THE ink has barely dried on the acquisition of the French Rafale fighter aircraft, and India has once again entered the international arms market with the intention to procure hundreds of fighter jets, albeit with the proviso that they be manufactured in India. The Rafale deal, for outright purchase of 36 twin-engined medium-weight multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) worth around $ 7.8 billion (Rs 50,000 crores), did not quite turn out to be  ‘the mother of all defence deals’ it was once hailed as.

SWATI Chaturvedi's book I am a Troll, released a few days back, blows the lid off BJP's systematic trolling of its opponents. We have always known that the trolling on the internet we see on a daily basis was an organised effort of the BJP. We now learn that there is a team, directly controlled by the RSS and BJP leadership that is at the centre of this trolling. This was the team that fed the lies, the “drip of hate”, vicious attacks on women including threats of rape, to a larger troll army.

WITH the worst of the winter pollution crisis in Delhi and other northern cities having subsided for the moment, the episodic clamour in the media, the judiciary, government agencies and among the public at large has also quietened down. No doubt it will flare up at the next peak in air pollution. Forgotten, it seems, are the short-term fixes furiously discussed then. And, in the days of instant media, nobody has the patience to discuss long-term solutions.Efforts to obfuscate the nature of the problem, and hence the determined steps required to tackle it, continue as usual.

THE crisis of the power sector reforms, carried out over the last three decades, particularly after enacting the 2003 Electricity Act, is now becoming worse. It is estimated that 25,000 MW of capacity today is lying idle, as the distribution companies are not able to pay for electricity. Under pressure from the finance ministry, banks have lent money to the private power companies. As a consequence, Indian banks’ exposure to the power sector stand at Rs 5.8 lakh crore (September 2015), which is 22 percent of all outstanding banking loans to industries.

THE government is in a complete denial on its spectrum auction fiasco. Only Rs  65,000 crore worth of spectrum – or 11.6 percent of the expected price of Rs 5.6 lakh crore – on the block was sold. Out of this, the government would get only Rs 32,000 crore this year, leaving a gaping hole in its revenue projection of Rs 98,994.93 crores in the budget for this year, as 'other communications services', the bulk of which is expected to be spectrum fees.