Indias coal mining scandal 2012

The coal mining controversy or coalgate scandal has gripped the nations attention for the past few weeks and has highlighted the irregularities in the handling of the nations coal deposits. It has garnered international media attention and the main Opposition party in India has called for the Prime Minister to resign over the allegations. But what is the full story of the Indian coal mining scandal of 2012? India is one of the largest producers of coal with regions such as Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand being coal-rich. The state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) is the only organisation selling coal in India. When the UPA government came to power in 2004 and was planning to increase India's power capacity, it found that the CIL would not be able to produce enough coal required for the power plants. So, the government started allotting more mines to both private and state-owned players, to help them generate power for their own use. The problem started when the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India accused that the Indian government, now led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was providing the nations coal reserves to private as well as state-run organisations in an arbitrary manner rather than following the protocol of auctioning them publicly and providing it to the highest bidder. A draft report from government auditors that was leaked in March 2012 estimated that the loss to India between 2004 and 2010 because of the selling of coal deposits without open bidding was about $210bn (133bn).

The CAG report is critical of the allocations on three main counts:

1. It states that the Screening Committee did not follow a transparent and objective method while making recommendations for allocation of coal blocks. 2. It observes that competitive bidding could have been introduced in 2006 by amending the administrative instructions in vogue instead of going through a prolonged legal examination of the issue which delayed the decision making process. 3. It mentions that the delay in introducing competitive bidding meant that a large number of private companies benefitted from the existing process 4. According to the governments main Opposition party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress led government has arbitrarily and discretionarily allocated as many as 142 coal blocks to private entrepreneurs most of whom were traders and not actual users. 5. Several allotments were made without the recommendation of the State governments and that the government did not implement a competitive bidding policy so that 142 successful entrepreneurs could be arbitrarily selected, according to Arun Jaitley, leader of the Opposition party BJP. 6. Deepening the impact of the loss to the government, it emerged that 58 companies have allegedly failed to develop their coal fields after winning licenses without proper bidding. 7. The Screening Committee mechanism was a farce as officials in the government influenced the decision, Jaitley said. 8. Some of the Ministers of State did not come out with any credit. Their role in these allotments appears to be dubious, he added. The whole process of allocation of coal blocks stinks. 9. The BJP has called for the PM to resign over the scandal saying Singh was heading the coal ministry for five out of the eight years when alleged misappropriate sales occurred. 10. The call has left the Parliament in a deadlock since Tuesday, August 21. 11. But the government and Singh have vehemently denied any wrongdoing. 12. Finance Minister P Chidambaram has also defended the government. He termed the CAG report as flawed by saying that if coal has not been mined, there is no question of gain or loss and the notion of this presumptive loss is flawed. 13. The coal referred to by the CAG and the Opposition party is still unexploited and the policy for allocation of the coal blocks has been the same since 1993, Chidambaram said. 14. But the governments defense that -- "the loss can arise only if one tonne of coal is taken out of mother earth and sold at some unacceptable price" -- has been slammed by its critics.

15. The coalgate scandal has also caused widespread anger among many Indian people and hundreds of anti-corruption protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against Indian PM Manmohan Singh. 16. Anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal and supporters of Team Anna were detained on Sunday, August 26 when they were marching towards the residences of the PM and Congress and BJP party members on the issue of the coal mining controversy. They were released later on the same day. 17. The Delhi Police used tear gas and water cannons on the crowd to prevent them from entering highsecurity areas in the capital. 18. Although the fury over the coal mining controversy and lack of transparency continues to grow, the government has called for an end to the Parliament deadlock. 19. In his speech to the Parliament on Monday, August 27, 2012, Singh said the allegations of impropriety are without basis and unsupported by the facts. 20. A day later, on August 28, 2012, Indian National Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi toughened her stance against the allegations. Gandhi accused the Opposition party of holding the nation to ransom over the coal blocks allegations against the Congress-led government's ministers. 21. The Prime Minister's Office has said that it will take action against the defaulters. The Prime Minister said that there is no question of him resigning from his post over the issue. 22. As the Parliament deadlock continues and as the Opposition wants an independent inquiry into the allocations, the government is looking to de-allocate 58 out of 142 coal blocks -- 30 of these coal blocks were given to private sector firms while 28 were allocated to state-run companies. 23. The coal mining controversy is the latest scandal to hit the Congress-led government in its latest term. Previously there have been allegations of corruption against UPA government ministers around the 2012 Commonwealth Games as well as the telecom licensing 2G spectrum scandal. 24. The final recommendation of the inter-ministerial committee which is reviewing the coal blocks issued since 1993 is likely to reach the Coal Secretary by Monday, September 10, 2012. 25. Indian Police have carried out raids across 10 cities as part of the investigation into the alleged misappropriation in the allocation of coalfields. Government officials and company employees too are under investigation.

What is coal block allocation?

Allocation of coal blocks to private companies for captive use (meaning using to fulfill a specific need for the country) commenced in 1993, after the Coal Mines (Nationalization) Act, 1973 was amended.

This was done with the objective of attracting private investments in specified end uses. As the economy grew in size, the demand for coal also grew and it became evident that Coal India Ltd. alone would not be able to meet the growing demand. Since 1993, allocation of captive coal blocks was being done on the basis of recommendations made by an inter-Ministerial Screening Committee which also had representatives of State governments, according to Singh. transparent coal block allocation. But in the wake of the CAG report alleging misappropriation, the coal mining controversy has become to be known as the "mother of all scams" costing the Indian exchequer hundreds of billions of pounds. Taking into account the increasing number of applicants for coal block allocation, the government, in 2003, set out guidelines for

The NRHM Scam in Uttar Pradesh

That Uttar Pradesh trails the nation on all health indicators doesnt surprise anyone. The Infant Mortality Rate in the state is 69 against 55for the country. The Maternal Mortality Rate in the state is 440 against the national figure of 254.The health infrastructure in the state is woefully inadequate. The state is short of 5823 Sub-centers, 700 Primary Health Centers and 582 Community Health Centers. A large number of existing medical facilities were there only in name as only a third of the Sub-Centers had have a functional labor-room while districts like Shravasti had no functional labor rooms. The manpower situation looks equally bleak. Uttar Pradesh needs 515 Obstetricians & Gynecologists at CHCs but only 131 doctors were in place, leading to a shortfall of 384 medical professionals. The state needs a total of 7295 nurses and mid-wives but the state only has half the number. These figures would have raised an alarm in any other state of the country, forcing the government to get into a rapid response mode. But Uttar Pradesh under Mayaraj is something else. The National Rural Health Mission provided the Uttar Pradesh government with the resources to bring Uttar Pradesh out of the hole it found itself in after 22 years of neglect.

They chose to swindle the money instead

The truth was carefully kept under wraps. That was until October 27, 2010 when the first bullet was fired. And the bullet killed Lucknow Chief Medical Officer Dr Vinod Arya. The morningwalk killers came back again on April 2, 2011 and this time another Chief Medical Officer, Dr VM Singh, was killed in cold blood. It was evident that somebody somewhere was trying to hide the truth about the rot in the healthcare system. The two murders had left a blood-trail and this trail was leading right to the doorstep of Chief Minister Mayawati. The skeletons in the cupboard were suddenly beginning to tumble out of the cupboard.

Congress General Secretary Shri Rahul Gandhi started the fight to unearth the truth of the NRHM scam as he filed the first application under the Right to Information Act in Lucknow on April 29, 2011. This was the beginning of the Youth Congress long battle to seek the truth. Rahul Gandhi Fires First Salvo through RTI Application The IYC Cadres Expose Corruption At Ground Level in UP The Youth Congress decided to carry out a social audit to understand the scope of the scam even as the state government in Lucknow was making an all out effort to stop the truth from coming out. Youth Congress activists realized that they had to plan each step carefully to ensure that they would be able to cut through the maze created by a corrupt system to ensure that the truth never came out. The Youth Congress identified a team of activists who would lead the social audit on the ground and the first round of training was held in Hyderabad in September 2011. This was followed by another round of training for ground level social auditors in New Delhi. Youth Congress activists had filed an RTI application across 25 districts of the state to identify the blocks which had reported the highest spending under NRHM. Only 12 district administrations responded to the RTI; Balrampur, Shravasti, Barabanki, Amethi, Rae Bareli, Lucknow, Hardoi, Sitapur, Ramabai Nagar, Kanpur, Kanshi Ram Nagar and Aligarh. The team identified the 12 top-spending blocks of these 12 districts and started to dig deep. The ground level operations started on November 15, 2011 where Youth Congress activists carried out extensive field checks on about 500 people who were listed out as beneficiaries under NRHM schemes in each of these 12 blocks. What came out startled even the most vocal critics of Mayaraj and surprised the IYC activists. We knew there was corruption, large scale corruption in the implementation of NRHM, but the scale of corruption took our breath away, said Youth Congress Secretary, Jitendra Baghel, who led the field investigations.

Our field checks disclosed that a very large number of people who were liste d out as beneficiaries in government records did not get any support from the government at all. There were cases where women were listed as beneficiaries under the Janani Suraksha Yojna when they were not even pregnant during the period mentioned in government records, says Baghel. Beneficiaries under the NRHM schemes are issued bearer cheques for the government and in a large number of cases these cheques were given to people who did not exist in villages that were stated to be living in. There were few cases in which women who had delivered babies during the period were give financial support but a majority of them stated that they had to give a part of the Rs 1,400 they had received under NRHM as bribes to local health officials. In almost all cases, medicines were given to the patients only on paper while in reality, almost all patients had to buy their medicines from the open market. None of the mothers we met during the social audit were given any ante-natal nutritional support that is a part of the scheme, added Shri Baghel. The Youth Congress team then confronted the officials with these facts and their response was hardly surprising. Baghel said, In Aligarh, we had a social audit which was attended by the Chief Medical Officer. About 300 women came for the social audit. When these women confronted the officials with facts, the officials started to allege that the social audit had been politically stage managed. Problem is, it is difficult to stage manage pregnancies when women are not pregnant. Baghel feels, like many others who have been following the NRHM money trail, that what they have unearthed is just the tip of the iceberg. We have only been able to conduct a social audit only in 12 blocks across the state and these were districts where the administration had replied to our RTI applications because they had some kind of documentation. We strongly feel that that the situation in the other districts could be much worse, he added. The Youth Congress activists have continued their pursuit for the truth. Only January 12, 2012, the Youth Congress filed an RTI application to know what action has been taken in cases where frauds were identified during the social audit. The government is now looking for answers which would be very hard to find.

While Youth Congress activists were carrying out their social audit in the villages of Uttar Pradesh, a certain Babu Singh Kushwaha, the prime accused in the NRHM scam and erstwhile minister in Mayawati government who was ostensibly dismissed by the UP Chief Minister , was last heard seeking votes for the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party which had helped the BSP form the government in the past. Partners in power have now become partners in crime. Even after this story was submitted for publication, the scale and scope of the scam in the implementation of the National Rural Health Mission in UP is acquiring new, additional dimensions, with fresh arrests and raids by CBI teams almost every day.