Hyderabad: Telangana State Planning Board vice-chairman B Vinod Kumar accused the BJP government at the Centre of conspiring to weaken the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) financially by denying allocation of coal blocks and eventually sell it to the crony capitalist friends of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He demanded the Centre to allocate the coal blocks to the SCCL, if it was committed for development of the company.
In a statement, Vinod Kumar stated that the union government allocated Koyalgudem-111 coal block in Satthupalli to a private company through auction on August 10. He demanded to know what was the logic behind the Centre’s decision to auction the coal blocks to private companies rather than allocating them to the public companies like Singareni.
“This is the union government’s conspiracy to privatise the Singareni without even mentioning it as privatisation. It is part of the BJP’s backdoor politics,” he said.
The State Planning Board vice chairman demanded that the union government should stop auctioning coal blocks and instead, allocate them to public sector companies like SCCL. He said of total 82 coal blocks in Telangana, SCCL was operating 40 blocks and sought the Centre to allocate the remaining 42 blocks to the company to ensure its operations run smoothly in future.
He ridiculed BJP State president Bandi Sanjay‘s argument that the Centre was only auctioning the coal blocks, but not privatising the company. He sympathised with Sanjay who was unable to understand the large conspiracy.
“How will Singareni survive without allocation of coal blocks? Obviously, it cannot compete with private sector companies who are mostly profit-oriented, while the public sector companies like SCCL function with the motto of benefiting the people of the country.