In 1972, the US President Richard Nixon sent burglars in the
office of the rival party situated at Watergate to get some classified
information. To his dismay, the operation got busted and ultimately the
President had to resign from his post. He is the only President in the history
of United States of America to have resigned from the post of President. But a
legacy was created simultaneously in the name of the scam which due to its
scalability gets a place in the scams worldwide to have such a big impact. The
suffix “gate” is used hitherto for all scams of such scale. The Coalgate scam,
2G scam are the scams which were awarded the title of “gate scams” due to their
large scalability. The coal gate scam, one of the largest so far exemplifies
the capabilities of wrongly drafted legislations to cause losses of such a huge
scale to the economy of a country. The estimated loss of 1.86 lac cr is
sufficient enough to meet the basic demands of many small countries around the
world. But whether the loss estimated by CAG and shown by the media was really
a loss to the exchequer or was just another attempt to create a sensation and
unrest in the world’s largest democracy. In 1973, the Coal mines act gave
responsibility to the States over their respective coal mines. In 1992, a
screening committee was formed which involved the coal minister and the seven
member states accountable for captive coal auctioning.
Well, the news aired in 2012 which said that the decision of
government to give coal blocks to private and public companies without the
auction caused a loss of 1.86 lac cr rupees. Nowhere in the news was it
mentioned that it was a potential loss which was to occur over a period of 100
years. Another claim made by the news reports referring the CAG report and accusing
the government was to have given the companies an advantage of “windfall gains”.
Though the then PM and the coal minister rebutted the claims stating that the
profits made by the companies were anyhow taxable.
The assumption based on which the loss was estimated is also
a point of debate as the coal mines that were auctioned, are in the remote
places, are the hardest ones to extract coal from which makes the cost of
production pretty high and reduces the estimated loss to a pretty much less
scale.
Though the idea of giving coal mines without auction was not
right and makes the screening committee responsible for the scam, but the whole
exercise has put up a question on the role of today’s generation of media in
explaining the facts related to a news. Is it their deliberate tendency to
create a sensation among the masses and their willing preference towards it
rather than creating a true awareness or is it just a mere chance that they
missed out these facts of the very CAG report they held as their reference.
#imadethisup:D:D:D
