At Bangalore\'s Gated Enclaves, the Chaos Outside Comes Knocking at the Door

Pushkar VYash Enclave, an upscale gated residential complex in Bangalore, Karnataka.

In Bangalore, sentry-guarded, walled high rises and gated villa communities with grandiloquent names like Golden Enclave, Pebble Bay and Palm Meadows are all the rage. For many middle-class and upper middle-class families in the city - and in big cities elsewhere in India - they offer protection and privacy, an escape from the dysfunctional urban disarray outside.

But if events of the past few months are any indication, the problems of the outside world are insistently knocking at the gates.

David Arthur, a corporate dealer who offers cell-phone ser vices to companies, has lived with his wife and two children in one such idyll, called Yash Enclave, for the past eight years. Recent events have taken some of the sheen off this perfect setting for him.

Yash Enclave is a walled community in a new north Bangalore neighborhood called Hennur Road . Inside, the streets are squeaky clean, homes have lush gardens, and there is seldom a honk heard from the cars as they cruise through, stopping to make way for kids riding bicycles, gliding by on rollerblades or chasing after cricket balls.

It is a place where children also leave bicycles and skateboards outdoors without fear of theft â€" a situation unthinkable in any Indian city.

Beyond Yash Enclave's manned gates is India's urban reality: slums, potholed and traffic-choked roads, piles of garbage on street corners, traffic fumes, and a cacophonous din from the revving motors and incessant honking of the cars, buses and motorcycles.

The two worlds are separated by a bare hundred meters, but the contrast could not be starker. “Once inside, we live a sheltered life,” said Mr. Arthur, a lifelong Bangalore resident. But, he lamented, “that is going to get increasingly difficult in the coming days.”

Problems started in Yash Enclave a few months ago.

First, the borewells ran dry, leaving residents without water until they found an outside contractor. In Bangalore, the city supplies, or rather, rations water to individual homes. But large apartment blocks or villa complexes often have to make their own arrangements.

Venkata Raju of the Bangalore Water Supply Board said that the 900 million liters of water available per day, an amount that has remained the same since 2002, is rationed to 250 square kilometres of the city's core. Since then, the city has boomed, its boundaries have stretched and a lot more apartment complexes and gated communities have come up. “The quantity is i nadequate,” he said.

But private water suppliers come with their own set of problems. The quality of their  water is sometimes so bad that many communities are forced to install expensive water treatment plants or filters in individual homes.

The residents of Yash Enclave have hired private water tanker contractors who now fill the community tanks several times daily. Every home in Yash Enclave has a filter. Some buy bottled drinking water as well.

Water is an issue in nearly every walled community in Bangalore, but additionally for some, security guards started disappearing. Thousands of people from India's northeast fled Bangalore in August, after they heard rumors of possible attacks. Many private security companies rely heavily on northeastern immigrants, who tend to be fluent in Hindi or English and literate, and communities had to downsize their security staff or rework contracts to pay more for guards, whose salaries went up once the labor pool sh rank.

The latest crisis to hit Bangalore's planned communities involves their garbage.

In recent weeks, city authorities have thrown up their hands after a futile search for new dumping grounds for the thousands of tons of garbage produced daily in Bangalore. (Read more about Bangalore's garbage problem and the thousands of women responsible for sorting and collecting the city's trash.)

In September, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, the city's governing authority, categorized any building or housing society with more than 10 units as a ‘bulk generator' of waste, citing an old rule, and mandated that such bulk generators should have their own garbage composting units or else make their own arrangements to have waste removed by garbage contractors.

Residents at Yash Enclave, whose homes are worth 10 million rupees ($250,000) or more, currently pay a private contractor a few thousand rupees to clear the garbage from their complex once a day. Mr. Arthur anticipated that the contractor would soon ask for higher fees, or, worse, refuse to do the daily collection.

Hundreds of similar walled communes dot Bangalore, where the population of 9.6 million has increased nearly 50 percent in a decade.

The Bangalore residents who choose to live in the city's gated enclaves call them “Little Republics.” Urban experts criticize their resident of of withdrawing from civic engagement and accelerating India's already wide socioeconomic schisms.

“It is an unhealthy divide,” said V. Ravichandar, a management consultant and an urban analyst. “A certain segment of the population has concluded that the public system is a failure and has opted out by creating their own private cocoons,” he said.

Gated communities are a flawed urban development model, he said, adding that the government should instead encourage collaborative, sustainable development zones with built-in working, living and social spaces.< /p>

Bangalore's private communities, though, have been designed for the opposite of “collaborative living” with the rest of India â€" and residents say that's why they live there. Many of Bangalore's private communities are next door to real India, yet have no semblance of being connected to it. Some residents seem to prefer this, saying that the exclusivity really appeals to them.

Mili Jalan, who runs an early learning center, said she chose a gated complex on Sarjapura Road to get away from the mayhem outside, and to avoid some of the normal hassles of living in India.

“I did not want to get into the nitty-gritty of negotiating daily life, whether ensuring water in my taps or power to run my refrigerator or finding a reliable carpenter or electrician if I needed one,” said Ms. Jalan. In most gated communities, these duties are handled by either the complex manager or a committee of residents, who negotiate on the residents' collective behalf and levy maintenance fees or a one-time charge.

Yet, Ms. Jalan is realizing that she can't be completely shielded from the dysfunction outside. As Bangalore's water scarcity worsened recently, Ms. Jalan has found herself shocked by the price she has to pay for a necessity like water.

Her 100-apartment building complex, ironically called Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, never had a city water supply. Located in a dry part of the city, there is no groundwater to mine either so residents are dependent on private water suppliers, who take advantage of their position to raise priceas at will. Mr. Jalan's monthly water bill recently went up another 2,000 rupees ($37) per months.

The extra cost hasn't soured her on gated community life â€" if anything, it has made her more sensitive to the city's challenges. “I am even more aware what it's like outside,” she said. “I appreciate that I live in an ivory tower.”

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised here. There's never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.

A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India's Traditional Silence

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A 16-year-old girl, right, who was gang-raped, sitting with her mother. The girl's father killed himself.

DABRA, India - One after the other, the men raped her. They had dragged the girl into a darkened stone shelter at the edge of the fields, eight men, maybe more, reeking of pesticide and cheap whiskey. They assaulted her for nearly three hours. She was 16 years old.

When it was over, the men threatened to kill her if she told anyone, and for days the girl said nothing. Speaking out would have been difficult, anyway, given the hierarchy of caste. She was poor and a Dalit, the low-caste group once known as untouchables, while most of the attackers were from a higher caste that dominated land and power in the village.

It might have ended there, if not for the videos: her assailants had taken cellphone videos as trophies, and the images began circulating among village men until one was shown to the victim's father, his family said. Distraught, the father committed suicide on Sept. 18 by drinking pesticide. Infuriated, Dalits demanded justice in the rape case.

“We thought, We lost my husband, we lost our honor,” the mother of the rape victim said. “What is the point of remaining silent now?”

As in many countries, silence often follows rape in India, especially in villages, where a rape victim is usually regarded as a shamed woman, unfit for marriage. But an outcry over a string of recent rapes, including this one, in the northern state of Haryana, has shattered that silence, focusing national attention on India's rising number of sexual assaults while also exposing the conservative, male-dominated power structure in Haryana, where rape victims are often treated with callous disregard.

In a rapidly changing country, rape cases have increased at an alarming rate, roughly 25 percent in six years. To some degree, this reflects a rise in reporting by victims. But India's changing gender dynamic is also a significant factor, as more females are attending school, entering the work force or choosing their own spouses - trends that some men regard as a threat.

India's news media regularly carry horrific accounts of gang rapes, attacks once rarely seen. Sometimes, gangs of young men stumble upon a young couple - in some cases the couple is meeting furtively in a conservative society - and then rape the woman. Analysts also point to demographic trends: India has a glut of young males, some unemployed, abusing alcohol or drugs and unnerved by the new visibility of women in society.

“This visibility is seen as a threat and a challenge,” said Ranjana Kumari, who runs the Center for Social Research in New Delhi.

In Haryana, the initial response to the rape after it was disclosed ranged from denial to denouncing the media to blaming the victim. A spokesman for the governing Congress Party was quoted as saying that 90 percent of rape cases begin as consensual sex. Women's groups were outraged after a village leader pointed to teenage girls' sexual desire as the reason for the rapes.

“I think that girls should be married at the age of 16, so that they have their husbands for their sexual needs, and they don't need to go elsewhere,” the village leader, Sube Singh, told IBN Live, a news channel. “This way rapes will not occur.”

The most vulnerable women are poor Dalits, the lowest tier of the social structure. Of 19 recent rape cases in Haryana, at least six victims were Dalits. One Dalit teenager in Haryana committed suicide, setting herself afire, after being gang-raped. Another Dalit girl, 15, who was mentally handicapped, was raped in Rohtak, according to Indian news media accounts, the same district where a 13-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a neighbor.

“If you are a poor woman who is raped, you cannot even imagine a life where there will be justice,” Kalpana Sharma, a columnist, wrote recently in The Hindu, a national English-language newspaper. “If you are a poor woman and a Dalit, then the chances of justice are even slimmer.”

Haryana is one of India's most entrenched bastions of feudal patriarchy. The social preference for sons has contributed to a problem of some couples aborting female fetuses, leaving Haryana with the most skewed gender ratio in India, 861 females for every 1,000 males. Politically, the Jat caste largely controls a statewide network of unelected, all-male councils known as khap panchayats, which dominate many rural regions of the state.

Elected leaders are reluctant to confront the khaps, given their ability to turn out voters, and often endorse their conservative social agenda, in which women are subservient to men. Khaps have sought to ban women from wearing bluejeans or using cellphones. One khap member, Jitender Chhatar, blamed fast food for the rise in rape cases, arguing that it caused hormonal imbalances and sexual urges in young women. Mr. Singh, who suggested lowering the legal marriage age, is also a khap leader.

“They are working the blame-the-victim theory,” said Jagmati Sangwan, president of the Haryana chapter of the All-India Democratic Women's Association. “They are diverting attention from the crime and the criminals, and the root causes.”

Yet public anger is clearly bubbling up. Small protests have been staged across the state, including one this month in the town of Meham, where about 100 men and women picketed the district police headquarters over the rape of a 17-year-old girl. They waved signs demanding “Arrest Rapists!” and “Justice for Women” and chanted “Down with Haryana Police!”

Here in Dabra, about 100 miles from the Pakistan border, villagers say there is no khap panchayat but rather an elected village council where the leadership position, known as sarpanch, is reserved for a woman under nationwide affirmative action policies. Yet the male-dominated ethos prevails. The current sarpanch is the wife of a local Jat leader, who put her forward to circumvent the restriction. During an interview with the husband, the official sarpanch sat silently in the doorway, her face covered by a gauzy scarf.

“No, no,” she answered when asked to comment, as she pointed to her husband. “He's the sarpanch. What's the point in talking to me?”

The gang-rape of the 16-year-old girl occurred on Sept. 9 but remained a secret in the village until her father's suicide. Dalits formed a committee to demand justice, and roughly 400 people demonstrated outside the district police headquarters, as well as at the hospital where the father's body was being kept.

“We told them that unless you catch the suspects, we would not take the body,” said a woman named Maya Devi. “We do not have land. We do not have money. What we have is honor. If your honor is gone, you have nothing.”

Since then, the police have arrested eight men - seven of them Jats - who have confessed to the attack. There are discrepancies; the victim says she was abducted outside the village, while the suspects say they attacked her after catching her having a tryst with a married man.

“She was raped against her will,” said B. Satheesh Balan, the district superintendent of police. “There is no doubt.”

Officer Balan said villagers told the police that other local girls had also been gang-raped at the same stone shelter, though no evidence was available. Often, a girl's family will hide a rape rather than be stigmatized in the village. Even sympathizers of the teenage victim doubt she can assimilate back into Dabra.

“It will be difficult on her,” Ms. Devi said. “Now she is branded.”

In an interview at her grandparents' home outside the village, the victim said she believed other suspects remained at large, leaving her at risk. (Female police officers have been posted at the house round-the-clock.) Yet she has actively pushed the police and joined in the protests, despite the warnings by her attackers.

“They threatened me and said they would kill my family if I told anyone,” she said.

Many Dalit girls drop out of school, but the victim was finishing high school. Even in the aftermath of the rape, she took her first-term exams in economics, history and Sanskrit. But she no longer wants to return to the village school and is uncertain about her future.

“Earlier, I had lots of dreams,” she said. “Now I'm not sure I'll be able to fulfill them. My father wanted me to become a doctor. Now I don't think I'll be able to do it.”

Hari Kumar contributed from Dabra.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 28, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India's Traditional Silence.

India's Unassuming Formula One Pioneer

Talking to the soft-spoken, matter-of-fact, unassuming Narain Karthikeyan, it is easy to forget that he is currently India's fastest man.

Narain Karthikeyan is the only Indian in Formula One this season.

It is also easy to forget that Karthikeyan, 35, is a trailblazer for world motorsport, as the first Indian to race in Formula One, the highest level of racing, when he began driving for the Jordan team in 2005.

“I was the first guy from India to be in Formula One, nobody had been to this territory before,” he said in a recent interview. “So it was all inventing it myself. Being a pioneer is always difficult, and I'm glad to have got another chance to race in Formula One.”

After that 2005 season, he spent several seasons in various other series before returning to Formula One last year to race with the HRT team, where he continues this season.

Looking at his results in Formula One, where he has scored points only once - at the U.S. Grand Prix in 2005, when most of the teams did not race because they had dangerous tires - it is also easy to forget that when he raced in the lower series in Europe, he had results to compare with those of such accomplished drivers as the former world champion Jenson Button, with whom he raced in Formula 3 in 1999, when Button scored three victories and Karthikeyan scored two.

He was, in fact, the first Indian to win any racing series in Europe when he won the Formula Ford Festival winter series in 1994.

Formula One is another matter. But Karthikeyan still has the same simple and direct way about him. He said competing in his home race near New Delhi this weekend was for him no different than for Button or Lewis Hamilton, both British drivers at the McLaren Mercedes team, when they go to race at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

“Except that we might not even finish on the points,” he said, alluding to a comparison between his team and the Britons, who could expect to win. “You have to keep yourself motivated, you know the country is supporting you, there are a lot of loyal fans out there. And I hope I can do something special. Last year I was 17th, and hopefully I can do better. That is all I can expect.”

The HRT team is one of the weakest - and newest - in the series. After almost three full racing seasons, it has yet to score a single point. But Karthikeyan says he knows his value as a driver.

“When I put everything together, I am as fast as anyone else,” he said, before adding about India again, “But obviously there are a lot of people watching, and that gets to you a little bit. But as you get older and more experienced, you try to calm that down a little bit.”

Karthikeyan's father raced in rallies, winning the South India Rally seven times, and the boy grew up in Coimbatore, which is the motorsport hub of India, where rally cars and other racing cars are built and prepared. Unlike his peers in Formula One, he did not start in go-karts, which were not available in India. He began in a car series, the Formula Maruti series, where he finished on the podium in his first race.

“I was 16 years old, in this formula of cars created out of 40 horsepower Suzuki engine, very basic and very small,” he said. “I think the top speed was 140k or something. Just basics.”

Since he clearly had talent, he next had to go to Europe to fulfill his ambition to become the first Indian in Formula One. He started in 1992 at Winfield, a top racing school in France that had spawned many French Formula One drivers, including its most successful, the four-time world champion Alain Prost. The competition was fierce, and among those who attended with him that year, Karthikeyan was the only driver who eventually made it to Formula One.

After the Vauxhall Junior series and the Ford series in England, he raced in the Formula Asia series in 1995 and 1996, when he won the series. In 1997, he again raced in England, in Formula Vauxhall, and the following two years in British Formula 3. Spotted by Paul Stewart Racing, the team of the son of the triple world champion Jackie Stewart, he was hired to race for that Formula 3 team in 2000, and he finished fourth in the series.

He then raced in Formula Nippon, in Japan, in 2001 before racing three seasons in the Formula Nissan World Series, in Europe, finishing fourth in 2003.

But racing at all levels requires money from its drivers, and Karthikeyan said it was not easy to persuade Indian companies to pay for a sport so little known in his country. Still, early on he gained the support of the Tata group of companies, and Tata eventually supported his entry into Formula One.

“My first Formula One test was with Jaguar,” he said. “I didn't get the break, and then I tested with Jordan the same year, in 2001, but we needed backing. But in India when you convert that kind of money 60 odd times from the dollar to the rupee, it's a lot of money for India. So people were not used to spending that kind of money, but Tata stood by me and supported my entry into Formula One.”

Tata, based in Mumbai, grew as a global conglomerate at the same time as Karthikeyan's career grew, and it helped him fund his second stint in Formula One as well. The HRT team's other driver is Pedro de la Rosa, a Spaniard who was a similar racing pioneer for his country, beginning in 1999. Then his compatriot Fernando Alonso came along and won the world title twice, in 2005 and 2006.

When asked if he saw himself that way and whether he could see an Indian world champion on the horizon, Karthikeyan was skeptical.

“There is a lot of interest, but I don't know about future world champions,” he said. “But everyone is pushing. It is a very difficult sport.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 27, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Formula One Veers Into Global Politics Again

DELHI - Just when it seemed international politics would not enter back into a Formula One racing weekend until the series visits Bahrain next year - remember the worldwide protestations against the series going to the Gulf nation in April? - political controversy has again struck the paddock, at the Indian Grand Prix, scheduled for Sunday.

This time, the focus is on a single team and not all of Formula One. The team happens to be the best known and one of the best known sports brands in the world: Ferrari. The Italian team's cars raced in the practice session Friday emblazoned with the image of the Italian Navy's flag.

The move was a show of solidarity with two Italian marines being held in India after they mistakenly killed two Indian fishermen, thinking they were pirates attacking an Italian ship.

But showing the flag has sparked outrage in the media here. (It has also produced the only red hot - darker than the color of the famous Ferrari livery - exc itement of the day, in a practice session that confirmed Sebastian Vettel and the Red Bull team as the fastest racers of the moment.)

Stefano Domenicali, the Ferrari team director, had been scheduled to take part in the customary Friday afternoon press conference. He was grilled by both local and foreign media. He refused to provide any detailed answer, other than to say the Italian team was not making a political statement.

It is written in the statues of the International Automobile Federation, the sport's governing body, that the teams must not take part in or make any political or religious statements.

“There was no political intention of this,” said Mr. Domenicali to one Indian journalist, before becoming visibly annoyed with an insistent British journalist who said Ferrari was clearly taking sides in a political matter. “It's not true what you're saying,” Mr. Domenicali said to the journalist.

Immediately after the press conference, th e Ferrari team spokesperson was grilled by the Indian media and others in the paddock, and he too said this was not a political statement. He reminded the journalists that the team has frequently used its cars to express support during times of tragedy, such as when the its two cars raced at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 2001 less than a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The noses of the cars bore black paint. The cars were used to make a similar gesture in Italy after the Japanese tsunami and earthquake.

Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One promoter, when queried by a reporter in the paddock, said that it was not a problem for him to deal with, that the series was not political.

“We'd look at the national sporting authority here to have a look at that,” said Mr. Ecclestone, referring to the Federation of Motor Sports Club of India.

Mr. Ecclestone and all of the Formula One teams were severely criticized in April for running the Bahrain Gran d Prix while a political uprising was underway in that country. The race had been canceled for the same reason last year, but Formula One had decided to race in Bahrain this year partly in order to not be seen bending to political pressure, which could in itself be considered a political statement.

According to The Associated Press, Ferrari's decision to run the cars with the navy flags was hailed by the Italian foreign minister, Guilio Terzi, who tweeted: “Congratulations to Ferrari for displaying the navy's symbol at the India GP. It will show the sailors the whole country is behind them.”

The Italian marines are accused of killing the fishermen in February, while the navy was protecting an Italian cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. The marines were granted bail but must remain in India. Italy has requested they be allowed to return home as the incident took place in international waters.

Just as happened in Bahrain, of course, with Formula One being u nder the spotlight of the international media, a case that would not otherwise have been heard to such an extent around the world has once again received a massive amount of publicity.

Of course, had there been some bigger surprise event, like the only Indian driver in the series - Narain Karthikeyan of the HRT team - setting the fastest lap of the day rather than one of the slowest, which he did, there would have been less talk about sailors…..

Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

Whether it is Communist China or democratic, socialist India, corruption by top politicians seems to follow the same path, use the same techniques and yield the same results - politicians and their family members suddenly become rich as they become powerful.

In India, of course, politicians have followed similar pattern, irrespective of the party they came from. Examples include corruption in the telecommunications industry, the Commonwealth Games, the allocation of coal mining blocks and the illegal mining of iron ore. Allegations about companies promoted by Nitin Gadkari, the president of opposi tion Bharatiya Janata Party and Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, also follow the same patterns.

In “Hunger Stalks My Father's India Long After Starvation Ends,” the Bloomberg reporter Mehul Srivastava returns to his father's village of Auar, in Uttar Pradesh, where villagers once survived on coarse, imported wheat from the United States in the 1950s, to find their situation little improved now.

Mr. Srivastava and his immediate family escaped the plight of many of these villagers thanks to his family's emphasis on education. A “single generation of good nutrition” that he and his cousins experienced separates them from their parents, and catapulted them into the top 10 percent in India for height and health, he wrote. “In Auar, I felt like a giant, stooping through doorways, my feet dangling over the edge of my borrowed cot.”

Time Magazine's special report on India, carried a series of articles that focus ed on the overarching theme-“can the nation recover its magic?” One of the articles, by the author Akash Kapur, argues that the entire country “has been reduced to a giant dumping yard,” with plastic bags, bottles and rubber tires strewn around and the air polluted with chemicals. He writes that the “garbage crisis” is symptomatic of the “nation's troubled engagement with modern capitalism - reflecting a new prosperity and consumer boom, yet a reminder too of the terrible price often expected by that boom.”

Mr. Kapur postulates that if India wants to overcome social, cultural and environmental depravation, it needs to search for a new identity. An alternate model of development will matter deeply not only to India, but also other emerging economies around the world, he notes. “Even in the West, with capitalism in crisis and a sense of old certainties crumbling, India's search has a new salience.”

In Cabinet Reshuffle, a Focus on Youth

In an effort to improve the electoral prospects of the governing United Progressive Alliance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India inducted 22 new  members into his predominantly elderly cabinet on Sunday.

The Congress Party-led coalition government is facing criticism because of multiple corruption charges, a slowing economy, rising public agitation and pending anti-corruption legislation. In recent months the government took steps to streamline the economy and attract foreign investment.

The cabinet reshuffle Sunday is likely to be the biggest push for an image makeover before the 2014 national elections. The new appointees include 7 ministers of cabinet rank, 2 junior ministers with independent portfolios and 13 junior ministers. (Read the full list here, under “Press Comminique,” October 28.) Seven long-time cabinet appointees retired ahead of the shuffle, including external affairs minister S.M. Krishna, 80.

The Co ngress Party seems to be aiming for political balance in states where their political prospects are low, including West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Out of 22, 17 are new inductees and 5 ministers have been promoted to cabinet status.

Yet for all the spectacle, the new-look government was also notable for who was not included: Rahul Gandhi.

For days, Indian analysts have speculated about whether Mr. Gandhi would finally join the government. Instead, Mr. Gandhi, considered the heir to the Congress Party leadership, has apparently decided, for the moment, to continue focusing on party work, rather than jumping into governing.

CNN-IBN, a private news channel quoted Mr. Singh, after the oath ceremony, saying “I always wanted to Rahul to be in the cabinet, but he wants to strengthen the party. This is hopefully the last cabinet reshuffle.”

The new lineup represents an attempt by Mr. Singh and the Congress Party President, Sonia Gandhi, to build some posi tive momentum for what remains of the decidedly bumpy term of the current governing coalition. Most analysts say that Congress is staring at significant losses unless it can somehow show tangible progress in the coming months.

Among the change of portfolios, the new foreign minister is Salman Khursheed; he was the law minister till recently. Several young and junior ministers were also given new independent portfolios, including Jyotirditya Madhavrao Sciendia to the power ministry, Sachin Pilot to corporate affairs and Jitender Singh to youth affairs and sports.

It is expected that the Congress party will make some changes among party leadership ranks soon.