Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gestures as he arrives to make a statement to the media after being shouted down by opposition politicians in the lower house of parliament, in New Delhi, Monday. — APNEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Monday termed as “clearly disputable" a federal auditor's report that claimed the government lost billions of dollars in potential revenue in the allocation of coal blocks and led to demands for his resignation. Singh denied allegations of wrongdoing in the allotment of the blocks in a prepared speech in the lower house of parliament, amid vociferous protests from opposition parties. “I wish to say that any allegations of impropriety are without basis and unsupported by the facts," the prime minister said while making his first public comment on the coal-block allocation after the Comptroller and Auditor General of India published its report on Aug. 17. The opposition has been blocking parliament proceedings demanding Singh's resignation after the auditor said the government lost up to 1.85 trillion rupees ($33 billion) by allocating licenses for 57 coal-mining blocks between 2004 and 2011 without a transparent auction. The government has rejected the opposition's demand, saying that auctioning could have pushed up the cost of coal and therefore of electricity, as most of India's power-generation plants are run on the dry fuel. The auditor's report came as an added embarrassment for the Congress party-led coalition government, which is facing a deluge of corruption allegations since 2010 including on irregularities in the allocation of telecommunications licenses and kickbacks related to the hosting of an international sports event. The auditor says it calculated the losses by looking at what the government could have received had it auctioned the blocks competitively instead of selling them directly to 25 companies. The prime minister disputed the calculations, and said the findings “are flawed on multiple counts." Even if its views that benefits accrued to private companies were accepted, the auditor's “computations can be questioned on a number of technical points," he added. Singh said the process of allocating coal blocks to private companies was in vogue since 1993, before the coalition government took charge, and that previous governments have also directly allocated coal blocks. “Let the country decide where the truth lies," the 79-year-old premier said. Prakash Javedkar, a spokesman for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, said the “country is upset with the prime minister's statement. It is just points and lists of excuses. He is hiding facts." “At least, he has owed responsibility for having approved allocation of coal blocks, so he should now resign," Javedkar added. — Agencies
