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After pointing a gun at the government and Petroleum Minister M Veerappa Moily over the recent gas price increase decision, Communist Party of India leader Gurudas Dasgupta is taking a legal route to block the decision. Dasgupta and former Union Power Secretary E A S Sarma have filed a public interest suit in the Supreme Court, seeking a rethink on the government’s decision, based on the Rangarajan committee formula.
“The matter would be taken up for hearing on Monday,” said Dasgupta’s counsel Colin Gonsalves. The move comes at a time when Parliament’s standing committee on finance, headed by Yashwant Sinha, is set to to clear a report on the economic impact of natural gas pricing on Friday.
The report might ask for a different formula than Rangarajan’s, more suited to the current priorities of various sectors. The gas price decision was taken on June 27 by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, to take effect from April 2014.
The Rangarajan committee had proposed taking an average of the US, Europe and Japanese hub prices, and then averaging it with the netback price of imported liquefied natural gas to give the sale price for domestically-produced gas. Earlier, Dasgupta had alleged Moily was working in favour of the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries in pushing for a gas price rise, saying it would mean an additional subsidy burden of Rs 76,000 crore.
The Rangarajan formula is set to almost double the price from the current $4.2 a million British thermal unit (mBtu) to $8 an mBtu. The pricing would reviewed each quarter. The decision was expected to cost Rs 42,000 crore for about 28,000 Mw of power capacity dependent on gas, while the fertiliser subsidy would zoom by Rs 13,200 crore annually.
Meanwhile, the draft of Parliamentary Standing Committee report is set to create storm tomorrow as both the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) are also in line with other Opposition parties like the BJP and the Left in opposing the Rangarajan formulae.
