Having faced the heat of the Opposition in Parliament on the missing files related to coal blocks allocation, Coal Ministry officials have been put on search mode to “locate” the said files as according to sources privy to developments within the ministry, minister Sriprakash Jaiswal is said to have held a late night meeting with his top officials on Tuesday over the matter.
Sources however told The Pioneer that leave alone the files, even minutes of the meetings which took place during 1993 and 2004 for allotting coal blocks are nowhere to be found.
In fact it has been alleged that these minutes were never prepared in the first place as during the 1990s and even till the early 2000, very few companies came forward to seek coal blocks and the number of entities which were given reserves could be counted on fingertips, so no serious efforts were reportedly made to maintain records of those blocks allotment meetings. The blocks during this period were given through a screening committee presided over by the Coal Secretary. It is now being alleged that the missing minutes are of these very meetings of the screening committee.
Incidentally sources with direct knowledge of the developments said that only after the Government started giving out lists of identified coal blocks that companies started evincing interest in seeking reserves and subsequently corporate response surged from 2005 onwards. Prior to this, mainly in the early 1990s, Government used to ask companies to come forward and identify the blocks on their own, which generated poor response, sources informed.
As far as the missing files are concerned, sources informed that even if these are untraceable, their copies could easily be obtained from the CAG office or from other related state-owned entities of the ministry like Coal India ltd (CIl). Interestingly as reported by this paper on July 19, the Coal Ministry had formed an eight-member committee under its Additional Secretary, to review reasons behind non-availability of files related to the allocation of the specific coal blocks which the CBI is currently investigating, and take adequate action to locate them.
The panel having representatives from the ministries of steel and power apart from senior officials of the Coal Ministry as well as from CIl, has been mandated to meet on a weekly basis and give regular updates to the Government. However with Jaiswal failing to give a clear response to BJP leader Arun Jaitley’s pointed query in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday to categorically state that no file after 2005 had gone missing, the entire exercise of searching for missing files may prove to be an eyewash, as this lends an air of ambiguity on the entire issue, sources said.