By IANS
New Delhi : A decision on the controversial pricing formula of Reliance Industries for its gas discoveries in the Krishna-Godavari basin is slated to be announced Sep 19 when the ministerial panel under External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee meets again.
At Wednesday’s meeting of the panel, set up by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the members left a decision with Mukherjee but nevertheless agreed to meet again after his return from a tour of Southeast Asia.
Emerging from the meeting, the third since it was set up last month, Mukherjee told reporters here that “no decision has been taken yet”, even as Petroleum Minister Murli Deora said the final decision will be announced Sep 19.
However, officials said the ministers had broadly agreed to a basic principle that the government’s stated stand under the new exploration licensing policy to allow market-determined prices should not be altered.
Besides Mukherjee and Deora, the other members of the panel are Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, Fertiliser Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Law Minister H.R. Bhardwaj, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Corporate Affairs Minister Prem Chand Gupta.
The panel examined in detail two sets of recommendations – one by the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council headed by C. Rangarajan and the other by a group of bureaucrats under Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar.
It also looked at suggestions made by the ministers of fertiliser, petroleum and power and the merits of the arguments by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), which wants the “artificially inflated” price rejected, the officials said.
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries wants higher prices and more customers for the gas, off India’s east coast – a move opposed by his brother Anil Ambani’s Reliance Natural Resources and the state-run National Thermal Power Corp (NTPC).
Following an appeal by Reliance Natural Resources, which sources feedstock for Reliance Energy, the Bombay High Court had stayed the pricing plan and suggested that the government look into the issue afresh.
Reliance Industries said that while global prices for natural gas had gone up, the production cost had also virtually doubled because of cost escalation in hiring of rigs, construction material and pipelines.
But referring to Reliance Industries’ proposal to sell the gas at $4.33 per million metric British thermal unit (mmbtu), the CPI-M said this was not consistent with the price of $2.34 the company had quoted in 2004 to NTPC.
The pricing of natural resources like gas should not be left to market forces, and the government should decide on a price based on “actual production costs plus reasonable profit”, the CPI-M had said in a statement.
“Even if the price quoted in 2004 through competitive bidding is indexed to the present, it (the government) can in no way allow an 85 percent hike as RIL has done while fixing the price at $4.33 mmbtu,” the party said.
“The proposition is thus an artificially inflated one and should be rejected.”
Reliance Industries, however, says that the process it followed was transparent and legally competent, while alleging that fresh bidding process would distort the market and lead to a “cartelisation”.