JPC to meet on 2G fact finding mission

New Delhi, May 18: The 2G scam seem to be back in the limelight and the first meeting of the Joint Parliamentary Committee's (JPC) is due to be held on Wednesday. This is the first such meeting after the draft report was submitted by the Public Account Committee (PAC) to the Lok Sabha speaker by BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi who is also the PAC Chairman.

The JPC meeting will throw light and hope to understand better “at least 10 years on Telecom policy." A source within the committee has been quoted as saying, “The process and procedures as well as the criteria for awarding licences since 1998 will be gone into."

The meeting to be carried out over a period of two days will include briefings from experts from the Ministry of Communication, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and Ministry of Finance (Revenue and Economic Affairs). Spectrum allocation and licensing between the period of 1998 to 2009 will be looked into and studied.

The JPC is also likely to constitute a technical committee to calculate the loss caused by the scam and put a figure to it. The fact that different agencies gave contradictory figures on the loss led to the move. The CAG, CBI, CVC and the PAC estimated the loss from the range of Rs 20,000 crore to Rs 1.90 lakh crore.

With parts of the draft PAC report going public, a source in the PAC commented, “our work will go beyond that of the PAC, as we will investigate telecom policy stretching back to 1998."

OneIndia News