Coal scam: Narendra Modi lobbied for KSK, Shinde for Lanco

Coalgate is fast turning out to be the great leveller in the Indian politics. There is no politician whose hands have not been blackened due to the association with coal block allocation. No, not even that of Narendra Modi, the doyen of governance.

According to a report in the Economic Times today, the government has submitted before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament a series of letters that were written by politicians to the screening committee lobbying for various companies.

The screening committee had officials from the coal ministry, railways ministry and various state governments as members. The committee was responsible for vetting the applications and proposals submitted by the companies and the governments of states where the captive coal mine to be allocated situated.

[caption id=“attachment_992911” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] . There is no politician whose hands have not been blackened due to the association with coal block allocation. No, not even that of Narendra Modi, the doyen of governance. AFP[/caption]

The committee played a pivotal role in the block allocation and so was the nerve centre of lobbying.

The letters submitted to the PAC are written between 2004 and 2008, says the ET report, adding none of them, including those from the NDA-ruled states, however, suggested or argued for competitive bidding of the blocks.

As per the report, Modi lobbied for KSK Energy’s project in Chhattisgarh, KSK Mahanadi Power, and state-owned Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation.

Of this, it is the KSK project that is likely to turn out to be damning for Modi because of the controversies surrounding the company.

According to a report in the_Times of India_ in 2012, KSK Energy Ventures was also linked to controversial DMK leader S Jagathrakshakan, a former minister in the UPA government. It has been alleged Jagathrakshakan’s company JR Power Gen Pvt Ltd was just five-day-old when it entered into a pact with the Puducherry Industrial Promotion Development and Investment Corporation to apply for coal block.

Within months after it got a coal block, JR Power sold 51 percent stake to KSK Energy, it has been alleged. KSK Energy has, however, denied any wrong doing and said the stake was not bought from the existing holders but through fresh subscription .

Modi lobbied for allocating coal to KSK Mahanadi because his state was supposed to get electricity from the project, says today’s ET report. The Guajrat chief minister has written two letters to the prime minister to get coal blocks allocated to KSK Mahanadi and Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation.

Another company which got support from heavyweights is Lanco Infratech, the report says. And for this the lobbying was done by none other than Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath and Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde. Nath was commerce minister at that time and Shinde power minister.

Others who sent such letters include, Naveen Patnaik for the Tata Group and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal for GVK Power.

However, the most interesting instance is that of Congress MP Vijay Darda, who lobbied for his own family’s Lokmat Group, which was setting up a power plant in Yavatmal district in Maharashtra. According to the ET report, he had even met the prime minister to press for allocation of blocks to his group.

A parliamentary panel had recently said that the loot of the natural resources happened over 1993-2010, which effectively means all prominent political parties have been part of the malpractices.

This is why we shouldn’t expect the probe into the coalgate to see a logical conclusion. Nobody apart from the common people would want the CBI, or any investigative agency for that matter, to get to the bottom of the scam.

Read the entire ET report here .