Another PIL for scrapping coal block allocations

Another PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking cancellation of all the coal blocks allotted to private companies since 1993 and a court-monitored CBI probe into the alleged scam involving over Rs 1 trillion.

The petition has been filed by former Secretaries, including Cabinet Secretary TSR Subramanian, and Common Cause, an NGO, alleging that the Centre had gone for “massive allocation of the scarce natural resource of coal to a few select private companies at no cost in a completely arbitrary and non-transparent manner causing a huge loss to the public exchequer running into tens of lakhs of crores of rupees.”

Among the other petitioners are former Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami, former Union Secretaries Ramaswamy Iyer and Sushil Tripathi and Admirals (retd) RH Tahiliani and L Ramdas, who has been the Navy Chief.

Either a court-monitored probe by the CBI or a Special Investigation Team (SIT) was necessary to “unearth the full magnitude of the coal scam which involves not only the Ministry of Coal but also the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Steel, Ministry of Power and governments of various states where the coal blocks are located,” the PIL said.

On September 14, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Coal Secretary on a similar petition. The apex court has sought details on various aspects to ascertain as to whether any guidelines had been violated in the allocations.

Since 1993, through the process of screening committee, successive governments had been allocating coal blocks for captive use of the manufacturers of iron and steel, power and cement. This process was highly arbitrary and resulted in a windfall gain to private companies, the PIL said.

The Coal Ministry announced a competitive bidding policy in June 2004, but continued with the non-transparent process of the screening committee “which was marred by multiple illegalities, corruption and favouritism. The screening committee recommended the allocation of coal blocks without comparative evaluation of the inter se merits among applicants, which is apparent from the minutes of the meetings of screening committee,” the petitioners said.

Of the 250 coal blocks allotted since 2004, 101 were for steel companies, 97 for power, 10 for cement and 37 for “commercial” use. The term commercial was apparently meant to violate the statutorily mandated “captive” concept and thereby provide ample scope to private parties to sell coal for windfall profits in violation of laws, they contended. 

The petitioners include former Cabinet Secretary TSR Subramanian, former Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami, former Union Secretaries Ramaswamy Iyer and Sushil Tripathi and Admirals (retd) RH Tahiliani and L Ramdas.

Source:- Thursday, November 15, 2012, Chandigarh, India, P. 2

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20121115/nation.htm#2

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