Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Das, creator and ex-head of the Confederation of Indian Industry; and Pradip Baijal, a re-
tired senior bureaucrat who worked for Radia's firm.
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Coalgate
The coal scandal - dubbed Coalgate by the media - began with a leaked draft report
in March 2012 from the CAG that alleged the government had lost Rs 10.6 lakh crores
($210bn) by allocating mining licences to around 100 private and public sector companies
without competitive tendering. This focused on the years 2004- 2009, when Manmohan
Singh held the coal minister's portfolio. Licences had been allocated since coal mining was
opened to the private sector in 1993. Competitive bidding was first proposed in 2004, but
was not implemented till 2010. Five months after its first report, the CAG cut the figure to
Rs 1.86 lakh crore ($37bn), based on an assessment of the gains that could have been made
by private sector companies that were allotted 57 coal blocks, including nationally signific-
ant names such as Tata, Reliance (Anil Ambani's group), and the Jindal family-controlled
to boost serious power shortages, was that many of the companies had failed to start min-
ing and instead sat on the assets, waiting for their value to rise. Some companies had filed
inaccurate information and were not even eligible to be awarded captive mines or capable
of doing so.
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The CAG said that a screening committee of officials that allotted coal blocks was re-
Congress fought back by arguing that states ruled by the BJP such as Rajasthan, Jharkhand
and Madhya Pradesh had opposed competitive bidding. The coal ministry cancelled many
of the allocations, but the controversy expanded. The CBI investigated the claims and
began by registering charges against relatively small companies. In May 2013, there were
allegations of a cover-up by the law minister (who had to resign), and by officials in the
prime minister's office, who were apparently trying to protect the prime minister's reputa-
tion by influencing the drafting of CBI documents to be presented to the Supreme Court.
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In June 2013, Naveen Jindal, head of one of his family's businesses and a Congress mem-
ber of parliament, was accused, along with a former minister of state for coal, of fraud and
corruption in the allocation of a coal licence for Jindal Steel & Power.
This illustrated how, once investigations begin into a sector of Indian business, all sorts
of potentially dubious and allegedly corrupt links emerge. Jindal, a Delhi socialite and polo
player, was well connected with Congress leaders, so it was significant that the CBI felt
free to investigate him. The CBI later filed a case suggesting that Kumar Mangalam Birla,
chairman of the respected Aditya Birla group, had met a top coal ministry official and
wrongfully persuaded him, after seeing the prime minister, to allocate a coal block in Orissa
