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Court rejects Purohit's plea to stop Nippon Denro's mining

The Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court on Thursday declined to stay the extraction of coal by the Nippon Denro Ispat Limited from the captive mines allotted to it for its 1052 mw Bhadrawati power project in Chandrapur district in eastern Maharashtra.

Justices V S Sirpurkar and B H Marapalle observed that the prayer of petitioner Banwarilal Purohit, Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament, for an interim stay on the mining of coal by NDIL of the Mittals group on ground of national security, could not be accepted on the basis of material placed before the court.

Purohit, in his public interest litigation, contended that the allocation of coal mine blocks to the NDIL by the Centre near an ordnance factory posed a security hazard, while the state government's coal mine lease was against established procedures.

The court, however, permitted Purohit to amend the litigation or file a separate one to prove his case with sufficient evidence that the operation of NDIL mines within the radius of 25 kilometres of the Chandrapur ordnance factory indeed posed a security threat.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the eminent lawyer and former Indian ambassador to the US who appeared for NDIL, argued that there were 12 other coal mines operating in the vicinity of the ordnance factory for more than four years and that it was not correct to say that it posed any security threat to the ordnance factory.

Additional Solicitor General V R Reddy, appearing for the coal ministry, endorsed Ray's contention and said the ministry had not received any objection from the defence ministry against allocation of coal mines to NDIL when it was done as early as in 1993.

The filing of the public interest litigation had generated a bitter controversy between Purohit and Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Pramod Mahajan, with the two trading charges on the issue. Claiming huge corruption in the deal with NDIL, Purohit had alleged that Mahajan had tried to pressurise him for withdrawing his petition and that Mahajan, during his 13-day tenure as defence minister, had used his influence in clearing allocation of mines to NDIL overruling the objections of the Ordnance Factory Board.

The BJP's Maharashtra unit had recommended to the central leadership that Purohit be suspended from the party.

During the hearing, the judges pointed out that Purohit had been adding new grounds to his petition after it was filed in September 1996. He first challenged the hike in coal price, the policy of allocation of captive coal mines to private power plants, and sought a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the alleged corruption in the Coal India Limited, especially its subsidiary, the Western Coalfields Limited. His defence consideration came as a last ground.

K H Dunsel, appearing for Purohit, contended that new grounds of challenge were added as soon as they came to his client's notice in his capacity as member of Parliament. He argued that the clearance of the power project of the Mittals and allocation of captive mines to it was done in a "surreptitious and clandestine" manner by the then central government.

It was the contention of the petitioner that though the project was cleared by the P V Narasimha Rao government in a illegal manner, the succeeding governments perpetuated that illegality and the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra compounded it by entering into agreement with the National Coal Mining Company floated by the Mittals for the extraction of coal.

RELATED REPORT: Purohit resigns from the Lok Sabha

UNI