Business
With auctions, corruption is disappearing from India: Jaitley
New Delhi, March 17
Corruption is disappering
owing to the way the government is managing the allocation of the
country's natural resources, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said citing
the on-going auctions of spectrum and coal mines whose earlier
allotments were cancelled by the Supreme Court.
"Corruption is
disappearing from the Indian dictionary, if you see spectrum, coal,"
Jaitley told the Lok Sabha in his reply to the debate on his first full
union budget presented last month.
Addressing an intervention by a
Congress member, the finance minister said: "In spectrum, you brought
in a host of cases, in coal...all the corruption was caught by the
Supreme Court, the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General).
Referring
to the former prime minister in this connection, Jaitley said that
"Manmohan Singh in his first two months in office in 2004 had said coal
blocks should be auctioned, but till 2014, nothing had been done".
"Today
because of this faulty decision, we have a situation in which the
former PM has been caught. In future, there should not be a situation
in which an ex-PM is summoned by court."
In fact, in a move
designed to be doubly sure about coal allocations this time around, the
government is re-examining the e-auction of coal blocks won by Balco,
Jindal Steel and Power (JSPL) and BS Ispat.
JSPL was the
successful bidder for Gare Palma IV 2 and Gare Palma IV 3 mines, Balco
successfully bid Gare Palma IV/1, and BS Ispat bagged Marki Mangli III
mine.
The central government has asked for a review of the
bidding process of the mines by the nominated authority, which has
published the results of only 8 out of 13 mines that have been
auctioned.
The bids for the five undeclared blocks closed in five
to eight rounds, while difference between the opening price and
closing price was much lower than other blocks, a coal ministry source
told IANS on Tuesday.
For instance in case of the Brinda and
Sasai block, bidding opened at Rs.1,802 per tonne and closed at
Rs.1,804 per tonne. Similarly, bidding for the Meral mine opened at
Rs.725 a tonne and closed at Rs.727 a tonne.