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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Welcome folly: CAG's flawed 'coal scam' report serves a purpose

Welcome folly: CAG's flawed 'coal scam' report serves a purpose

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published Published on Mar 29, 2012   modified Modified on Mar 29, 2012
-The Economic Times

With its draft report alleging a coal scam, duly leaked to the media, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is making a habit of choosing sensation over sense. Its allegation of loss to the exchequer in allocation of 2G spectrum colours the public discourse on the subject, but was discarded by the CBI court in the telecom case as the basis for a formal charge. 

Its assumption that the civil aviation ministry should have privileged ill-run Air India over the travel requirements of globalising Indians was transparently laughable. However, this time around, its coal report does serve to turn the spotlight on a mindlessly flawed policy that has been given the clothing of law: the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, which restricts mining of coal to the public sector. 

The CAG's assumption that the government should have auctioned off coal blocks is logical. But that would violate the law. The CAG is free to fantasise on the riches auctions could have yielded. The government is constrained to act within the remit of the law, which was amended thrice, in 1976, in 1993 and 1996, to permit allocation of coal mines for private companies to produce iron and steel, power and cement but only for captive purposes. 

With this ridiculous restriction in place, the only bidders in any open auction conducted by the government for coal blocks would be a clutch of public enterprises. The CAG errs on many counts: it is not its job to question policy; applying a fixed margin to coal extracted over decades makes no sense; using domestic lowgrade price as a benchmark, instead of the much higher global price, is arbitrary; expecting 90% of the reserves of every mine to be recoverable ignores historical experience. 

Its biggest error is that it ignores the blackest crime in coal: allowing state monopoly to continue, leading to coal shortage and resultant power shortage in this country with nearly 100 billion tonnes of coal reserves. 

For all its faults, the report should serve to focus public attention on the urgent need to abolish coal nationalisation and open up the sector to private enterprise in mining, beneficiation, trade and transport. That would be a welcome fallout of yet another flawed CAG report.


The Economic Times, 29 March, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/editorial/welcome-folly-cags-flawed-coal-scam-report-serves-a-purpose/articleshow/12449238.cms


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