Newly constituted PAC to hold first meeting tomorrow

Members from the BJP are expected to raise a demand for PAC taking up the contentious AgustaWestland issue when the newly-constituted body holds in first meeting tomorrow.
It being the first meeting of this Public Accounts Committee(PAC), the Comptroller and Auditor General Shashi Kant Sharma will do the customary briefing.
Interestingly Sharma was earlier Defence Secretary and the committee will have to face a dilemma if it decides to take up the VVIP chopper scam issue and feels the need to call the former Defence Secretary.
"If we decide to call the former Defence Secretary before the committee, we will have to call Sharma, who is now CAG. It's a ticklish issue," said a member speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Sharma had joined the Defence ministry in 2003 as a joint secretary. Sharma also held the post of director general (acquisition) in the Defence ministry in 2007-10. He became Defence secretary later in 2011.
In May 2013, the BJP had opposed appointment of Sharma as CAG. However, the 1976 Bihar cadre IAS officer was made CAG the same month replacing Vinod Rai with a tenure up to September 24, 2017.

Expressing reservations over the appointment of Sharma as CAG, the BJP had then said that there could be a "conflict of interest" as he will be auditing defence deals in which he had a role as Defence Secretary.

The CAG later submitted a report on the acquisition of
VVIP helicopters in August 2013, concluding that the process, from framing of quality requirements to the conclusion of the contract, differed from established procurement procedures.
The report came before the PAC of that time, which was then headed by BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi but the PAC did not take up the issue then.
The argument of Congress members is that that the PAC Chairman would have taken up the issue then had there been anything substantial to pin point bribing of any politician.
"We have no issue anyway in PAC taking up the matter. If members want the issue to be taken up, it can be taken up," said a Congress member.

The issue has led to a huge controversy during the recently concluded Budget Session of Parliament with members from Congress and BJP sparring over the incident for days.
While the government vowed to track down the main beneficiaries of the kickbacks so that "we can do" what "we could not do in Bofors", Congress said it was ready to face a probe that is monitored by the Supreme Court.
The 21-member reconstituted panel has seven members from Rajya Sabha --- Naresh Agrawal, Satyavrat Chaturvedi Bhubaneswar Kalita, Shantaram Naik (Congress), Vijay Goel, Ajay Sancheti (BJP) and Sukhendu Sekhar Roy (TMC).
It has 15 members from Lok Sabha including Kirit Somaiya, Anurag Singh Thakur, Nishikant Dubey, Janardan Singh Sigriwal, Riti Pathak, Abhishek Singh, Shivkumar C Udasi (BJP), Sudip Bandyopadhyay (TMC), Prem Singh Chandumajra (Akali Dal), nominated MP from Kerala Richard Hay, Gajanan Chandrakant Kirtikar (Shiv Sena), Bhartruhari Mahtab (BJD), Neiphiu Rio (Nagaland Peoples Front) and P Venugopal (AIADMK).

Many of the newly-appointed BJP members in the panel have been aggressively attacking Congress and the Gandhi family on issues including AgustaWestland in Parliament and outside and therefore the PAC meetings in coming days are expected to generate much heat.