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Blood and Iron, a documentary on illegal iron ore mining by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, insetHidden behind all the administrative scandals that rocked India in 2010, illegal mining is an unnoticed beast that has been eating into the country's soul. While corruption in spectrum allocation and the conduct of the Commonwealth Games are primarily about monetary loot, illegal mining is about invaluable non-renewable natural resources. In at least five major states, there were more than 20,000 complaints...

THE INCREDIBLY fast expansion of mobile telecommunications in India has been accompanied by a series of scandals that are a consequence of poor regulatory oversight and deliberate manipulation of policies to favour a select clutch of companies. The biggest and most brazen of these scandals relate to the undervaluation of a valuable national resource — electromagnetic spectrum or radio frequencies used by mobile phone service providers — by the Department of Tele – communications (DoT) under...

THE NEXUS BETWEEN BIG BUSINESS and politics is neither new nor unique to India. But what the recent disclosure of recordings of phone conversations involving corporate lobbyist Niira Radia exposes is the range of this relationship’s perniciousness and how it has corrupted the nation’s body politic. On one level, the leaked recordings are all about the massive undervaluation and misallocation of the precious electromagnetic spectrum used by mobile telecommunications companies; on another, they...

THE BUCK HAS DEFINITIVELY stopped at the table of the very highest in the land. On 16 November, the Supreme Court was irked into asking why ‘the sanctioning authority,’ the prime minister, had remained (rather eerily) uncommunicative for 15 months to a request by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy for the prime minister’s sanction to prosecute Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Andimuthu Raja in the 2G spectrum scam, whose magnitude has left the polity stunned...

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...

Earlier this week, India's opposition parties came together in a rare show of unity to take to the streets in cities across the country. They protested against the government's recent decision to raise fuel prices after it scrapped its subsidy of petrol prices in an effort to cut the budget deficit. Supporters of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party joined hands with their ideological rivals among the Communists to paralyse normal life in large parts of the country. Opposition leaders thundered...

WHY IS THE LEFT FRONT COALITION in West Bengal, led by India’s biggest left-of-centre party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which runs the longest-surviving state government in the country, staring defeat in the face? Why is Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, once hailed as the epitome of a pragmatic New Left, appearing like a beleaguered figure straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy, stoically awaiting the coup de grace? The principal opponent of the West Bengal communists...

Elections to the Bihar legislative assembly are scheduled for October-November and twice-elected Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's political opponents are trying to tarnish his reputation by highlighting the circumstances that led to the sacking of his Excise Minister Jamshed Ashraf in February. Ashraf has alleged that the state government is neck-deep in a scandal involving evasion of taxes on liquor that has led to revenue losses worth Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion), a charge the chief minister...

HIS BODY LANGUAGE SAID IT ALL as he walked past the row of television cameras and scampering journalists waiting impatiently outside the Supreme Court. He did not respond to the questions thrown at him. The 51-year-old long-distance runner had always been the underdog in the bitter battle for control of India’s natural gas resources, but he had chosen to take on his elder brother and, with him, the might of the establishment. On that muggy morning of 7 May 2010, however, Anil Ambani realised...

WHY DOES Andimuthu Raja have a charmed existence as Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, despite accusations that he has virtually singlehandedly caused a staggering loss to the national exchequer somewhere between Rs 50,000 crore and Rs 100,000 crore? Has his continuance as boss of Sanchar Bhavan — headquarters of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) — got something to do with the fact that he’s a Dalit, as his mentor, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) supremo and...

LESS THAN A YEAR after the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government assumed office in New Delhi, it is not just the ruling coalition, but the Congress party which leads it, that appears to be at war with itself. The kind of open dissension that is being witnessed in the incumbent regime has not been seen in many years, if not decades. The public airing of differences has undermined the authority of not just Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but also one of his most important colleagues in...

THE RAJYA SABHA, the Upper House of Parliament, recently passed a historic bill reserving for women 33 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House (though, ironically, not in the Upper House), with its 534 elected representatives, and in the 30 state legislative assemblies. Congress president Sonia Gandhi appeared to have reached a new high in her political career. The 63-year-old widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is exuding more confidence today than she ever has before...

IT IS OFTEN TOUTED as the ‘world’s largest social security scheme.’ Its critics call it the worst form of wasteful government expenditure. It is held responsible for the victory of the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance coalition in the 2009 general elections. Now, the name of the ‘Father of the Nation’ has been prefixed to make the acronym even more cumbersome than it was. Love it or hate it, the National—now, Mahatma Gandhi—Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is here to stay...

WHEN, ON THE MORNING of 26 February, the diminutive, bespectacled finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, gets up from his seat in the Lok Sabha to present the Union government’s annual budget for the fiscal year that will end on 31 March 2011, don’t expect fireworks. There is every possibility that the bulky document he will read out will be greeted with quite a few yawns. The editors of the pink dailies and breathless anchors on television screens with running tickers where stock quotations change...

THE IRONY WAS ALL TOO OBVIOUS. And it happened less than 24 hours after the planet’s three largest polluters – the United States, China and India (in that order) – came together with two other emerging economies (Brazil and South Africa) to thrash out an uneasily brokered, messy political statement on tackling climate change. The statement was forged at Copenhagen in the teeth of opposition from much of the rest of the world after more than a fortnight of bitter wrangling and public posturing...

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...

At least three books have been published over the last 20 years about India's first family of businessmen, the Ambanis. The first by S.R. Mohnot was somewhat prosaic and academic in its style and content. Polyester Prince written by Hamish McDonald was a racy compilation of facts, most of which had appeared in newspapers like the Indian Express. For reasons best known to the Ambanis, this book is not available in India though quite a few photocopied versions are in circulation. Alam Srinivas has...

The verses and songs of Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, articulated the angst and aspirations of an entire generation. His lyrics and tunes, sung and recorded zillions of times, continue to enthrall thousands, even those who know nothing of the anti-establishment mood of the '60s. Over the decades, Dylan changed drastically, as did his music. His seminal The Times They Are A-Changin became an advertising jingle for an accountants' firm, while a track from his 2001 album "Love and...

Just days after the finance minister announced his budget proposal to hike the cap on FDI in telecom firms from 49 to 74 per cent, the bureaucracy had started working overtime. A fortnight later, on June 23, a draft cabinet note was readied and inter-ministerial consultations on it are now almost complete. The note, a copy of which is with Outlook, is a clear attempt to address the concerns raised by security agencies and allay the fears among the Left parties, which support the government from...

Does the Left have no alternative but to continue supporting the Congress-led UPA government despite strong disagreements on various economic policy issues? Are the claims of the Left that it is capable of not just "barking" but "biting" as well a lot of bluff and bluster? Have the Indian Communists—today more powerful than ever before if one goes by the number of seats they won in the Lok Sabha—been left in the lurch? Are they faced with a Hobson's choice, supporting a government that takes its...

The problem with trying to please everyone is that one could end up pleasing precisely no one. That is because the happiness can get spread so thinly that it is easy to ignore it altogether. When I used these words to describe the Union Budget for 2004-05 to Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, he was not amused in the least. He was appearing on a panel discussion on Doordarshan News and dared me to point out how he had tried to please different sections and, in the process, ended up...

On May 17, 2004, the stockmarket went into a tailspin. The one alleged reason for the panic was that the Left parties, supporting the Congress government from the outside, had suggested that the high-profile but controversial disinvestment ministry be scrapped. Needless to say, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hasn't appointed a disinvestment minister—at least not till the time of going to press. But why has disinvestment got such a bad name? Well, if there's one individual who has given...

Dhirubhai Ambani was an amazing entrepreneur who aroused extreme responses in people. Either you loved him or you hated him. There was little or nothing in between. However, there is at least one important individual who had started out disliking the man who had founded the Reliance group of companies, India's single-largest privately owned corporate conglomerate, before becoming his admirer if not a faithful follower. He is none other than Arun Shourie, former economist with the World Bank and...

Raghuram G Rajan, Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, is the first person of Indian origin chosen by the International Monetary Fund as its chief economist. He is not only the youngest individual to hold this position, but also the first from a developing nation. Co-author of the book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (Crown Business, New York, 2003), Rajan has apparently sought to steer clear of the ideological position espoused by the extreme...

The performance of the Indian economy appears to have improved due to, among other things, the prospects of a favourable monsoon. However, the current state of the world economy leaves little or no room for optimism. During the current calendar year, the world economy is expected to grow at a niggardly 2.25 per cent, a quarter of a percentage point higher than the 2 per cent growth that was recorded during 2002. Whereas geopolitical uncertainties are easing, the persistence of a slowdown in...

It's amazing what the awesome clout of a large multinational corporation can achieve. The government of India is on the verge of changing its policy because of the pressure exerted by the Atlanta, US-based soft drinks giant, Coca-Cola. Coke is one of the best-known brands in the world. But the corporation and its Indian associates have not exactly covered themselves with glory by the manner in which they appear to have successfully lobbied with the government in New Delhi to change the rules of...

More than six months ago, the government had announced in Parliament that it was setting up a special Divestment Proceeds Fund. But there are no indications as yet as to when this fund would be established. The delay is particularly inexplicable because the establishment of such a fund could take some of the sting out of the attack on the government's privatisation programme. One would have thought that with state assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi due to be...

There has been a lot of public concern about the non-performing assets of the country's banking system running into a figure close to Rs 100,000 crore (Rs 1,000 billion) or around one-twentieth of India's gross domestic product. These NPAs are now being brought down to more manageable levels thanks to a recently enacted new law. What has, however, escaped public attention is the fact that the Union government's total tax arrears are as high as the total amount owed to banks and financial...

The country's premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, is looking into whether or not a case of corruption can be made out in the questionable Rs 250 crore (Rs 2.5 billion) investment made by the public sector Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited in the Maharashtra government-owned Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation Limited. A number of leading politicians are said to have been associated with this controversial investment. They include Pramod Mahajan...

The April 8 decision of the empowered committee of state finance ministers postponed the deadline for implementation of a Value-Added Tax regime in the country to June 1. The new deadline, like the previous one, would almost certainly not be met. There are pressing political, economic and technical reasons why the implementation of VAT -- undoubtedly a superior taxation system than the current cascading type tax system -- will not happen in a hurry. As this columnist had pointed out in an...

The United States-led war on Iraq is certain to hurt India's economic interests. Higher prices of crude oil and petroleum products would stoke inflationary fires. Civil aviation, shipping, tourism, inward remittances and exports are also going to be affected. That the war would have an adverse impact on India is beyond doubt. What is not clear is the precise extent of the impact. A lot depends on the levels at which international crude oil prices stabilize in the coming months. If world crude...

There is considerable euphoria in certain circles about the impending introduction of value added tax -- a move described by Finance Minister Jaswant Singh in his Budget speech as 'a historic reform of our domestic trade tax system' that would take place 'in the highest tradition of cooperative federalism.' There are obvious advantages of a VAT system vis-à-vis what is commonly called a cascading type tax or CTT system, but the transition from a CTT regime to a VAT regime is fraught with hazards...