PM and Amit Shah’s claims on job creation and revenue ‘baseless’, says coal ministry

An RTI reply by the Ministry of Coal holds out an important lesson. When ministers make grand announcements, take them not at face value but with a pinch of salt.

The reply sent to energy researcher Sandeep Pai is potentially embarrassing for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Union Minister for Coal Prahlad Joshi. The reply from the Government reinforces the impression that the PM and Union Ministers are economical with facts and figures, if not the Truth.

The Prime Minister, Amit Shah and Joshi had in June this year claimed that commercial auction of 41 coal Blocks would create “lakhs of jobs, bring in investment and generate revenue for coal bearing states” of Jharkhand and Odisha.

Shah and Joshi were very specific. The auction would create 2.8 lakh jobs, bring in Rs 33,000 Crore worth of investment and generate Rs 20,000 Crore of additional revenue for the states.

In his RTI application dated September 15, 2020, Pai, a journalist, author and researcher on energy, wanted to know the basis on which the claims were made by the Union Ministers.

Pai in his application requested the Coal Ministry to provide him with “a copy of the report/study/ survey/white paper/consultancy report/calculation or any other methodology used” on the basis of which the numbers were arrived at. How were employment and revenue generation claims made?

The response from Jitendra Kumar, CPIO in the Ministry of Coal, was swift and straight. Unlike most ministries Kumar did not stall for time. He did not sit over the application; nor did he pass it on to other ministries—a standard ploy to delay the response. Instead, he sent an email to Pai on September 24 and declared as follows: “It is informed that this office is not having any report/survey/ white paper/consultancy report/calculation on basis of which benefit of employment generation and revenue generation to State government is calculated”. If the Coal Ministry has no idea about how the figures were arrived at, how were they made in the first place?

“For such an important policy with serious climate, environment, and health implications for people & communities, the methodology for calculating the policy benefits should be transparent & made public. One should not even need to file an RTI,” says Pai.

“This is not about whether you are “For” or “Against” commercial coal mining or you love Renewable Energy or want to phase out coal. It is about how politicians and government say anything and get away with it, without worrying for any scrutiny, he went on to say before adding, “States like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha etc. and various civil society organizations should ask the central government how exactly these auctions will bring socio-economic benefits.”

Job estimations and revenue calculation, Pai explains, is at the core of his Ph.D. topic and that he has reviewed global literature on various ways to calculate jobs numbers/revenues.

Three months after the announcement by the Prime Minister, half of the 41 coal blocks are yet to find a bidder. Although the Government has allowed 100% FDI, no foreign investor has shown any interest. The Union Government had made the announcement without consulting the stakeholders. Even the coal bearing states were not taken into confidence while auctioning the coal blocks, a decision that was opposed by trade unions, environmentalists and others. The

Fifth Schedule of the Constitution of India specifies that Tribal Advisory Committees need to be taken into confidence for any project in Fifth schedule areas. Mining in Schedule 5 areas with a pre-ponderance of tribal population also requires consultations with Gram Sabhas under the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996,”

Trade Union leaders and sources in the public sector Coal India Ltd. (CIL) maintain that generating 280,000 jobs by auctioning 41 coal blocks is a gross exaggeration. In the best case scenario, they said, around 35,000 jobs could be created but that figure would need to be offset by the number of the displaced and the number of people who will be deprived of their access to the land, forests and the mine.

The decision to auction the blocks ( how many private parties actually bid for each block is not clear), they feel, is designed to weaken the public sector CIL.