New Delhi:
The Supreme Court will pronounce its opinion today on whether all natural resources must be auctioned by the government, a decision the court made earlier this year in the context of the expansive telecom scam.
In February this year, the court cancelled 122 telecom licenses issued by former minister A Raja in 2008 on the basis of a first-come-first-serve policy which he allegedly manipulated. In its landmark judgement, the court said that a get-in-line policy was fundamentally flawed and that a competitive bidding process must be followed for allocating all national resources.
The government, however, has argued that is not always possible, and that the verdict impedes upon the executive's right to decide policy. It sought a clarification from the Supreme Court on whether its stand on an auction, as expressed in the telecom or 2G verdict, applies to other national resources too.
The government has been recently indicted by the national auditor or CAG who said that because coal blocks were not auctioned from 2004-2009, the country lost upto 1.86 lakh crores. Though the government has challenged that estimate, the auditor's conclusion has added to the debate over how resources should be given away to private firms. In the case of both airwaves for telecoms and coal blocks, the government has argued that an auction would have led to increased costs which would have adversely impacted consumers and the industry.