8 dead, a dozen injured as Dharmastala bound bus falls off bridge in Hassan

For many Indian tycoons, 2019 turned woeful as lenders -- empowered by the nation’s recent bankruptcy law and desperate to clean up soured debt from their books -- started seizing assets of delinquent firms or dragged them into insolvency.

Indian banks wrote off a record $39 billion of loans in the 18 months through September in a bid to repair their balance sheets as they battled the world’s worst bad debt pile. Making matters worse, a shadow banking crisis led to a funding squeeze, crushing debt-laden businesses that were critically dependent on rollover financing.

“Life has come a full circle for tycoons that had enjoyed debt-fueled growth,” said Nirmal Gangwal, founder of distress and debt restructuring advisory firm Brescon & Allied Partners LLP. “Many firms collapsed like a house of cards. The downfall was rather unprecedented.”
The government has also been cracking down on economic crime to assuage public anger over absconding businessmen. It’s even barred some from traveling overseas if they were deemed a flight risk.

Here are some of the country’s biggest and most-storied businessmen who saw their fortunes fade. Spokespersons for none of these tycoons, except Essar, immediately replied to emails and text messages seeking comments.

Anil Ambani

The chairman of Reliance Group, which makes movies to metro lines, had a close shave with jail time in March before his elder brother and Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, bailed him out at the last minute. The woes of the ex-billionaire came to the fore when India’s top court asked him to pay Ericsson AB’s India unit about $77 million of past dues or go to jail since Anil Ambani, 60, had given a personal guarantee. His telecom carrier slipped into insolvency this year, while unprofitable Reliance Naval & Engineering Ltd. faced a cash crunch. Reliance Capital Ltd. is selling assets to pare debt. Ambani is also fending off Chinese lenders in a London court.

Malvinder & Shivinder Singh

Karma caught up with ex-billionaires and brothers Malvinder Singh, 47, and Shivinder Singh, 44, and how. Scions of a prominent business family, they once helmed India’s top drug maker and second-largest hospital chain. In October, the two were arrested on charges of fraudulently diverting nearly $337 million from a lender they controlled. India’s market regulator found in 2018 that the brothers had defrauded their hospital company of about $56 million. The collapse of the $2 billion empire turned brother against brother, prompting their mother to broker a peace deal that was short-lived. In February, Malvinder accused Shivinder and their spiritual guru of fraud.

Shashikant & Ravikant Ruia

After a hard-fought battle to keep their flagship steel mill, the first-generation entrepreneurs finally saw the bankrupt Essar Steel India Ltd. pass on to ArcelorMittal last month. The $5.9 billion takeover was almost two years in the making with multiple legal wrangles. The group, controlled by Shashikant Ruia, 76, and Ravikant Ruia, 70, were also reprimanded by a U.K. judge in March this year for concealing documents. Started in 1969 as a construction firm, Essar Group diversified, investing about $18 billion between 2008 and 2012, and piled on debt. In 2017, the group had sold another prized asset, Essar Oil.

Selling an asset to pare a liability shouldn’t be seen as a “lost asset,” an Essar spokesman said, adding that the group remains a diversified conglomerate.

VG Siddhartha

Before jumping off a bridge into a river in July in an apparent suicide, the founder of India’s biggest coffee chain Cafe Coffee Day had penned a letter that spoke of pressure from lenders, a private equity firm and harassment by tax officials. He had spent much of the last two years pledging ever more of Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. shares to refinance loans for ever shorter periods, at ever higher interest rates. “I would like to say I gave it my all,” V.G. Siddhartha, 60, wrote in the letter. “I fought for a long time but today I gave up.”

Naresh Goyal

The former ticketing agent who built India’s largest airline by value, stepped down as chairman of Jet Airways India Ltd. in March, caving in to pressure from banks who took over the company. Cut-throat price wars and surging costs pushed Jet deeper into loss. The airline stopped flying in April and went into bankruptcy two months later as lenders failed to find a buyer. In July, an Indian court barred Naresh Goyal from flying overseas after the government said it was investigating an alleged $2.6 billion fraud involving Jet Airways.

Rana Kapoor

The founder of Yes Bank Ltd., which became India’s fourth-largest non-state lender, tweeted in September 2018 that his shares were invaluable and requested his children never to sell them upon inheritance. But trouble was brewing. The nation’s banking regulator, which found the lender had repeatedly under-reported its bad loans, refused to extend his tenure as chief executive officer. This forced Rana Kapoor, 62, to step down by end-January. Kapoor, who has pledged some of his Yes Bank shares in July, sold almost his entire stake in the lender by October.

Subhash Chandra

The rice trader-turned-media mogul, 69, who brought cable television into Indian homes in the early 1990s with his ZEE TV, resigned as chairman of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. in November and lost control of his crown jewel. Subhash Chandra has been selling stake in Zee Entertainment in the past few months to repay group’s debt.

Gautam Thapar

A default by Gautam Thapar, founder of the paper mill-to-power transmission Avantha Group, on pledged shares made Yes Bank Ltd. the biggest shareholder in CG Power and Industrial Solutions Ltd. In August, the firm was hit by an accounting scandal forcing the board to remove Thapar, 59, from the chairman’s post. A month later, the market regulator ordered a forensic audit of the firm and barred Thapar from accessing securities market.

Even as the Muslims of undivided Dakshina Kannada district broke out of the “spiral of silence” and made history by leading an unprecedented protest against CAA, NPR and NRC as well as the categorial mistreatment of non-saffronites at the hands of the police across the country, mainstream media turned a blind eye to the spectacle at the Shah Garden Maidan in Mangaluru’s Adyar where about two lakh patriots with tricolor in their hands converged to assert themselves on January 15th, 2020, a date which will be remembered by the people of coastal Karnataka forever.

The largest gathering in the history of Mangaluru was absolutely peaceful, law-abiding and respectful. While the slogans of ‘Azaadi’ were reverberating in the atmosphere, the protesters were seen making way for vehicles and passersby, taking care of women and helping elderly citizens on the highway adjacent to the ground. Though the organisers and most of the participants were Muslims, they collectively identified themselves as “We, the people of India”.

The district administration and the police department hadn’t imagined or even dreamt of such a mammoth gathering after blocking the highway and banning public transport from 9 am to 9 pm. Many opine that this action was taken only to discourage the concerned from participating in the protest and to create fear in the hearts of the people who are yet to process the unjustifiable deaths of two innocent citizens in an unwarranted police firing a few weeks ago.

What has since surprised the protesters most is the mainstream media’s blatant attempt to downplay the significance of this largest ever gathering. Shockingly, it could not make it to the front pages of any of the state-level Kannada daily newspapers except city-based Vaartha Bharathi. In the absence of The Hindu, which had announced a holiday on account of Makar Sankranti, most of the English newspapers too pitilessly buried the historic event in their inner pagers. National TV channels too were evidently reluctant to cover the event until NDTV started telecasting the news of the protest.

This uneasy relationship between the media and minorities in coastal Karnataka has long existed, but the non-coverage of the huge protest of Jan 15 marks a quantum leap beyond the media’s traditional pro-Sangh Parivar stance and biases –– which in the past had often demonised non-saffronites –– to now completely ignore and suppress the people’s voice. This media bias has naturally evoked a sharp response from netizens, who took to social media to issue clarion calls to boycott the mainstream media forever.

Cleanliness Drive

Most major protest meets and rallies –– both religious and political –– leave behind tonnes of garbage, especially water bottles, placards and buntings. However, the organisers of the Jan 15 protest meet led by example by launching a cleanliness drive in the area soon after the protesters left the venue peacefully. The drive continued on Jan 16 too. (Ironically, amidst this ongoing cleanliness drive, a local news portal captured photos of a few plastic bottles scattered along the road at Adyar and published a report accusing the event organisers and participants of polluting the area!)

New Delhi, Jun 6: Military commanders of India and China are scheduled to meet today at Moldo on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), to discuss the ongoing dispute along the LAC in Eastern Ladakh.

The Commander of the Leh-based 14 Corps of the Indian Army Commander Lieutenant Gen Harinder Singh will meet his Chinese equivalent Maj Gen Liu Lin, who is the commander of South Xinjiang Military Region of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) to address the ongoing tussle in Eastern Ladakh between the two countries over the heavy military build-up by the People's Liberation Army along the LAC there.

The two sides have held close to a dozen rounds of talks since the first week of May when the Chinese sent over 5,000 troops to the LAC.

On Friday, officials of India and China interacted through video-conferencing with the two sides agreeing that they should handle "their differences through peaceful discussion" while respecting each other's sensitivities and concerns and not allowing them to become disputes in accordance with the guidance provided by the leadership.

In the last few days, there has not been any major movement of the People's Liberation Army troops at the multiple sites where it has stationed itself along the LAC opposite Indian forces.

India and China have been locked in a dispute over the heavy military build-up by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) where they have brought in more than 5,000 troops along with the Eastern Ladakh sector.

The Chinese Army's intent to carry out deeper incursions was checked by the Indian security forces by quick deployment. The Chinese have also brought in heavy vehicles with artillery guns and infantry combat vehicles in their rear positions close to the Indian territory.