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Andimuthu Raja has chosen to brazen it out. But are his days as Communications and IT minister numbered? The Congress-led UPA today needs the support of the DMK less than it ever has since May 2004. After the CBI raids, there is no doubt that the spectrum scam, running into more than Rs 50,000 crore, is turning out to be an embarrassment for the government. Raja says he consulted the PM and Pranab Mukherjee while allotting mobile phone licences with spectrum on a ‘first-come-first served’ (FCFS)...

Love her or hate her, there's no way you can ignore Mayawati. She may or may not one day become Queen of Delhi or kingmaker, but for an unmarried Dalit woman of 52, her rise to power has been extraordinary. Journalist Ajoy Bose takes us on a thrilling ride through Mayawati's political career that began 28 years ago when her mentor Kanshi Ram dropped in unannounced at her home to persuade her to abandon her plans of joining the IAS, and take up a political career instead where she would lord it...

Inflation is one economic phenomenon that directly affects every citizen. Not surprisingly, politicians dread inflation, for it inevitably translates into popular resentment. Over the decades, the prices of sugar and onion have become symbols of voter anger against several incumbent regimes. So, when on June 22, 2007, Union finance minister P. Chidambaram—already under attack from his party colleagues, political opponents and Communist comrades for failing to rein in prices of essential products...

He has been lauded as India's most dynamic scientist. The list of prestigious awards and citations he has received runs into many pages. He took science out of the lab and brought it to factory floors. He has done more than most others to protect India's traditional knowledge that the MNCs eye avariciously. As the longest-serving (13 years) director-general of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), which controls 40-odd research outfits with roughly 18,000 employees and an...

[With Alam Srinivas] It was the kind of ugly spat that doesn't exactly cover the Indian petroleum industry with glory. On one side was the director general, Hydrocarbons (DGH), head of a regulatory body that is under the administrative control of the Union ministry of petroleum & natural gas, an individual who doesn't enjoy the kind of independence that his counterparts in the telecom and power sectors do. On the other side was the country's largest (in terms of assets) and the most profitable...

The name sounded deceptively familiar, except it seemed to be in the wrong country. No, it wasn't Chandigarh, but Chundrigar. The reference was to Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar, the minister for trade and commerce in the first Cabinet of the newly-constituted government of Pakistan headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and prime minister for a brief two months in 1957. And the road that bears his name is busier than most major thoroughfares in Karachi on working days, hardly surprising since it happens to...

Deng Puffs 555 Kolkata and Calcutta—jealous mistress and dutiful wife; city of joy and megapolis of despair; arrogant about her intellectual prowess yet unsure of urban regeneration; glitzy malls and imperial colonnades cracking at the seams; brilliant beams of light in uneasy coexistence with quasars. Remember the infamous black hole? To use former West Bengal finance minister and author Ashok Mitra's memorable analogy: more poets per square km than even football fans. Rajiv Gandhi was wrong...

One of the tallest buildings in downtown Mumbai's financial district is the imposing 25-storeyed headquarters of the country's central bank and apex monetary authority. The higher one moves up the hierarchy in the RBI the more rarefied the atmosphere gets. Especially if one belongs to a northeastern state like Assam or, worse, a scheduled caste. This realisation came the hard way for the seniormost executive director of the RBI, R.B. Barman, who was first promoted as deputy governor last...

The government hasn't covered itself in glory by following a convoluted, arbitrary and opaque bidding process that led to a flurry of allegations of nepotism. Few were, therefore, surprised at the legal recourse taken by a bidder criticising the implementation of the programme to revamp the nation's two largest airports. This, because the tendering system was marked by subjective evaluation criteria and frequent changes in rules while the game was on. The criteria to judge the technical bids...

It's rare that the Reliance group doesn't succeed in bulldozing its way through the capital's labyrinthine corridors of power. But the manner in which the bidding process for the contracts to modernise and partially privatise the country's two largest airports in Delhi and Mumbai was sought to be manipulated, unsuccessfully, indicates there could be some hope yet for a country where crony capitalism hardly raises too many eyebrows. Influential corporates can fail to convince a pliant political...