By IANS,
New Delhi : Amid a turf war with the Joint Parliamentary Committee, parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has decided to call the principal secretary to the prime minister and the cabinet secretary for questioning on the 2G spectrum allocation by former communications minister A. Raja.
The PAC headed by Bharatiya Janata Party’s Murli Manohar Joshi has called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Principal Secretary T.K.A. Nair and Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar for a meeting next week – on April 15 or 16, reliable sources told IANS.
The sources said the PAC wanted to know the details of letters exchanged between Manmohan Singh and Raja on the allotment of the second generation telephony radio waves.
In November 2007, Manmohan Singh is said to have written a letter to Raja on how the scarce spectrum radio waves, a national resources, should be sold because there was a huge rush in applications for the licences.
Raja was forced to step down last November after the government’s auditor reported that the 2G spectrum licences were sold to private telecom firms at throwaway prices causing huge losses to the government.
PAC chief Joshi on Tuesday told reporters that the possibility of calling PMO officials was there and “let’s see what happens in the coming days”.
The move to call the PMO officials comes even as JPC head P.C. Chacko has been objecting to PAC’s “parallel probe” into the scam, billed as one of the biggest since independence.
Joshi and Chacko have already had separate meetings with Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar after the JPC head requested her to demarcate areas for the probe on the issue.
Chacko, a Congress leader and strongly supported on his views by his party, says that the PAC’s mandate is just to analyse the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the 2G spectrum allocation.
But the PAC has already held wide-ranging meetings with industrialists, corporates, former and current bureaucrats and corporate lobbyist Niira Radia who is alleged to have pitched for some private firms to get the licences.
With this Joshi has extended the PAC’s probe ambit beyond the auditor’s report. It has decided to finalise its report by April-end when the term of the present committee ends.
It had earlier quizzed Telecom Secretary R. Chandrashekhar, his predecessors D.S. Mathur and Siddhartha Behura, former member-finance in Telecom Commission Manju Madhavan and former Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) chairman Pradip Baijal.
It also interacted with Reserve Bank Governor D. Subbarao, who was finance secretary when the scarce spectrum for second generation telecom services was allotted.