File photo of the Supreme Court of India
The Supreme Court is likely to give its verdict today on a batch of petitions that have asked for the scrapping of illegal coal block allocations.
A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, RM Lodha, has examined allegations about alleged irregularities in the allocation of around 194 coal blocks in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh.
The CBI alleges that for several years, mining licences were given arbitrarily to private companies without a transparent bidding process, at the cost of thousands of crores to the country.
A petition cites the Comptroller and Auditor General's assessment that the government lost about Rs 1.64 lakhs crores by not following the auction route for allotting coal blocks.
Former auditor Vinod Rai has controversially said that he was "pressured" to drop certain names from his reports on the coal scam. Speaking on his upcoming book "Not Just An Accountant", Mr Rai said, "Politicians came to my home and told me not to name some people and to protect some others in connection with the CWG and coal allocation reports."
The Congress has hit back at Mr Rai, calling his comments the "latest bout of his sensationalism."