What Centre must do to curb oil mafia

The burning alive of Nashiks additional collector at Manmad in Maharashtra on the eve of this years Republic Day by an oil mafia gang he had caught redhanded should not really come as any surprise. It was almost dj vu: the murder of yet another upright public servant doing his duty, reminding the nation of the horrific circumstances in which Satyendra Dubey of the National Highways Authority of India was killed for exposing misdeeds relating to the Golden Quadrilateral project in Bihar seven years ago, in November 2003, as well as another oil mafia-related killing that of Shanmugham Manjunath of the Indian Oil Corporation just two years after that, in November 2005, in Uttar Pradeshs Lakhimpur Kheri region. Maharashtra too has seen some similar incidents such as the death in mysterious circumstances of a DIG of the CBI who had taken on the oil mafia. More recently, a top oil mafia gang leader operating in Mumbai Port suspected of smuggling Rs 25 lakhs of diesel every day was killed in broad daylight just outside the GPO in the heart of the nations financial capital. A senior Maharashtra police officer who has taken on the oil mafia claims that it is far more powerful and ruthless than even the dons who rule the underworld, and that its tentacles spread throughout the length and breadth of the country. Many lives have been lost along the way, and the mafias modus operandi is well known to governments at the Centre and in the states such a widespread operation simply cannot continue without connivance at all levels: the politicians who are beholden to the mafia, bureaucrats and the oil companies. In Maharashtra itself, many people have written detailed letters to the government on the mafias activities, but they did not get even an acknowledgement. There are big names involved, and it is estimated between 50-60 per cent of kerosene meant for the public distribution system is diverted by the mafia with official connivance. This makes a mockery of the susbsidy of kerosene and diese! l are t hese only meant to subsidise the mafia? Kerosene and LPG together account for two-thirds of the total oil subsidy of Rs 50,000 crores which is nearly 4.5 per cent of the Union Budget! The new petroleum minister has declared that this subsidy will not be stopped so that the poor are not hit. Which poor exactly is he talking about? He would do well to study other options which have been suggested to the government on ways to protect the poor and also put an end to this astronomical leakage.
&nbsp

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No need to ring alarm bells

First, the good news. With an average score of 42 in the quantitative section of the Graduate Management Admission Test ( GMAT) - used as selection criteria by B-schools across the world - Indian students placed seventh globally, comfortably beating the global average of 37. Now for the bad; Chinese students topped the list, beating the Indians handily. Given the obsession with China in this country, this is likely to cause dark warnings about Chinese students and corporate workforce outdoing their Indian counterparts. But this is a false alarm. Standardised test scores have very little bearing on the actual academic or professional quality of an individual. To understand what these scores really signify, one could look at Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, a book by Chinese-American academic and author Amy Chua on how Chinese mothers raise successful kids. It is a somewhat alarming account of parental pressure. We have Chua forcing her seven-year-old daughter to practise piano for ...
Keep reading

The Tea Party: a creedal passion past its prime | Michael Weiss

Image
American political history is characterised by cyclical convulsions. We've just seen another, but it's a passing phase At its worst, the American Tea Party is a helter-skelter of conservative populism, a movement broadly united by small-government principles but more animated by a hatred of the current president. It lacks a coherent vision and prefers paranoid sloganeering and anti-establishment platitudes to a viable platform. At its most benign, the Tea Party represents what the late historian Samuel Huntington , in an insight more valuable than his more famous one about a "clash of civilizations," once termed a "creedal-passion period" of American politics. That is to say, a cyclical phenomenon that occurs every few generations in Anglo-Saxon cultures and has its roots in the Protestant Great Awakening of the 1740s . Creedal passion periods, in other words, are manifestations of American Puritanism, that fatal shore upon which idealistic expectations inv...
Keep reading

It's not just John Bercow charm is disappearing from public life. About time too | Tanya Gold

Image
Whether in the courtly language of Westminster or the honeyed words of Cameron, it conceals a fundamental dishonesty There was a fight in the Palace of Westminster this week. It was a small fight, and nothing to ruffle the International League Table of Legislator Physical Violence, where first place is still held by Taiwan, because the opposition and ruling party frequently beat each other and sometimes throw food . Still, this fight was non-violent, instructive and very British. Mark Pritchard , a Tory MP described "as mild mannered" in the way that serial killers are usually described as mild-mannered until the lampshades made of skin are found in the basement, apparently impeded the movement of Speaker Bercow, who was progressing through the palace like a small medieval king mounted on a skateboard. "The courtesy of the house is that honourable members should stand aside when the Speaker passes by," said Bercow , whose rudeness to his former Tory colleagues is m...
Keep reading