तारांकित प्रश्न ★ 7

F. No. SI/Q7/ONE-NATION-TWO-BUYERSसेवा में: The Government of India & Its Two Most Successful Citizens

One Nation, Two Buyers, Everything Must Go

Six airports without an experience requirement, coal blocks a court had quashed, the world's largest solar tender, the slum, the news channel. Whatever the republic put up kept reaching the same two houses, and the agencies kept reaching the sellers and rivals first. Every denial is stapled where it belongs.

प्रश्न, भारत सरकार के लिए

Since the spoken version was expunged, here it is in writing: is there anything these two houses have asked of the Government of India and not received? The airports went despite the written objections, the coal stayed despite a Supreme Court quashing, the forest consent stands despite a statutory forgery finding, and the one bribery indictment naming Indian officials was filed, contested and buried in a Brooklyn courtroom without a single Indian agency opening a file. Constitute the JPC the hundred questions asked for. Or expunge this too, and we will staple the expungement to the register as Exhibit I.

Indicted Abroad · Inaugurated at Home · Denied Throughout

अभिलेख, प्रदर्श-वार

Start with the scoreboard. In February 2022 Gautam Adani overtook Mukesh Ambani as Asia's richest man at $88.5 billion, some group stocks having risen 600 to over 1,000 percent in two years, in precisely the sectors the government was announcing as national priorities. By September 2022 he was the second richest person on the planet, having added roughly $70 billion in a single year, more than any other billionaire alive. A conglomerate does not grow like that on operational excellence; nothing grows like that on operational excellence. In the world's fastest growing major economy, the fastest growing asset was proximity.
The airports set the template. In 2019 the government privatised six of them, and one bidder won all six on 50-year concessions: Adani, whose prior experience of running airports was zero. This bothered the government's own economists. A NITI Aayog memo warned that a technically incapable bidder “can well jeopardise the project”; the Department of Economic Affairs recommended, the same day, that no single bidder get more than two airports. The appraisal committee's solution was to decide that airport experience would be neither a prerequisite for bidding nor a post-bid requirement. The objections were not answered. The clause containing them was removed. Then came the seventh: GVK, owner of Mumbai airport, collected a CBI FIR in June 2020 and an ED money-laundering case in July, and by 31 August had handed its stake to Adani, citing the pandemic. In October 2025 the Prime Minister personally inaugurated the ₹19,650 crore Navi Mumbai airport that came bundled with it, with Gautam Adani on stage. The investigations did their work, in the sense that the work got done.
The coal was managed with similar care. When the Supreme Court quashed the coal block allocations in 2014, the new government's Coal Mines Special Provisions Act of 2015 preserved the mine developer-operator contracts riding on them, which is how Adani kept and grew the positions that make it India's largest coal mine operator today. The PMO's own internal correspondence, unearthed by The Reporters' Collective, described appointing operators before blocks are even allotted as lacking “consistency and transparency” and “inappropriate”. The arrangement continued. In the Hasdeo Aranya forest, where the Parsa block is mined with Adani as contractor, Chhattisgarh's statutory Scheduled Tribes Commission found in November 2024 that the gram sabha consent was falsified: attendance inflated from 150 to 450 in one village and 132 to 482 in another, the mining agenda inserted into the minutes after the meetings had ended. The state utility disputes the finding. The clearances stand. The trees, for the record, do not.
The solar file went to Brooklyn. In 2020 SECI awarded Adani Green the 8 GW manufacturing-linked tender, the world's largest, followed by the world's largest green power purchase agreement, expected to yield about $2 billion in profit. In November 2024 a federal grand jury in New York indicted Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar and an executive for securities and wire fraud conspiracy, alleging a scheme to promise over $250 million in bribes to Indian officials to secure those very supply contracts while raising money from investors on clean anti-bribery representations. He denies all of it; he was indicted, never arrested, never tried, and convicted of nothing. Note what the indictment implies about this file: the alleged bribes were for Indian officials, in Indian states, over an Indian government tender, and the only prosecutors who examined it sat eight thousand miles from Delhi.
Then the Brooklyn file was closed, and how it closed is its own exhibit. In May 2026 the Trump DOJ moved to drop the case as “primarily foreign”; two career prosecutors withdrew rather than sign; the judge called the government's explanation “terse, bland and conclusory”. CBS News reported that Adani's lawyer, who is also the US President's personal lawyer, had told the DOJ his client would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy, and the judge ordered Adani to swear under oath that nothing was promised or exchanged for the dismissal, which he duly swore. Reported SEC consent deals would close the civil file at $6 million and $12 million, no wrongdoing admitted or denied. Separately, Adani Enterprises paid $275 million to the US Treasury over Iranian-origin LPG shipments the Treasury said carried red flags. The largest corruption question ever asked about an Indian company was thus asked in Washington, answered in Washington, and withdrawn in Washington. Delhi's contribution was silence at every stage.
The neighbours held the audits Delhi would not. Sri Lanka's electricity board chairman testified in parliament, under oath, that his President told him the Indian Prime Minister was “pressuring him” to hand a wind project to Adani; the President denied it, the chairman retracted within 48 hours, resigned within days, and the project died anyway once a new government reviewed the tariff. Bangladesh's High Court ordered an inquiry into the untendered Godda power deal, under which officials said Adani billed coal at around $400 a tonne against under $250 payable elsewhere. Kenya cancelled $2.5 billion in Adani airport and transmission deals the day after the indictment, citing information from “investigative agencies and partner nations”. Three democracies re-examined the friendship the moment they were free to. The fourth kept inaugurating.
The other buyer prefers policy to purchases. In September 2017 TRAI cut the interconnect charge from 14 to 6 paise, a decision worth the most to exactly one operator, the new entrant that paid it: Jio; rivals called it a one-company ruling and their stocks fell on the news. On Rafale, President Hollande said France “did not have a choice” in taking Anil Ambani's Reliance as offset partner because “we took the interlocutor who was given to us”, after the procurement procedure had been quietly amended in 2015 to stop vendors having to name their Indian partners up front; the government and Reliance deny any role, and the denial is stapled here. When the green hydrogen subsidies arrived in 2024, Reliance took the maximum electrolyser allocation and Adani took the next tranche. And in the electoral bonds ledger one file over, the third largest donor in the country was a little-known firm whose directors journalists traced to Reliance offices, which Reliance says is not its subsidiary. The farmers who besieged Delhi in 2020 named both houses in one breath and boycotted both; they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists by every channel whose owner's file sits in Annexure C.
What happens when you ask about any of this is the tidiest exhibit of all. The Leader of the Opposition asked in Parliament in February 2023; the questions were expunged from the record for being “unauthenticated”. His party asked 100 questions in public over 45 days; the Joint Parliamentary Committee they demanded was never constituted. The regulator investigated itself into September 2025 and found no violations in its flagship probes, which the group fairly cites as vindication, and this register fairly records; the court-appointed committee had earlier found no regulatory failure it could establish, “prima facie”, in a report it filled with caveats; the Supreme Court declined an SIT. Hindenburg then alleged the SEBI chairperson herself held stakes in offshore structures also used by Vinod Adani; she denied it, the Lokpal dismissed the complaints as “bordering on frivolity”, and her term simply ended. Meanwhile LIC's policyholders held the crash, Oxfam counted the bottom half of the country paying two-thirds of GST while owning 3% of the wealth, and the World Inequality Lab concluded the Billionaire Raj now out-concentrates the British one. The questions were expunged. The wealth was not.

पूरी स्रोत-सूची

अब आप वास्तव में क्या कर सकते हैं →