In reflective mood in the twilight of his life, former prime minister VP Singh once told me that the post of India`s prime minister is endowed with immense and unique power. “Nothing, particularly corruption, escapes his attention," Sin
With that spatial-cultural phenomenon called ‘urban India’ growing exponentially — by one estimate, the urban Indian population is set to go up to 750 million Indians by 2050 — there is need for proper plan
Is the food security bill, which will purportedly reach food to “67 percent” of Indians, as information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari put it, more important than raising a din and trying to address, and end, the Congress part
In April 1994, when then finance minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated UTI Bank (now Axis Bank) in Ahmedabad, the country’s first private sector bank, many thought took it as a landmark day in Indian banking. It was thought that Indian private
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has criticised the opposition for disrupting parliament and acting as a hindrance in the passing of crucial bills. “If our legislators cannot meet for discussion on crucial bills, there is certainly somethi
Strange are the ways of the Bahujan Samaj Party. At a time when every party on the political firmament is seeking resignations of ministers lording over ministries allegedly indulging in irregularities, the BSP has come to the support of railway m
With CBI director Ranjit Sinha today admitting in the supreme court that the investigating agency made changes in its probe report on the coal block allocation scam at the behest of law minister Ashwani Kumar and attorney general GE Vahanvati, anc
After exposing alleged role of some of the biggest private sector banks in money laundering, Aniruddha Bahal of cobrapost.com has now stung 23 financial institutions, including big public sector banks like the State Bank of India and Punjab Nation
In light of the rising incidents of unregulated collective investment schemes (CIS) going bust leading to huge losses to the public at large, the market watchdog Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has proposed a separate regulator to co
This can happen only in India. The government decided that millions of cable homes in dozens of cities, including the metros, or those households that received hundreds of TV channels through analogue cable, had to become digitised. But when a fri
A famous noting by a cabinet secretary aptly summed up the status of railways sometime back: “Indian Railways does not seem to be a part of the government.” The cabinet secretary, though, must be ruing the inaccuracy of
What do politicians do when caught with their pants down, metaphorically speaking of course? They feign ignorance — that is to say the pants never existed. And what do politicians do when a relative or family member is caught with his pants
Stressing that enacting laws alone are not enough to stop violence against women, a senior UN official has urged the Indian government to address structural discrimination and strengthen preventive initiatives in an effort to develop a more holist
The nation is still some distance way from a regulatory framework for its real estate sector. Urban housing and poverty alleviation secretary Arun Kumar Mishra admitted as much today at a conference on affordable housing. The real estat
When Rahul Gandhi said, "Congress can get defeated only by the Congress", his partymen had seemed surprised. Today, senior Congress leaders are ruing that their colleagues and party workers are on the verge of proving their leade
As the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) start the drive to evict residents living in illegally constructed floors of the Campa Cola compound in Mumbai’s upscale Worli area, we revisit an article we had done late April this year – when
In hindsight, Sushilkumar Shinde may have stated the truth late last year when he said even prime minister Manmohan Singh did not know about Ajmal Kasab’s hanging. “The
Last night ‘The’ Arnab Goswami dared all media persons counselling restraint. If the Boss had it his way, India would fix all b*stards in the world six times a month. Our MiGs, some as old as the pilots who we force to fly them, would
