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An unprecedented dispute between India's largest public sector company, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, and the country's biggest private company, Reliance Industries Limited, over allegations of theft of natural gas worth nearly $5 billion or Rs 30,000 crore (Rs 300 billion) from the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin levelled by the former against the latter, is likely to be resolved in coming months. An 'independent' foreign firm will examine the veracity of claims and counter-claims that have...

It’s an all-out war now between Didi and Dada. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had the temerity to question: Who is Amit Shah? The reply came on Sunday, at a public rally in the heart of Kolkata. The president of the Bharatiya Janata Party retorted that he, a small BJP worker, would lead his party to drive the Trinamool Congress out of Bengal. Rhetoric aside, the political tussle between the two portends ill for the state that has seen relatively harmonious Hindu-Muslim...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be patting himself on the back because President Barack Obama has agreed to India’s position on food stockholding norms in World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, New Delhi seems to be bending over backwards to accommodate the American government and giant multinational corporations (MNCs) in the pharmaceutical industry, which will work to the detriment of our country’s interests. In less than six months, the Modi government has taken several steps that play...

Book: Off The Record: Untold Stories From a Reporter’s Diary Author: Ajith Pillai Publisher: Hachette Price: Rs 395 Whenever a journalist meets someone who is not part of the media, she or he is invariably accosted and asked to provide tidbits of information that are not supposed to be in the public domain. Journalists are expected to be repositories of facts that they cannot write or speak openly about, vignettes about the foibles and frailties of the high and the mighty, the rich and the...

The room is rather spacious, much bigger than the size of an entire flat occupied by a typical upper middle-class Indian family. Is there something about the biggest room located at the western end of the northern of the two blocks of symmetrical buildings on opposite sides of the great axis of Rajpath that makes its occupants speak more or less the same language irrespective of their political affiliation? After finance minister Arun Jaitley presented his maiden Union Budget on July 10, few had...

As had been anticipated, on October 18, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to decontrol the prices of diesel, the most widely-used petroleum product in the country. Riding on an unexpected fall in world prices of crude oil, the government was able to simultaneously announce a sharp fall in consumer prices of diesel by Rs 3.37 per litre (in Delhi). But the decision to take the price of diesel outside the administrative control of the...

In the picture above, published in the Indian media on 22 May, Narendra Modi is leaving the western state of Gujarat, where he had been chief minister for 12 years, to be sworn in as prime minister of India. As he waves to people seeing him off at the airport in the city of Ahmedabad, the logo of the private aircraft carrying him is clearly visible: Adani. Gautam Adani, 52, one of India's richest men, is a businessman who is not shy of displaying his proximity to India's most powerful person...

The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly elections indicates that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his trusted lieutenant, party president Amit Shah, will now move full steam ahead to marginalise regional political parties while seeking to establish the party’s presence across all parts of the country. On his way towards a Congress-mukt Bharat, Mr Modi has set his sights on making the BJP the tallest pole in the polity for some time to come. His task has...