former Lokayukta (or people's ombudsman) of Karnataka, N Santosh Hegde, who had prepared a voluminous report on illegal iron ore mining in the state in July 2011 that had severely indicted former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, is "saddened" that the Bharatiya Janata Party has nominated him as its Chief Ministerial candidate in the forthcoming assembly elections in the state. A former judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Santosh Hegde, whose father and he has had close links with the BJP...

The Adani group’s proposed 1,600 megawatt power project in Jharkhand is an expensive and risky project meant to “prop up” its controversial Carmichael coal mine in Australia at the cost of Bangladesh, the Sydney-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has claimed in a report. The Godda thermal power plant is being implemented in Jharkhand’s north-eastern Godda district by Adani group firm Adani Power (Jharkhand) Limited, which will supply the entire electricity...

The Adani group’s proposed 1,600 megawatt power project in Jharkhand is an expensive and risky project meant to “prop up” its controversial Carmichael coal mine in Australia at the cost of Bangladesh, the Sydney-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has claimed in a report. The Godda thermal power plant is being implemented in Jharkhand’s north-eastern Godda district by Adani group firm Adani Power (Jharkhand) Limited, which will supply the entire electricity...

Over the last four years, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, or DRI, which is the investigative arm of the department of revenue in the finance ministry, has levelled allegations of over-invoicing of imports of coal and electricity generation equipment against at least forty of India’s biggest energy companies. The total amount involved in the scandal is an estimated Rs 50,000 crore, or more than eight billion dollars at the current exchange rate. Of this amount, around Rs 30,000 crore is...

An anonymous letter written by a civil servant, addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has levelled serious allegations against the multinational consulting firm KPMG’s India operations. In the letter, which is dated 5 December, a senior bureaucrat—who claims to be a member of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and holds the post of a director in the union government—accuses the group of exercising influence over key government officials by, among other means, recruiting their...

New Delhi, India - On the morning of February 16, India's second-largest state-run bank, Punjab National Bank (PNB), quietly announced to stock exchange authorities in Mumbai that it has been defrauded of $1.8bn. But things did not stay quiet. Within minutes, panic had broken out in India's financial markets. Indices tanked, especially bank share prices, as fears grew that the financial scandal was widespread. The news was widely reported by global media, not surprising, for this was no ordinary...

Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah inaugurates a new bus terminus in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on 27 March 2016. It was a spanking-new, modern construction with a fancy design befitting the ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ label. The terminal was constructed by Cube Construction Engineering Limited through one of its subsidiaries. On its website, the company crows about having built the “best” bus terminal in India. Cube Construction is one of Gujarat’s most prolific construction companies. It was re...

India’s revenue intelligence agency has told The Wire that it has every intention of filing an appeal against the dismissal of its show-cause notice against the Adani Group for the over-invoicing of imports to the tune of around Rs 5,500 crore. This information was provided after The Wire reported that the DRI had just one day left to decide its course of action. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) serves as the investigative wing of the Department of Revenue in the Ministry of Finance...

The country may have been surprised by the names of the various Indian individuals and companies who came tumbling out of the Paradise Papers last week but not the Narendra Modi government, which has been sitting on information about the offshore entities of at least one big corporate – the Essar group – for two and a half years without taking the “immediate appropriate action” it is now promising in the face of ongoing disclosures by the Indian Express. Given the mounting evidence about the...

On November 13, the Supreme Court will be hearing a most unusual case. For the first time in the history of the country, the appointment of a serving top officer of India’s premier police investigating agency is being questioned because he is himself being investigated in a corruption case by the same agency. The person concerned is Rakesh Asthana, officer of the 1984 batch of the Indian Police Service (IPS) belonging to the Gujarat cadre. He was appointed as special director of the Central...

The economy of the world's largest democracy is growing at a pace that is the slowest in the last three years. Jobs are being lost. Inflation is threatening to pick up. There are few takers for bank loans. Consumer confidence is down. In May 2014, the right-wing Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In the run-up to the elections, he had promised "achhe din", or "good times". But good times are yet to come for many...

Many believe the demonetisation announced on November 8, 2016 was a whimsical move by Prime Minister Narendra Modi even as he stuck to form by obtaining prior approval of the Reserve Bank of India before announcing the momentous decision. Others contend that while the move was announced suddenly in order to take everyone by surprise, it was nevertheless premeditated. Importantly, it is said that the decision to demonetise 86% of the currency in circulation in the country was based on inputs from...

Is there a connection between the impending formation of the country’s biggest telecommunications conglomerate and the sudden transfer of a top government official who was heading the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology? The link between the two developments may not seem obvious. They are, however, closely connected and have much to do with the consolidation that is taking place in the world’s second-largest market for mobile...

For more than a decade now, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) has been investigating how a clutch of companies in the Adani Group led by Gautam Adani allegedly evaded taxes and laundered money while trading in cut and polished diamonds and gold jewellery. The DRI, which is an investigative wing of the Department of Revenue in the Ministry of Finance, has issued a number of show-cause notices to firms in the group alleging evasion of taxes to the tune of roughly ₹1,000 crore. Adani is...

At 8 pm on 8 November 2016, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to a live broadcast on Doordarshan to make the historic announcement that the government was demonetising notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, emphasising his commitment to ridding India of the “evils of corruption” and black money, at least five central agencies or commissions in New Delhi were sitting on a tranche of documents that allegedly indicated that Modi had accepted bribes in excess of Rs 55 crore, or eight million dollars. It...

The Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), set up by the Gujarat government, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons for over a decade. In recent months, the Indian National Congress has been warding off allegations of corruption against it by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by highlighting a host of controversies connected with this company during the period Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat between 2001 and 2014. A series of reports prepared by the Comptroller and...

The scale and scope of the scandal relating to the fraudulent inflation of power tariffs by over-invoicing coal imported from Indonesia, and passing on the costs to the consumer has acquired new dimensions (Guha Thakurta and Malik 2016). Over and above the investigations that are being carried out by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) in the Ministry of Finance on 40-odd companies for allegedly over-invoicing coal imported from Indonesia to the tune of Rs 29,000 crore, there have been...

The Republic of Mauritius, the land of the now extinct dodo bird, is strategically situated. A small clutch of islands roughly 800 kilometres east of Madagascar, Mauritius is the easternmost point of the continent of Africa. Mauritius has always shared a special and unique ‘umbilical’ relationship with India: at least 60 percent of the country’s population of 1.3 million are people of Indian origin, mostly descendents of indentured labour from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of Southern...

On the last day of March, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), which comes under the Union Ministry of Finance, issued a "general alert" to fifty-odd customs establishments all over India highlighting the modus operandi of over-invoicing of imports of coal from Indonesia. The DRI has claimed that money was being "siphoned" outside the country and that electricity generating companies were availing of "higher tariff compensation based on (the) artificially inflated cost of the imported...