Possessed of an active conscience, handed down to him by his father, N S Hegde followed him and quit the government because he was not allowed to work.
What do Hospet, Bellary, Tumkur and Sandur have in common? Rich iron ore mines.
Till 10 years ago, they were just dusty villages inhabited by people who knew the riches they were sitting on, but had no way of accessing them. Due to low prices of iron ore in both the domestic and international markets, it wasn’t particularly profitable to mine iron ore.
Mining licences were given to state-owned MML (Mysore Minerals Limited) and private players. MML in turn transferred its mining rights to private mining barons. Meanwhile, the price of ore, which was around Rs 300 per tonne in 2002-03, skyrocketed to over Rs 5,000-7,000 per tonne in 2005-2006 due to global shortage and demand.
Curiously, MML continued to make losses. It would mine as much as 35 million tonnes of iron ore every year worth about Rs 6,500 crore, but would manage to earn a mere Rs 165 crore as royalties, on an average. However, when it subcontracted mineral extraction to private sector companies, these first made tidy profits and then went on to make super profits.
It is this mystery that the lokayukt (ombudsman) to the Governor, former judge N Santosh Hegde, tried to solve. After all, he is possessed of an active conscience, handed down to him by his father Justice K S Hegde. The senior Hegde had resigned from the Supreme Court in protest against his supersession, which had led to the imposition of Emergency.
Karnataka has lost around 10,598 hectares of land to mining. Given the scale of depletion of forest cover, the Karnataka Lokayukta was tasked with investigating the large-scale illegal mining and transportation of iron ore from forest areas in March 2007. The inquiry was ordered during the coalition government of H D Kumaraswamy-led Janata Dal (Secular) and the BJP.
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Hegde made a comprehensive analysis of the illegalities committed and the financial loss incurred by the state. He submitted an interim report (covering the period from 2000 to 2006) in December 2008 to the B S Yeddyurappa government. The second part of the report (covering the period from 2006-2008) has also been submitted and the state government is yet to take appropriate action. After the report was submitted by the lokayukta on illegalities in mining, the state government came out with a new mining policy to permit mining only for value addition and not for exports.
The facts narrated in the report were so damaging that the state government just sat on it and wasn’t ready to share it even with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team, which is probing the illegal mining of iron ore in Andhra Pradesh. The UPA government has ordered this probe on the request of the Andhra Pradesh government.
The report said the private sector mining companies were earning Rs 5,000 per tonne, while the state was getting a royalty of Rs 27 (maximum royalty then, revised to 10 per cent ad valorem recently) per tonne on the iron ore declared by the private players. A large amount of ore is illegally mined and transported and, therefore, does not show up in the books and on this the state doesn’t even get the token royalty.
While conducting his research, Hegde stumbled upon a deep and devious racket. Obviously, to be refined, ore has to be transported out. In January 2010, lokayukt Hegde had received complaints of illegal mining in forest and government land and transport of iron ore without valid permits. A lokayukta special team probed the matter in February 2010 and seized several fake permits, computer hard disk, documents, etc. The total iron seized was 805,991 metric tonnes and was stored on the Karwar port premises. Out of this, some exporters claimed ownership of the ore and produced documents to claim 300,000 metric tonnes. No one claimed the rest of the ore, which needs to be probed.
However, some exporters illegally shipped out around 500,000 metric tonnes of ore worth Rs 250 crore. The lokayukt then directed the local deputy conservator of forests (DCF), R Gokul, to write to the chief vigilance commissioner, New Delhi, to investigate the Customs officials. Following these developments, the DCF registered theft and criminal breach of trust case in Ankola police station against some stevedores operating at the Karwar port. But who are the people who paid the stevedores? Everyone knows them; and yet, no one seems to recognize them.
Little wonder then that the state government found Hegde so irksome. It did not have the powers to sack the Lokayukt, so it just refused to cooperate with him. The last straw was the delay in appointing an Upalokayukt: In many states, because the governments don’t have the time to address public grievances, it is the upalokayukt who performs this function. After all, where can you go when a lineman demands a bribe for fixing your electricity meter or when you have to bribe doctors in government hospitals to treat you!
In fact, Hegde had intervened in precisely one such case. A handicapped tailor from Bagalkot had approached the lokayukta office with his baby, who was suffering from a deformed intestine. The government doctor wanted Rs 80,000 as bribe to treat the baby. The tailor said he couldn’t afford it, adding that he was ready to leave the child at the door of the lokayukta.
Hegde told reporters he wasn’t ashamed of pulling strings. He contacted the Manipal Hospital in Bangalore that operated on the baby. It cost Rs 8,000 and the lokayukt settled the bills. He then took disciplinary action against the doctor.
Hegde’s resignation does not herald his entry into politics. He scoffs at such suggestions. His wife Sharada (who is a Punjabi grown up in Karnataka) and he have no children. He lives simply, has a flat in Bangalore and an ancestral home in Mangalore. He often talks about his mother Meenakshi, who greatly influenced his life. She was responsible for imbuing her children with values of humaneness. His father K S Hegde, who was also Speaker of Lok Sabha between 1977 and 1980, had made it clear to his children that while they would get the best education possible, making something of themselves was up to them — they would get no help from their father.
But what Hegde has in common with his father is a sense of justice and an abiding commitment to principle. The senior Justice Hegde had resigned from the Supreme Court, the junior one, too, quit the government because he was not allowed to work.