Al Jazeera-Reporters Collective report cites documents showing Modi favoured Adani

In a report titled ‘Modi govt allowed Adani coal deals it knew were ‘inappropriate’, Al Jazeera said the Indian government granted an extraordinary favour to Gautam Adani, boosting his coal business

Hyderabad: Did the Modi Government favour the Adani Group by allowing it to mine coal? A report by Arab news organisation Al Jazeera says so.

In a report titled ‘Modi govt allowed Adani coal deals it knew were ‘inappropriate’, Al Jazeera said the Indian government granted an extraordinary favour to Gautam Adani, boosting his coal business.

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After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office had ascertained that a particular regulation handing over coal blocks to the private sector was ‘inappropriate’ and lacked transparency, his government made an exception. “It allowed Adani Enterprises Limited to mine from a block holding more than 450 million tonne coal in one of India’s densest forest patches. The government did not explain why the Adani Group, owned by Gautam Adani, was given an exception,” the Al Jazeera report said, citing documents accessed by itself and The Reporters’ Collective (TRC), a non-profit media organisation based in India.

Adani’s group was given the exception under a regulation introduced by the Modi government following a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that cancelled the allocations of 204 coal blocks. Many of the blocks had been illegally allocated to companies owned by State governments, the court found. These companies, in turn, had been handing over the business of mining to private companies at prices that were kept under wraps in secret contracts. The Adani Group got one such contract in July 2008, the report said.

The court had found all this had gone on without legislative sanction and, in its ruling, cancelled all the coal blocks and the mining contracts that had been handed out, forcing the companies to forfeit them.

But the Modi government’s decisions enabled the Adani Group to continue to mine coal, unfettered by the court ruling as well as the government’s own policy decisions that put many other private players at a disadvantage. To date, the company has mined more than 80 million tonne of coal from the block, the report said.

In 2014, BJP came to power. The previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had been caught in a mire of news reports, auditor findings and litigation pointing to large-scale corruption.

Instead of auctioning them to earn the highest possible revenue, the UPA government allocated coal mines by just charging a minimal royalty. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), the government account’s auditor, concluded that this had caused a loss of $22bn to the exchequer, the report said.

Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Mahua Moitra, in a tweet said, “Coal mine allocation cancelled by Supreme Court given directly only to ONE special friend without any auction! Once given, window was closed. Everyone else buys via tender but only PM’s friend allowed to steal from our pockets.” She tagged the Central Vigilance Commission in her post. She also posted the link to the Al Jazeera story.