Comment

When the impeccable white sherwani Jawaharlal Nehru was wearing was spattered with oil from a gusher of the first prospecting well at Ankleshwar in 1960, his joy was boundless. He christened that well ‘Vasundhara’, meaning the earth goddess, provider of wealth and prosperity.

Nehru used to visit the oil exploration sites frequently, just as a concerned family head in a village anxiously inspects the digging of an irrigation well on the family land. When this incident happened on one such visit, Soviet and Indian experts standing nearby were perturbed. But Panditji cheered them up and said, “I shall address the parliament in this very same oil splattered Sherwani to let everybody know that we have our own oil.” So it was that the Parliament came to know the news first, although the jubilation was nationwide. It was a national victory.

But that was during Nehru’s time. Things have changed a lot since then.A similar event, striking of a huge quantity of gas in Krishna-Godavari basin off Andhra coast, which would make the nation proud, happened in 2002. But the news was disclosed not by the prime minister of the country nor to the august Parliament.

It was Mukesh Ambani the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) who announced this in the annual general meeting of the company on October 31, 2002.

“I am delighted to share with you our most momentous and historic achievement of the year —- India’s biggest gas discovery in nearly three decades and one of the largest gas discoveries in the world this year. Reliance has discovered natural gas in the very first well it drilled in the deepwater block D6 in Krishna Godavari basin off Andhra Pradesh coast. This is the first ever discovery by an Indian private sector company,” said Ambani. “We have decided to name the discovery in memory of our late father as Dhirubhai-1, 2 and 3,” he added.

While the first event of finding oil from Vasundhara and the elation it generated in the country shows how strongly the government at that time was concerned about the oil exploration with government initiative, the second incident, of gas find at Dhirubhai-1 etc and the associated euphoria in the Reliance conglomerate, evidences the complete dumping of the Nehruvian policy with regard to the oil and gas industry.

The Nehru government’s policy was very clear and categorical. K D Malavia, the minister of natural resources in his cabinet, told the Parliament in 1956 that there was no freedom to the country’s economy and its defence unless the oil industry was owned and controlled by the government. But this could not bind the subsequent governments, particularly after the reforms era launched in 1990.

On the plea of huge costs involved in the exploration of oil and gas — an estimated $60 billion over the next 15 years — the government worked out a New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) in 1997 with a view to involving private participation in the hydrocarbon sector.

This policy envisaged awarding of the exploration contracts on the basis of competitive biddings, placing both the private and the public sector entities on equal footing. Starting from early 1999, seven rounds of contracts have so far been allotted under the NELP.

The present controversy relating to the offshore Krishna Godavari basin gas involving Ambani brothers and others is one such exploration contract bagged by the private sector RIL.

Many strange claims and counter claims on sharing the gas have now surfaced, seven years after the gas find, creating a lot of confusion in the minds of people who are said to be the real owner of this precious natural resource.

The Andhra Pradesh government is claiming its share from the central government. Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy wrote a letter to the Prime Minister requesting allotment of 10% of the KG basin gas to the state. He has drawn the attention of the prime minister to the Directive Principles of State Policy which require allocation of natural resources in public interest. He firmly believes that private interest cannot take precedence over public interest and says the gas should be allotted by the Centre to the States and not, not by the Ambani brothers or their mother Kokilaben.

Not only are all the political parties — both ruling and the opposition — up in arms in Andhra Pradesh for the Reliance gas to the state, but also several news TV channels are vying with one another to be in the forefront in strengthening the public demand and struggle. They definitely are setting a new trend, the media activism, so to say, in spearheading a movement, going beyond the legitimate role of the media to report on the current happenings.

Similarly, Tamil Nadu has its own claim. An AIADMK member, Tambi Durai, raised the issue in Parliament. He said RIL has not laid the pipelines from Chennai to Kakinada despite securing clearance for it in 2007 and said the company was concentrating only on Mumbai, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and other northern states, leaving the southern states, particularly, Tamil Nadu high and dry.

More interestingly, the government of India too is fighting its case in the Supreme Court in order not to allow Mukesh Ambani’s RIL to supply the gas at a cheap rate to his brother Anil Ambani’s RNRL as claimed by the latter.

The claims of the governments at the Centre and in the States, together with many others, make one wonder why the government can’t enforce its will if the natural gas is a national resource. Straight answers are required to many questions, while the government needs to spell out why at all it created, in the first place, a situation of a business house having sway over the scarce natural resource of high national importance. This question is sure to embarrass the government as it doesn’t have a plausible answer.