Why Al Jazeera refuses to say who owns ORF, hired for Govt of India's democracy ranking

I was a little amused on reading an Al Jazeera piece -- a scoop actually -- which says that ahead of elections the Modi government is all set to come up with its own democracy and freedom index vis-a-vis other countries. The story has been quotes by Hindustan Times, from where I first read about it.

It is doing so after several international think tanks ranked India poorly -- a ranking which has been nose diving ever since Modi took over the reign in May 2014. The think tank "hired" is Observer Research Foundation (ORF), which, says the report, has worked closely with External Affairs Ministry and Niti Aayog, among others.

While the Al Jazeera story made good reading, what it refuses to say is who owns ORF. I don't know why it omitted its name. I have known about ORF ever since RK Mishra, my former Patriot editor, who later became editor-in-chief of Business and Political Obsever (BPO), majorly owned by Reliance, was made ORF chairman after BPO collapsed. Reliance owns 65% of its stakes, and also receives funds from some Indian (including Government of India) and foreign funders.

I see nothing wrong in a top business house owning a think tank, as it would help create an aura of intellectualism around it, apart from making it look respectable. ORF's Gujarat chapter was once led, ironically, by a Leftist journalist who was special correspondent of Patriot, Dinkar Mehta, an unassuming person.

However, why refuse to mention Reliance and other owners is difficult to comprehend.

Did the Sabarmati riverfront make Ahmedabad more vulnerable?

Currently living in Los Angeles, I find myself missing Ahmedabad . Not because I miss living through the city's recent devastating floods—which, experts say, resulted from a combination of extreme meteorological events and chronic urban infrastructure bottlenecks—but because I am unable to make an on-the-spot assessment of the disaster.

Paradox of Stanford's Hoover Institute: Freedom from Communism, but freedom for whom?

A few days ago, we went to San Francisco, ordinarily a six-hour drive from Los Angeles. However, it took us more than eight hours because a fire had broken out on one of the mountains along the highway, forcing us to take another route, part of which ran along the seashore.

India’s growth story meets a stark wealth divide: billionaires gain as top 1% owns 40% of wealth

India’s rapid economic expansion is accompanied by an increasingly concentrated distribution of wealth, raising fresh questions over how fheadline GDP figures reflect the economic reality of ordinary Indians. A two yearold social-media post by former bureaucrat Anil Swarup , founder chairman of Nexus of Good , has resurrected a debate over the gap between India’s aggregate economic size and the wealth held by its richest citizens. Swarup argues that looking only at GDP per capita can obscure the extent to which wealth is concentrated among a small section of the population.

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