Vaad

Arihant
  • 4.8 (32)
  • Politics

A platform for dialogue, debate and discussion.

  1. संवाद # 321: India's legendary bureaucrat explains poor quality of new expressways | RC Sinha

    9 Jun

    संवाद # 321: India's legendary bureaucrat explains poor quality of new expressways | RC Sinha

    Dr Ramesh Chandra Sinha is a 1962-batch IAS officer whose six-decade career produced some of the most consequential infrastructure projects in modern India.As Vice Chairman and Managing Director of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) under PWD Minister Nitin Gadkari, he built India's first world-class expressway — the 95-km Mumbai-Pune Expressway — completing it in 36 months at a cost of Rs 1,600 crore, which was Rs 50 crore below the MSRDC's own estimate and roughly half of Reliance's competing bid that came with 78 concessions. He raised Rs 2,400 crore from the open market through non-convertible debentures on an equity base of just Rs 5 crore, creating a financing model that other states later sought to replicate.Alongside the Expressway, he delivered 50-plus flyovers across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region with an average construction time of around 30 months, along with numerous rail over-bridges and town bypasses.Earlier, as Vice Chairman and Managing Director of CIDCO under Chief Minister Sharad Pawar, he transformed Vashi from a settlement of 30,000 people into the foundation of Navi Mumbai — building its dam, water supply, six-lane road to Mumbai, railway connectivity (with CIDCO funding 67 percent of the capital cost), modern railway stations, and the iconic Seawoods NRI Complex which sold out worldwide in nine days.He also developed New Nashik, New Aurangabad, New Nanded and the district headquarters of Sindhudurg, and engineered the shifting of Mumbai's wholesale market to Navi Mumbai.At the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation, he turned a loss-making PSU profitable and launched the famed half-hourly ASIAD bus service between Mumbai and Pune in the face of organised taxi-union resistance.In Andhra Pradesh, under Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, he played a key role in conceptualising Cyberabad, the Visakhapatnam SEZ, the Nagarjuna Sagar water supply system for Hyderabad, the Hyderabad bypass, the biopharma zone, the Hyderabad Metro, the Krishna port and the international airport.As Vice Chairman and Managing Director of MADC, he led the MIHAN multi-modal cargo hub and airport project at Nagpur. As Aurangabad Collector during the 1992 riots, his decisiveness earned him the nickname "Simh."At All India Radio earlier in his career, he was instrumental in bringing FM radio to India in 1977. His biography, Transforming India from Within, was released in 2024.

    2h 32m
  2. संवाद # 320: संवाद # 320: Vishal Bhargava's NEW BOLD prediction on Gurgaon's real estate market

    29 May

    संवाद # 320: संवाद # 320: Vishal Bhargava's NEW BOLD prediction on Gurgaon's real estate market

    Vishal Bhargava is one of India's most independent voices on real estate — a journalist and analyst who has tracked the sector for nearly two decades from inside both finance and media. He began his career on the institutional side, with stints at CLSA India and Bank of America, before moving to financial journalism at The Economic Times and ET NOW.Today he writes regular columns on real estate, and runs BHK-Voice, his independent platform that has become required reading for serious homebuyers, builders, and policy-watchers. He is based in Mumbai and applies the discipline of an equity analyst to a sector that has historically resisted scrutiny - pricing builders the way one would price stocks, and reading projects through their lenders, their balance sheets, and their political backers.His writing and commentary are known for being unusually plain-spoken in an industry built on spin: he has called Mumbai's market "Lower Parelised," predicted Gurgaon's coming correction long before consensus, and coined the term "location deception" for one of Indian real estate's most common scams.Beyond the numbers, he is also a chronicler of Indian cities — their architecture, their infrastructure, their slow disfigurement — which makes him one of the few people in India equipped to discuss real estate not just as a market, but as a mirror of Indian state capacity and public life.

    1hr 30min
  3. संवाद # 319: Kashmir expert who predicted Pahalgam has a NEW WARNING | Dr Abhinav Pandya

    26 May

    संवाद # 319: Kashmir expert who predicted Pahalgam has a NEW WARNING | Dr Abhinav Pandya

    Dr Abhinav Pandya, a Cornell University graduate in public affairs and a bachelor's from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, is a founder and CEO of Usanas Foundation, an India-based foreign policy and security think tank. He has authored books named 'Radicalization in India: An Exploration (2019)' and 'Terror Financing in Kashmir (2023)'.He had previously advised the former governor of Jammu and Kashmir on security issues during the critical times when Kashmir's special status, Article 370, was revoked.He has written extensively for several national and international newspapers, and worked with the International Labour Organization, the United Nations.His latest book is 'The Jihad Game: Inside Pakistan's dark war'

    1hr 14min
  4. संवाद # 318: Sanskrit scholar exposes pseudoscience in the name of Hinduism

    24 May

    संवाद # 318: Sanskrit scholar exposes pseudoscience in the name of Hinduism

    Nityānanda Miśra is a Mumbai-based finance professional in the investment banking industry. He specialises in quantitative finance, equity market microstructure, algorithmic trading, and execution consulting. He is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore (2007) and a gold medalist from Gujarat University (2004).Nityānanda is a multifaceted personality—a Sanskrit scholar, a polyglot, a grammarian, a littérateur, an instrumentalist, a musicologist, a researcher, an editor, an author, and a book designer. He has authored thirteen books, including several bestsellers. He is also a professional onomastician, specialising in Sanskrit names.Nityānanda is passionate about Indic culture, literature, music, and arts. He runs a popular YouTube channel, which produces content on these topics.

    1hr 47min
  5. संवाद # 317: India's BIGGEST cover-up - Rajiv Gandhi's murder investigation | Anirudhya Mitra

    21 May

    संवाद # 317: India's BIGGEST cover-up - Rajiv Gandhi's murder investigation | Anirudhya Mitra

    Our guest today is the journalist Anirudhya Mitra. In May 1991, when a former Prime Minister of India was assassinated at Sriperumbudur, Mitra was a young reporter who had joined India Today magazine barely a month earlier. Over the next ninety days, he covered the hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's killers from closer than almost any other journalist in the country — his investigative stories became known as the "inside story" of the assassination. That reporting also made him a target: he was followed, threatened, and publicly branded a CBI agent by both the DMK and the LTTE chief Prabhakaran himself. For thirty years he carried facts he could not put in print. In 2022, he finally wrote them down — in the book that is the subject of today's conversation, Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assassins.

    2h 14m
  6. संवाद # 316: India's legendary nuclear scientist tells the truth about Pokhran, US-India N-deal

    16 May

    संवाद # 316: India's legendary nuclear scientist tells the truth about Pokhran, US-India N-deal

    Dr Anil Kakodkar is one of the senior-most living architects of India's atomic energy programme and a Padma Vibhushan awardee. He joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1964. He served as Director of BARC from 1996 to 2000 and as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, from 2000 to 2009.He was among the small group of scientists at Pokhran for India's first nuclear test — Smiling Buddha — on 18 May 1974, and played a central role a quarter-century later in the five Pokhran-II nuclear tests in May 1998 that established India as a declared nuclear weapons state.As a working engineer through the long sanctions era, he designed and built the Dhruva research reactor entirely indigenously, led the development of pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR) systems that today form the backbone of India's civilian fleet, and rehabilitated Units 1 and 2 of the Madras Atomic Power Station after the 1989 failure of their moderator inlet manifolds — both reactors had been on the verge of being written off. He conceptualised the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR), a 300 MW thorium-fuelled design that remains central to India's three-stage nuclear power programme.His team at BARC designed the miniaturised 83 MW pressurised light water reactor that powers INS Arihant, completing India's nuclear triad. Between 2005 and 2008, he was the technical anchor of the Indian negotiating team — alongside Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, Shivshankar Menon and Shyam Saran — that delivered the 123 Agreement with the United States, the India-IAEA safeguards agreement, and the September 2008 Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver that ended three decades of India's nuclear isolation.A lifelong champion of thorium as the foundation of India's long-term energy sovereignty — India holds roughly a quarter of the world's known thorium reserves — he has continued to argue, well into his eighties, that abandoning the thorium path would be a serious strategic error. Beyond nuclear, he has chaired the Board of Governors of IIT Bombay, led high-level committees on Indian Railways safety and Maharashtra higher education, helped establish NISER and the Homi Bhabha National Institute, and currently chairs Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited.

    2h 15m
  7. संवाद # 315: India’s National security is now compromised | Dr Chaitanya Giri

    20 Apr

    संवाद # 315: India’s National security is now compromised | Dr Chaitanya Giri

    Dr. Chaitanya Giri is a distinguished space scientist, astrochemist, and technology strategy analyst whose expertise bridges planetary science, space policy, and astropolitics. He serves as a Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation's (ORF) Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology and is an Associate Professor at FLAME University.Dr. Giri holds a Ph.D. in Astrochemistry from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. His scientific career includes significant tenures at the Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. Notably, he was a co-investigator for the COSAC payload on the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which made groundbreaking discoveries on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Beyond his scientific research, Dr. Giri is deeply involved in science diplomacy and policy, having consulted for India's National Security Council Secretariat and served on various government review committees. He is also the author of the book India in the Second Space Age of Interplanetary Connectivity, which explores the geopolitical and economic implications of future space exploration.His latest book is ‘The Long Siege: 500 Years of India’s Struggle for Technopolitical Freedom’.

    1hr 15min
  8. संवाद # 314: Muslim scholar explains Islam's biggest weakness | Zahack Tanvir

    17 Apr

    संवाद # 314: Muslim scholar explains Islam's biggest weakness | Zahack Tanvir

    Zahack Tanvir is a Hyderabad-born independent journalist, counter-extremism expert, and the founder and editor of the UK-based media outlet Milli Chronicle. He specializes in international affairs and counter-terrorism, having completed academic programs in these fields at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the London School of Journalism.His educational background is diverse, also comprising an engineering degree in Computer Science from Osmania University, a post-graduate diploma in AI and Machine Learning from IIIT India, and a Master’s in AI-ML from Liverpool John Moores University.Tanvir identifies as a traditional Muslim who is vocally "anti-Islamist," often criticizing extremist ideologies and the political misuse of religion. He lived in Saudi Arabia for 13 years until a significant legal ordeal in late 2023, when he was detained by Saudi authorities following a complaint filed by Pakistan regarding his social media content, which was alleged to be anti-Pakistan. He was released in December 2024.

    1hr 21min
See All (322)

4.8
out of 5
32 Ratings

About

A platform for dialogue, debate and discussion.

Information

  • Creator
    Arihant
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    322
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 359410
  • Show Website
    Vaad

You Might Also Like