CITU terms oil & gas field auction as 'doling out assets'

Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) today accused the government of "doling out" national assets to private business and strongly protested against its decision to auction 69 discovered oil and gas fields.
"CITU strongly protests the government decision to go for auctioning of 69 identified discovered oil & gas fields - both offshore and onshore terming them as marginal fields.
"The move of the government to hand over discovered oil & gas fields is nothing, but doling out national assets to private business, both domestic and foreign," it said in a statement.
Hundreds of crores of rupees spent by oil PSUs only to discover these fields have gone unaccounted for with no returns on these investments, it said.

"The shocking terms of the contract are the licence for exploration of the fields for 20 years on a revenue sharing basis, open market pricing and open-ended marketing rights to contractors," said the statement.
Furthermore, the contractors under the new model shall be exempted from paying cess on crude oil to the government resulting in crores of rupees of cash transfer to contractors.

"It must be noted that at the beginning of the opening up of the sector, it was production sharing which was later switched over to profit sharing, and now it is revenue sharing. The new model will be exploited by private operators to earn high windfall profits," it said.

CITU felt that the new model, which shall be extended to major fields as well, is heavily loaded in favour of the private sector.
"The new move shall put the public sector crude oil refineries into great trouble and will have serious adverse impact on prices of petroleum products and further cascading impact on the general price level."
The move is, therefore, at the cost of the interest of the national economy, jeopardising the energy security of the country and of course harmful to the employees in general, said the statement.
"CITU urges all its affiliates and fraternity to oppose the move by mobilising workers of the sector in particular and people in general through campaign, propaganda and action," it added.