Friday, August 29, 2014

If everything is illegal does it protect the crooks?

Indian companies have become used to being protected from foreign competition by high import duties, making easy money from natural resources, given free by bribe-taking politicians, and by price gouging Indian consumers. Indian telecom companies want the government to impose charges on WhatsApp, Viber and Skype because they offer free messaging and voice services based on the internet. Mobile number portability was announced with great fanfare 3 years ago but the companies completely changed the meaning of the exercise. For us it meant that your number will be portable, which means that you pay the same charges wherever you go in India, but the companies restricted it to mean that you can keep the same number if you change your service provider within the same circle. And then last year 2 companies loudly announced free roaming. Which meant you pay Rs 5 per day or a mere Rs 79 for 30 days for incoming calls. For us paying even Re 1 means that it is not free and you still have to pay for outgoing calls, so they were lying. Our mineral wealth is being looted by criminals, with help from politicians, of all parties. The Coal mines scam, between 2004 and 2009, is said to have resulted in a loss of Rs 1.86 trillion, during which time the Congress was in power. The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh was in charge of the Coal Ministry and defended his decisions as being in accordance with ' coalition dharma '. A few days back the Hon'ble Supreme Court pronounced that all licenses awarded since 1993 were illegal because," The screening committee has never been consistent, transparent, there is no application of mind......Hence, the allocation of coal blocks based on the recommendations made in all the 36 meetings of the screening committee is illegal." So what happens now? The CBI was investigating cases of corruption in the allocation of mines between 2004 and 2009. Does the investigation become irrelevant if all the allocations going back to 1993 were illegal anyway? Since the BJP was in government from 1998 to 2004 does it meant that the Congress does not have a case to answer? Does the judgement protect all those who have benefited from the scam? Although originally proposed by the Congress the perceived haste of the present government in taking up the Judicial Accountability Bill has angered the judges. In particular they want judges to be appointed by a collegium of judges whose activities are secret. Power companies have taken huge debts for the projects so if all the mines are cancelled the banks will see a huge rise in bad debts and the economy will suffer because of a shortage of power. We hope the judges will consider the nation.

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