NEW DELHI — India's Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal resigned Friday, Indian television channels reported, but the government spokeswoman said she could not confirm this. Spokeswoman Neelam Kapur told Reuters she was trying to verify the media reports. The prime minister's office declined to comment, while Bansal could not be contacted. Bansal was widely expected to step down after police arrested his nephew last week for accepting a bribe in a case that was seen as embarrassing to the Congress party-led government which has been battered by a series of corruption scandals. Opposition demands for the resignation of Bansal and another minister caught up in a separate scandal had paralyzed parliament and forced the government this week to shelve, for now, planned economic reforms as well as a flagship program to give cheap food to 70 percent of the population. Congress president Sonia Gandhi met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Friday even as the party said it would not "spare anybody mired in corruption," the clearest indication yet that Bansal's exit was imminent and might happen even before a Congress core group meeting to be held Saturday. Sources in the country's top investigative agency, the CBI, have said that the agency will soon interrogate Bansal to follow up on allegations of his involvement in the bribery case. The sources said the agency is acting on "grave suspicions." Bansal's name has allegedly been mentioned in several of over a 1,000 phone calls that the CBI has tracked over the last few months in its investigation of alleged bribery and corruption in the railways. — Agencies
