Sibal rubbishes CAG's 1.76 lakh crore figure, calls it erroneous

The new telecom minister of India, Kapil Sibal rubbished the 176,000 crore loss figure shown by the Comptroller and Auditor General in India whose report on such a huge governmental loss on 2G had blown the lid off.

Calling the report a sensational erroneous, he told that the basis of CAG’s calculation was wrong as the government had only given out 4.4 megahertz of spectrum and not 6.2 megahertz which has been taken into account by CAG.

He further said that the exercise by the CAG was fraught with errors as the base of calculation was only taken wrongly. Explaining the mistake he also gave a correct protocol to solve the problem. He said that excluding 6.2mh because that is yet to be laid by government, if only 4.4 mh is applied to the spectrum then the revised amount of loss comes to Rs 99,000 from 1,76,000 crore.

Sibal also echoed his predecessor A Raja’s defence of his actions, claiming that the low spectrum price helped to keep operators’ expenses low, and the benefits were in turn passed on to consumers.

The congress party said that it does want to attack constitutional institutions like the CAG but they were extremely pained at the methodology adopted by the CAG. Some figures have no basis whatsoever. But it is human to err and to err is human.

Sibal also mentioned that the behaviour of opposition was unconstitutional and despite of attempt to reach out at opposition, it hasn’t worked.

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