Court Panel Finds Discretionary Quota Allotments Arbitrary

An independent fact finding committee has termed the allotment of petrol pumps, cooking gas and kerosene dealership from the petroleum ministers discretionary quota during 1992-96 arbitrary.

The three member advocates committee which submitted its report to the Delhi High Court has said no criteria/guidelines were followed by former ministers B Shankaranand and Satish Sharma, in making the allotments, but clarified that it was not to suggest that all allotments were without merit.

The committee comprising Neeraj Krishna Kaul, Sandep Sethi and Sanjeev Khanna, in its report to the court said the discretionary quota in all three categories before 1988-89 was only 20 in number. This increased in 1988-89 to 25, in 1989-90 to 85, 1990-91 to 115 and thereafter to 155 per year.

The report said a guideline was formulated during the tenure of Sharma as petroleum minister in 1993.

Commenting on the allotments made by Shankaranand, the report said the minister used to personally recommend the files and forward it to the ministry and in many cases the date of receipt of the file by the ministry was after order of allotment by the minister.

The report said there was hardly any verification of the statements in the application and most applicants did not file any bio-data, nor give any details of annual income.

Surprisingly, the ministry has not even called for such details and particulars and also Shankaranand relied considerably on recommendations of VIPs. It is noteworthy that almost every allotment during his tenure was recommended by a VIP or influential person. In some cases, while sanctioning allotment, the minister merely recorded strongly recommended by mr..., it observed.

In the case of Sharma, the committee said it is noticed that in some cases the personal secretary to the minister, Gurucharan Singh, has first examined the applications and submitted a note to the minister. In terms of the note the minister approved the application.

In most of these cases, there has been no verification of the facts and the allotments have been made in the most casual manner, the committee said.

The commitee gave a break up of the allotments year wise in the LPG, kerosene and petrol pump and recorded their findings.

In all, the allotments around 50 per cent of the cases were made due to recommendations of the VIPs and in most of the cases there was no identification.

The committee also mentioned few cases which were glaring lapses in the porcess of discretionary allotment.

The case would come up for further hearing on thursday and the high court had indicated that it would consider issuing notice to individual allottees.