JPC Report On 2G Scam Adopted Friday Sep 27,2013

The JPC Report On 2G Scam Adopted by a 16-11 vote in favour of government side said JPC Chairman  P C Chacko.

The JPC has 20 Members from the Lok Sabha and 10 Members from the Rajya Sabha

Two members — both from the Janata Dal (United) — abstained from voting, while BJP’s Gopinath Munde did not turn up for the meeting.

The Oposition Members include - BJP (6), BJD (1), TMC (1), CPI (1), CPI-M (1) and AIADMK (1)

The report exonerated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram of any wrongdoing and blamed the then Communications Minister and DMK MP, A. Raja, for being solely responsible for the controversial spectrum allocation and was accused of “misleading” the PM and “belying” the assurances given to him

The members opposing the report have time till October 10,2013 to give their dissent note. The dissent notes will be carefully examined to ensure that they are in order as per Parliament rules and that no aspersion is cast against individuals. Then the notes will be appended to the main report and presented to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. The Committee will not meet thereafter.The Speaker will then forward it to the government/Communications Ministry for printing and attaching the action taken report, if any, by the government. The combined report will be tabled in the winter session of Parliament

The JPC was asked to look into the telecom policies of the NDA and UPA governments and allocation of spectrum between 1998 and 2008, the final report blamed the decision taken by the then NDA government to grant concessions to telecom operators over non-recovery of “huge amount” of licence fee despite opposition by the then Telecom Minister Jagmohan.

The report said the NDA government had to “forego” revenue to the tune of Rs.42,080.34 crore while offering Migration Package to cellular operators. 

The JPC’s report rubbished the loss figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore estimated by the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG), saying it was “ill-conceived.”

Note

The term of the JPC was recently extended till the end of the winter session of Parliament. This was the sixth extension to the JPC set up in March, 2011

Comments on JPC Report Adoption

Gurudas Dasgupta (CPI), in a letter to Mr. Chacko, said the role of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Prime Minister was not identified. The involvement of the Ministry of Finance was never sought to be looked into. “The failure of Cabinet Secretary to draw the attention of the PM when the rules were being violated by A Raja was not discussed

Former Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha (BJP), said a contrived majority had been “unashamedly” used to adopt a report based on “wrong facts, falsehood and prejudicial” findings without the consideration of the Committee

AIADMK parliamentary party leader and JPC member M. Thambidurai said he too had given a dissent note on Friday. He described the report as nothing but a drama staged by the Congress and the DMK to protect interests of both the parties and the family members of DMK president M. Karunanidhi. He wondered why the Committee did not consider the report of the one man enquiry committee on 2G Spectrum allocation issue, headed by Justice Shivraj Patil, which spoke in detail about corruption in the allocation of Spectrum. 

CPI(M)’s Sitaram Yechury has already submitted a 32-page dissent note stating that the report has made “selective” use of the evidence,several crucial questions, which were to have been replied by the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister, had remained unanswered as both were not called by JPC