The government was once again rapped by the Supreme Court on Tuesday for not giving details of each coal block it had allotted since 1995, saying its latest affidavit was completely opposite to what the Centre had said earlier.
“This affidavit is completely opposite to what you have told the court,” a bench of Justices R.M. Lodha, M.B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph told attorney general G.E. Vahanvati as he submitted that contents of the affidavits were not at variance with what he had told the court on an earlier hearing. “This is not the way. You have been filing counter affidavit after counter affidavit,” the court told Vahanvati in an expression of disappointment. The court said the latest affidavit said that 172 blocks were identified by the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute Ltd. “but we don’t have the details on which block went to whom”, the bench said. “We want to know out of 172 blocks how many went to government companies and how many to private companies,” he said. “The legality of the allocation (of coal blocks) has to be justified by you. It can’t be abstracts. Explain the position coal block-wise which you have given in your break-up. You give us in a tabulated form so that at one glance we can know (which) coal block was allocated to whom and ... whether any of these were in the leases of (PSU) Coal India Limited,” the bench told the Centre. The SC asked the A-G for details of 218 coal block allocations by the government and told him to explain block wise allotment of the natural resource. The A-G, who found it difficult to respond to the queries to court’s satisfaction, appeared annoyed and sought time to place all the documents.