A lot of wheeling and dealing goes on in the back-room while structuring an IPO, especially if it is a much-anticipated offer. A large company, whose public issue is imminent and is in the final stages of the IPO process, decided to reserve 10 per cent of the issue size for the shareholders of the parent. Some of the bankers to the issue had other ideas. They pushed for the shareholder portion to be scaled down so that there would be more for institutional investors.

The company’s management, however, refused to budge and finally won the day saying that the shareholders should have room to subscribe to the shares of the company.

Landline to the rescue

As news broke of a rift between DMK MP Dayanidhi Maran and his brother (and Sun TV executive chairman) Kalanithi Maran, the significance of humble landline telephone came to the fore. With Dayanidhi having issued a notice to his brother detailing his allegations against the latter, journalists got busy making calls to decipher the core of the issue.

However, due to the sensitivity of the issue, their calls were left unattended or ignored by most of the people they called. That’s when landline phones came into play.

To the surprise of those in newsrooms, calls made from landlines had a better chance of being addressed.

Smooth satellite launch

Placing satellites in Lower Earth Orbit may not be difficult, after all. “I am very confident it is going to be by demand, and by order you can get these satellites placed,” said IIT Madras Director, V Kamakoti, at a symposium on Telecom Technology Development Fund. He was highlighting the importance of satellite communication and how IIT Madras incubated rocket factory, Agnikul Cosmos, will build launch vehicles capable of taking micro and nano-satellites to Low Earth Orbit. “We have a patent which has a unified single printing of both the satellite and the rocket. We can place the order and within 45 days, the rocket will be launched along with the satellite,” he said.

Cracking civil services

In an exclusive interview to Doordarshan News, Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh said that the last 11 years have seen the democratisation of the civil services and youth aspirations. According to him, the IAS and civil services were at one time dominated by those from a handful of States like Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but today there are toppers from States like Punjab, Haryana and J&K which hardly figured in the toppers’ list earlier.

He cited the cases of Parsanjit Kour, a young girl from Poonch, a border district in J&K, who bagged all-India Rank 11 in the civil services exam of 2022 in her very first attempt, and that of a boy from Punjab, Anmol Sher Singh Bedi, who got Rank 2 in 2016. Cases like these, the Minister said, have restored faith in the fairplay and equal opportunity offered by the system.

Published on June 22, 2025