The chief auditor’s role was traditionally as dull as it sounds: a post for cautious, elderly men, who churned out dry reports that almost nobody read. But Rai arrived in a city swirling with intrigue. New Delhi was being turned into a construction site as preparations raced ahead for the Commonwealth Games in 2010, an event designed to showcase India’s economic rise which soon turned into a corruption-ridden fiasco. At the time, Manmohan Singh’s government was also busily handing out telecoms and mining licences to large industrial houses in circumstances that reeked of favouritism. Dozens of
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