below the line. ‘Coal-storage’

The news reports of Coal India’s Delhi office being shut have irked the Coal Minister’s office. After expressing its displeasure, the office realised that it had itself posted this information on the Coal Ministry’s website.

In addition to the CIL office being shut down, the action-taken report on 13 items forwarded by Coal Minister Piyush Goyal also hits out at the Railways for not providing enough rakes for coal movement. Now, Goyal is also the Railway Minister and in this report, one of his departments is incriminating the other. Not surprisingly, as the action-taken report started gaining attention, the Coal Ministry’s website removed it from the homepage.

Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which has emerged as one of the fiercest opponents of the Walmart-Flipkart deal, is miffed with the fact that Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi is representing Walmart in the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal. CAIT is challenging Competition Commission of India's decision to approve the deal in NCLAT. CAIT is now taking on the Congress, calling out the hypocrisy of the party, where its president Rahul Gandhi in his speeches talks about the welfare of small traders even as the party’s senior leaders seem to be openly working for the MNCs.

In a recent press conference held by Union Health Minister JP Nadda, an entire crowd of journalists was stunned when a fellow reporter asked Nadda why the government invests money in HIV protection programmes, when people who are prone to getting infected indulge in “illegal physical relationships”. Nadda, who was caught unaware at being asked such an ignorant question by a journalist, did not know how to react for a second but quickly countered in his classic diplomatic demeanour, saying, “The ministry will continue performing its duties, like it is expected to.”

‘Data is the new oil’. So there was hardly any surprise when Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, during the Global Mobility Summit here on Friday, said: “India is a happening place as far as big data is concerned.” During his speech, he said, “Billions of data is generated daily so sanity of data is important.” But what was important was the ministry’s recent stand on abuse of data — its tough stance against the social media applications WhatsApp and Facebook. Even the recent debate on data localisation, from the draft data privacy and e-commerce policy, is reflective of this. All this talk is great and commendable, but industry sources say that it is a little too late and we are doing merely a catching-up game when we have already given away most of the data in all these years.

Those frequenting India International Centre (IIC), the Capital’s popular watering hole for bureaucrats, are reporting how former J&K Governor NN Vohra can be seen throwing his weight around the club. Vohra was elected IIC president last year, replacing jurist Soli Sorabjee after an intense power struggle.

At that time, there were murmurs about how Vohra could devote time to IIC as well as oversee affairs of the troubled State. But now that Vohra is back in Delhi, eased out of the governorship reportedly over differences with the Centre on Article 35A, he is free to fully occupy himself with matters of the club. And, apparently, he is doing so, getting involved in everything from the flowers to the menu to the room rents. Regulars complain how IIC room rates have climbed steeply.