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NOW THAT the ugly underbelly of the Great Indian Telecom Revolution has been publicly exposed, the question being frequently asked is whether the mess can be cleaned up. And if indeed it can, whether it actually will be. The spectrum scam has blown up in the face of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the ripples of this scandal on the country’s political economy will not disappear in a hurry. Under the circumstances, the government would be well advised to initiate prompt and stern punitive...

Shahid U Balwa, one of the promoters of the leading real estate company, DB Realty, as well as the controversial Swan Telecom (now Etilisat DB Telecom), has been questioned by officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation over Wednesday and Thursday in New Delhi, reliable sources told this correspondent. Balwa, who is among the richest builders in India, was quizzed about this week's 'kickbacks for loans' controversy involving leading bankers and also the telecommunications spectrum scandal...

The reluctant resignation over the weekend of India's Communications and Information Technology Minister Andimuthu Raja marks the end of a concerted campaign over the past two years for him to be removed. The allegations against Mr Raja have been described by some analysts as the country's biggest-ever scandal - amounting to about $37bn (£23bn). He is alleged to have sold scarce electromagnetic spectrum - used for mobile telecommunications - at discount rates to a select group of firms. Mr Raja...

Now that Ashok Chavan is in the news for all the wrong reasons, it is worth going back to an interview he granted in January on 'paid news' to this correspondent and my colleague in the Press Council of India, K Sreenivas Reddy. We were members of a sub-committee constituted by the Council to prepare a report on corruption in the media in India, in particular, the phenomenon of media organisations receiving illegal funds for providing favourable coverage to politicians standing for elections...

POLITICS IN KARNATAKA HAS TOUCHED A NADIR, and governance has been reduced to a parody by corruption and opportunism. The open venality in the workings of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government headed by Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa—the first state in southern India to be governed entirely by the right-wing Hindu nationalist party without a coalition—has overshadowed the almost equally corrupt coalition and Congress governments that preceded it. Since its incumbency two years and four...

Two years ago, when I told some of my more cynical fellow-tribals from the journalistic fraternity that I was about to complete a textbook on media ethics, they smirked. Media ethics? That’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, they said glibly. What became apparent to me then was that the image of the journalist in India has taken quite a battering. There are many among the aam admi who still trust the journo more than the hawaldar, the patwari or the magistrate and believe that he or she...

HE WAS such a multi-faceted personality that it’s impossible to cubby-hole him. He was an economic policy administrator for much of his professional life but it would be inaccurate to describe him as such — for he was also an academic, a politician, a diplomat, a bureaucrat and a researcher who provided a different perspective on the extent of poverty in India. As an economist, he was always firmly rooted in the left wing of the Congress, empathetic towards the Communists but never a part of...

In a recent public lecture that was hardly reported by the media, former Union Petroleum Minister and member of the Rajya Sabha, Mani Shankar Aiyar, lambasted his own government for kowtowing before Uncle Sam in trying to secure the country's energy supplies by ignoring neighbours in Asia. His was arguably one of the sharpest critiques of the manner in which the United Progressive Alliance government's foreign policy and energy policy have failed to coalesce for -- among other reasons and one...

THE MOST POWERFUL PERSON in the world’s largest democracy is Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Of course. But where does that leave the Prime Minister of India? Manmohan Singh has become the third-longest serving head of the Indian nation-state after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. He has addressed the country from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi on Independence Day seven years in a row since 2004, beating Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s record of six years. But he is well behind Nehru (17 years...

THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA swears in the name of the proverbial aam admi—the ordinary people. Its actions, however, not merely benefit the khaas admi—the select few—but also, in fact, contribute to the further immiseration of the underprivileged. This is aptly illustrated by the manner in which the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government suddenly decided on 25 June to hike the prices of petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas, the most widely-used petroleum products in the country. The...