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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...

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...

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...

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...

The 2014 general elections saw the parliamentary Left becoming wea­ker than ever before. Three years earlier, the red bastion had crumbled in West Bengal after 34 years. The question is whether the clutch of par­­ties headed by the CPI(M) is lik­ely to lose even more political ground. Or was the writer (who passed away before his book was published) being realistic when, as the title suggests, he compared the Left to a mythical Greek bird that is cyclically regenerated or reborn? It seems almost...

Did particular functionaries of the Narendra Modi government and supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party anticipate that their actions would contribute to a young PhD student of the Jawaharlal Nehru University becoming a folk-hero of sorts in a matter of days? If they did not, they have only themselves to blame. True, many could argue that the media attention Kanhaiya Kumar is getting is going to be ephemeral and that such transient instances of individual fame do not have a lasting impact on...

Auctions, whether at Christie’s or Sotheby’s for works of art, or of telecommunications spectrum by the government of India, are fascinating psychological games. When the interests of large competing corporate groups are involved, not surprisingly, allegations are aired of criminal intent by manipulation of rules. Even as the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) prepares for the next round of auctions of scarce – and hence, valuable – electromagnetic spectrum, the person at the helm of this...

Union budgets in India are not bland statements of accounts. Budgets are much more than the balance sheets of income earned and expenditure incurred by the central government. Budgets are important occasions for the finance minister of the day to outline his government’s political and economic strategies. Budgets are often less about numbers and much more about atmospherics. As a statement on the country’s political economy, Arun Jaitley’s third budget for the coming financial year starting on...

As one listened to finance minister Arun Jaitley deliver his third Budget speech, the overwhelming impression that was sought to be created was along anticipated lines. Here was a government whose heart was bleeding for the hapless farmer toiling in the fields, the agriculturist whose livelihood has been all but destroyed by two successive monsoon failures. Here was an administration whose representatives were concerned about the “curse of smoke” polluting the lungs of poor women cooking for...

The big message emanating from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's third budget is that the Narendra Modi government's heart is bleeding for the farmer and that the government is more concerned about the plight of poor women and the underprivileged, not corporate captains or rich taxpayers. The effort clearly is to counter the suit-boot sarkar image of the government that has been sought to be assiduously propagated by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and other political opponents of the...

Who would have imagined that the presentation of the Union Budget for the 12 months that start from All Fools’ Day is just round the corner? This will be finance minister Arun Jaitley’s third Budget; he will be presenting two more and then an interim Budget in February 2019 before the next general elections. But the economy seems to be the last thing that is occupying the minds of large sections of the population. Just about everything else is. The agitation by Jats has suddenly disrupted the...

Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act a “living monument” of the failure of the economic policies of the Indian National Congress which has ruled the country for all but roughly 14 years since August 1947? Or is it that the MGNREGA, a law enacted a decade ago which seeks to implement the world’s biggest and most ambitious job creating scheme, one of the few programmes that has been successful in not just alleviating poverty but has also empowered the underprivileged in...

As Reliance Jio Infocomm prepares to launch its 4G telecom services, a public interest litigation is being heard in the Supreme Court that challenges the government’s decision to allow the company to offer voice services on its 4G spectrum. In June 2010, an e-auction of electromagnetic spectrum had ended with a small Internet Service Provider called Infotel Broadband Services Private Limited trumping bigger rivals to emerge as the winner. Hours after the auction, Reliance Industries Limited took...

Before it turned into a courtroom spat, it had started as another court hearing. On January 12, while hearing a public interest litigation against Reliance Jio Infocomm, the Supreme Court of India challenged the credentials of the petitioner, activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan’s Centre for Public Interest Litigation. A three-judge bench, including Chief Justice TS Thakur, asked if the NGO was taking the system “for a ride”. It raised the question whether the non-profit nature of the NGO could be...

It is not every day that promoters or directors of large real estate companies have to spend time behind bars for allegedly duping home buyers. So when four directors of Unitech Limited, the country’s second-largest real estate financing firm, found themselves in judicial custody on Monday on being unable to complete bail formalities, it was bound to be news. For big builders, the episode came as a strong jolt, and share prices of realty companies came tumbling down. For flat buyers, who...

The New Year has brought little cheer for the economies of almost each and every country across the globe. The Government of India never fails to remind us that this is one of the few nations on the planet, certainly the only large country, which continues to witness reasonably robust rates of growth of gross domestic product (GDP). No man is an island. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believe that the Indian economy would remain insulated from what is happening all around us...

Maachher teley maachh bhaaja is a Bengali phrase for the culinary practice of frying a fish in its own oil. Can the analogy be extended to a set of convoluted corporate transactions? This is the story of how one of the richest men of Indian origin, who heads one of the world's biggest privately owned mining and metals conglomerates, is seeking to protect his highly-leveraged balance sheets at a time when commodity prices across the globe have collapsed. (A company is said to be highly leveraged...

Why has the Narendra Modi government apparently acted in a vindictive manner by preventing Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal from entering his office during a raid on Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Investigation on one of his senior bureaucrats? At first glance, the move appears politically damaging. Whatever be the merits of the CBI's decision to search the office and premises of the Principal Secretary to the Delhi government Rajendra Kumar, the Modi government may end up making Kejriwal...

It’s a huge story. And it’s not getting the kind of media attention it deserves. It’s a story about India’s farmers. It’s a story about the ongoing agrarian crisis in the country in the wake of two successive years of drought. If one looks only at the figures of growth of gross domestic product which tend to make headlines in financial publications, there’s no story for agriculture comprises 16-17 per cent of GDP. But this is a blinkered view. The picture is pretty grim and here’s why. At least...

After a humiliating defeat in Bihar, the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has no option but to become more conciliatory towards its political opponents. While adopting a consensual approach rather than a confrontationist one, the party will have to keep its flock together by periodically placating hardcore Hindu nationalists in the Sangh Parivar, the family of organisations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This is the big challenge before the BJP. When out of power, the fact that...

The Narendra Modi government's stated intention to divest a 10% stake in Coal India Limited is aimed at establishing its reformist credentials after the humiliating defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Bihar assembly elections. While the proceeds of the divestment will help contain the fiscal deficit, by moving money from one pocket of the government to another, the move will neither help the country nor the public sector company, which is the world's largest coal producing entity. Here's...