Ek Tha Tiger: The other side of the coal scam - daily.bhaskar.com - 0 views
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kit pieta on 28 Aug 12"I've spent the past few days reading a couple of page-turners that I recommend strongly to every Indian who cares about her country: the CAG's audit report on coal block allocations, and a new report released by Greenpeace, titled 'How Coal-Mining is Trashing Tigerland'. Both are freely available online, at the CAG and the Greenpeace websites respectively. Till now, the media has focused primarily on the CAG report. But you have to read both together to get the full picture about the implications of coalgate. The CAG's audit report makes three things amply clear: one, in the last seven years, the government of India has given a major push to coal-based power; two, a lot of private players have made a lot of money out of coal, and more through speculation than by actually producing coal; three, the office of our beloved incorruptible prime minister was right in the thick of coalgate, having chosen to avoid a transparent process of competitive bidding - opting instead to award coal blocks through a 'screening committee' - despite being advised by its own legal experts that a competitive bidding process would not contravene the existing mining laws. Yes, the corruption in the coal block allocation is mind-boggling. I mean, can someone even explain what Rs1,800,000,000,000 means - on a human, as opposed to a cosmic, scale? But corruption is only half the coalgate story - the half that's easier to tell, because it doesn't challenge any of our assumptions. "