Reportage on a planet without equitable or sustainable development.
is the cag’s coal report too conservative?
one of the major strands of media reporting in the aftermath of the coal report being tabled in the parliament is whether the cag report got its arithmetic right. all manner of reporters and pundits have been loudly arguing that it presents too inflated a number. the finance minister has recently said that there was no loss at all.
In November 2008, the Madhya Pradesh State Mining Corporation (MPSMC) auctioned six mines. “The minimum bid price was set at 200% of royalty,” says a senior official of MPSMC, who did not want to be identified… In the MPSMC auction, however, the winning bids ranged from a royalty of Rs 700-2,100 per tonne.
contrast that to the cag report which…
Based on certain assumptions and extrapolations from numbers of Coal India, CAG further estimated the per-tonne-profit for these mines to be 295… “The auctions by MPSMC netted 2.3-7.1 times the rates we assumed,” says a senior manager in CAG, who was part of the team that prepared this report and spoke on condition of anonymity.
I am an Indian journalist with interests in energy, environment, climate and India’s ongoing slide into right-wing authoritarianism. My book, Despite the State, an examination of pervasive state failure and democratic decay in India, was published by Westland Publications, India, in January 2021. My work has won the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award; the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award; five Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism; and, more recently, been a finalist at the True Story Award and GIJN’s Global Shining Light Awards. Write to me at despitethestate@protonmail.com.
“Westland closure: Titles that are selling fast and a few personal recommendations,” by Chetana Divya Vasudev, Moneycontrol. (Because this happened too. In February, a year after DtS was released, Amazon decided to shutter Westland, which published the book. The announcement saw folks rushing to buy copies of Westland books before stocks run out.)
Fractured/Earth 
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