The Competition Commission of India has raised an alarm, saying bureaucrats are obstructing its work.
The Competition Commission of India has raised an alarm, saying bureaucrats are obstructing its work.
In identical letters to prime minister Manmohan Singh and power minister M Veerappa Moily, chairman of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), Ashok Chawla has sought their intervention to protect the domain of the panel, usurped by bureaucrats.
The CCI, an autonomous independent body, is empowered to look into cases of anti-competitive agreements and abuse of dominance and to take remedial action, including imposition of heavy penalties against firms engaged in practices that impede free and fair competition in the market and which are anti-consumer.
The CCI chairman has mentioned a fresh attempt of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) to revive a parallel and conflicting competition law regime through an executive order. Earlier, attempts were made to restrict the CCI’s jurisdiction in matters related to banking sector. Sensing the plot, the GoM looking into the changes in the Competition Act rejected the amendments to the Banking Regulation Act as proposed by the officials of the RBI.
Ashok Chawla has warned that the CERC attempts will create a parallel and conflicting competition regime for the electricity sector, usurping the legislative powers and “ignoring the extant regulatory framework for competition matters.” Further, the three-page letter said it will create a regulatory uncertainty and a veritable chaos in the regulatory cosmos.
He writes that his prime concern is that if other sector regulators follow suit to assume responsibility of enforcing the competition laws, it would cause duplications, jurisdictional overlap, unnecessary expenditure of public funds, multiplicity of cases and consequential delays. He pointed out that such parallel bodies would defeat the very purpose of vesting the CCI with the mandate to look into the competition concerns in all sectors.
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