The spat between CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta and Petroleum Minister Veerappa Moily on natural gas pricing continues. Dasgupta on Tuesday produced documents of the CCEA decision on fixing the price of the natural gas to allege that Moily was telling lies on the actual decided price.
Moily had on June 27, after the CCEA meeting, said the new price would be US $8.4 per mmbtu (million metric British thermal units). later, on July 12, the Petroleum Minister detracted from his statement saying the price could be around $6.8
Releasing the CCEA documents and his letter to the Prime Minister to the media, Dasgupta alleged, “Moily is lying and Finance Minister Chidambaram is playing fraud to mislead the people of the country by trying to underplay the quantum of increase in price.”
Urging Manmohan Singh to reconsider the decision to raise the price of natural gas, the CPI leader said the increase of price should be kept in abeyance until the issues were debated with all stakeholders. The CCEA documents show that the average price of the natural gas was decided to be $8.42 per mmbtu.
Pointing out Moily’s different versions on the price of the natural gas decided by the CCEA, Dasgupta wrote to PM that this “is a sad commentary on your Government that the Petroleum Minister is making these self-contradictory statements on an issue of such vital importance.”
“What concerns me even more is that these statements are not made out of ignorance but with a sinister design to confuse issues and to mislead the public debate,” he said.
“I am also constrained to point out the dubious role being played by the Finance Minister in the entire exercise. The Finance Ministry had recommended a price even higher than the Rangarajan formula. While Rangarajan formula yields a price of $8.4 per mmbtu from April 2014, the Finance Ministry had suggested a price of $10.92, as brought out in page 18 of the CCEA note. Needless to say, the Finance Ministry did not make any comment on how the additional subsidy will be financed if the price were to be pegged at $10.92 or even at the level of $8.4,” said Dasgupta.
“The Finance Minister, who has to make provision for subsidy in the Budget, made a statement that subsidy implications will be dealt with later while price revision will be given now. While making a decision, views of both producers and consumers, have to be appropriately balanced. While the views of producers like Reliance Industries limited (RIl) have been considered, the impact on the consumers, the power sector and the fertiliser industry, and eventually the common people, has been omitted. This is a huge abdication of responsibility by the Finance Minister,” said the CPI leader.
Dasgupta reiterated the move to increase the price of the natural gas was meant to provide super profits of Rs81,000 crore to RIl and to cause increase in fertilizer prices by Rs6,000 per metric tonne and Rs2 increase in the cost of power per unit. He also urged the Prime Minister to fix responsibility on RIl for the huge shortfall of production of natural gas from KG Basin.