The gamble, which seeks to avoid putting Jet Airways into court-administered bankruptcy, will be put to a shareholder vote on February 21.

Although the stake-sale plan has been known for a while, the official explanation so far was that Zee wanted a partner to become a -global media-tech player.-

Walmart Inc.'s splashy acquisition last year of Flipkart Online Services Pvt., the homegrown e-tailer giving Amazon.com Inc. a solid run for its money, might have given the impression of a two-horse race.

The problem is that as 2015 was ending, Jet was earning only half a rupee more in revenue per seat kilometer than IndiGo.

Their first move, unveiled Thursday, is an innocuous - even laudable - infusion of 410 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) into troubled state-run lenders, bumping up this fiscal year's outlay for bank recapitalization by 63 percent to 1.06 trillion rupees.

After IL&FS blew up, the funding market froze, and the credit industry cried mommy, begging the central bank to act as the lender of the last resort.

Rajan strongly opposed the idea of handing supervision of the government securities market to the stock-market regulator.

India is home to nine of the world's 10 most-polluted cities. Beyond the health risks, the smog crisis threatens to erode competitiveness just when the country is starting to boast of rapid improvements in its ease-of-doing-business rankings.

If the standoff with the government gets any worse, a test of the central bank's dire warning could come soon.

Individual investors started returning to collective investment vehicles after the 2014 general elections, hoping for a reset to an economy held back by corruption scandals and policy paralysis. They doubled down after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's shock November 2016 currency ban pulled 86 percent of people's cash into bank accounts.

Now that the government is backing its liabilities, IL&FS presumably can survive on a thinner layer of equity than it would have otherwise needed.

The world's biggest repository of citizen information, India's Aadhaar database, is now beyond the private sector's reach. That was the verdict last week by the country's top court, which refused to strike down the entire biometric-based system as unconstitutional. Now only the government can use it, and that's a problem.

Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) Ltd. had 30 years to spawn an Indian clone of Macquarie Group: a powerhouse of finance, investments, asset ownership and risk management. Instead, Ravi Parthasarathy, the founder who stepped down recently as chairman, went on to build an unwieldy, debt-fueled empire that has now crumbled.

It's important for the Reserve Bank of India to join forces with the Securities and Exchange Board of India to deal with the fallout. Their urgent first step must be an emergency bailout of IL&FS, before it does more harm.

IL&FS and its associates have $12.5 billion in debt, of which $500 million is due over the next six months.