New Delhi: The Supreme Court yesterday declined the Narmada Control Authority’s plea seeking the transfer to it the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s plea challenging the decision to raise the height of Sardar Sarovar Dam that will be taken up for hearing by Jabalpur High Court today.
Declining the plea, a bench of Justice TS Thakur, Justice C. Nagappan and Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel said that since the plea sought to be transferred to apex court relates to the compliance of the high court’s order, then the latter should deal with it and sought to know why it should it be brought here.
Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the court that an application filed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan before the high court has sought to put on hold the June 12 decision of the NCA permitting raising the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam from existing 121.9 m to 138.7 m.
After the apex court had said in 2006 that it was not inclined to restrain the continuing work of raising the height of the dam, the NBA, instead of approaching the apex court, has moved an application before the Jabalpur High Court challenging the NCA June 12 decision to raise the height of the dam, he said.
At this the court inquired if the apex court in its 2006 judgment had the issue that the height of the dam could be increased to 138 m, but Rohatgi said that they (the NCA) were before the court in connection with work that had nothing to do with the decision to raise the height of the dam.
The court said that it would hear the matter on Aug 4 after Rohatgi told the court that this plea was listed on that day for hearing.
Meanwhile, the Congress yesterday cautioned the government over the process it will adopt to meet its disinvestment targets, saying the record of the previous NDA government had left people with “deep dissatisfaction”.
Congress spokesperson Rajeev Gowda told reporters here it was not yet clear how the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government will meet its disinvestment target.
“When you look at disinvestment and the NDA, when you juxtapose those two phases together, lot of questions arise. The track record of the NDA government in its previous time in office... we had raised lot of questions and is a matter which left most of us with deep dissatisfaction,” he said.
Gowda said there were instances during the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government when “multiple hotels were sold”.
He said one could sell shares to the public and make people stakeholders in essentially a government owned company or one could sell out the company altogether.
“During the NDA years, they focused on outright sale... that philosophy may recur again. When an outright sale was done, in most instances, there were lot of questions about under-valuation, there were questions about sweet-heart deal and there were questions about negligence in terms of assets of the companies,” he said.
IANS
