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On the face of it, the news about the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) signing a pact to buy a stake in the Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) may seem to be that of a routine merger-buyout deal. Only, that it’s not business as usual. In fact, it is a classic case of a cash-rich Maharatna enterprise being made to subsidise the financial misadventures of a company that is steeped in debt. Suspicion that ONGC would have to bail out GSPC surfaced during the Budget session of...

The excitement over Thursday's Jio launch may sooner or later fade away, but the Shah Committee's indictment of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) will ensure that the company remains in a spot. The one-member panel of former Delhi High Court chief justice Ajit Prakash Shah on Wednesday held RIL and its foreign partners BP Plc and Niko Resources guilty of taking out natural gas that belonged to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in an offshore block in the Bay of Bengal. Worse for the...

The KG gas controversy now has some numbers to go by—the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of India has pegged "excess cost recovery" at $1,547.85 million (Rs 9307.22 crore). The numbers have been mentioned in a chapter of the CAG report that looked at Union government (civil) compliance issues for the financial year ending March 2015. This chapter pertained to the ministry of petroleum and natural gas; the report was released on Tuesday August 2. The statements made in the report, albeit...

The media blitz surrounding Reliance Jio's launch of 4G services (albeit for its employees, as of now) has been as overwhelming as the launch event itself had been a spectacle. But the real story is hardly about the rollout of a broadband service as it is about being a personal milestone for Mukesh Ambani, the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). For more than ten years Ambani had been biding his time—to get into the telecom space. When the undivided RIL had...

The Union government is increasingly bulldozing through policies and Bills – in a tearing hurry. The latest, following on the heels of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012 and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill, 2014, is the National Tourism Policy (NTP). The Union tourism ministry put up a draft of the policy on its website on April 30, and gave the general public only 10 days to respond. The policy may be unveiled as early as May 15...