Windfall claim

The government seemed to be in overdrive to clear big-ticket investment projects last week. A Union cabinet minister from the Congress party, who has been pushing for the clearance of one such mega-scheme, enthusiastically called a briefing after the project was approved. However, the informal briefing was coincidentally scheduled on the day Narendra Modi was declared the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general elections and, as luck would have it, one of the mega-projects cleared happened to be in Modi's Gujarat. When reporters asked the minister what he made of the Gujarat angle to the project, he was quick to retort that maybe Modi will stake a claim to it. Going by that logic, if Modi ends up in the PM's chair he may just stake a claim to the entire scheme, much to the minister's chagrin.