-The Hindu The Bharatiya Janata Party and other opposition parties are crying foul over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s alleged involvement in the coal blocks allocation scam but the BJP-led Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan governments themselves were among the strong opponents to a transparent process of competitive bidding, and pitched for continuing the policy of allocation of coal blocks. Documents with The Hindu show that the BJP governments were against putting in place an...

-Live Mint The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the allotment of captive Coal Mines is a scathing narrative on the mis-governance and mismanagement of the country’s natural resources. As early as 2004, the government realized that the then prevailing system of allotment of mines was not transparent. An internal debate kicked off with the coal secretary pushing for a 28 June 2004 deadline for reforms in the...

-The Economic Times The three reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on coal, ultra-mega power projects and airports, playing out in the public discourse as major indictments of corruption and of the government, serve only to spread confusion and convert infrastructure building into a political battleground. The reports are ill-informed by commercial logic, sometimes deficient in factual detail. However, since they bear the authority of a constitutional body, the...

-The Hindu One of the first principles that students of auditing are taught is that auditors are watchdogs and not bloodhounds. The Manmohan Singh government would have us believe, in the wake of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s reports first in the 2G case and now in the coal mining issue, that this basic principle is being violated by the incumbent CAG. Why should the CAG comment on the...

-The Hindu The Comptroller and Auditor-General’s report on the allocation of coal blocks, reviews how it took seven-and-half years to move the allocation procedure for captive coal blocks from a discretionary procedure to competitive bidding that was demonstrably transparent. It turns out that the process began within six weeks of UPA-I coming to power in 2004. Ironically, the amendment to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) (MMDR) Act rules for auction...