The Hindu : PM may convene arbitration meet

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 04, 2003

National

National

PM may convene arbitration meet

By Gargi Parsai

New Delhi March 3. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, is likely to convene soon a meeting of the Water Resources Minister, Arjun Charan Sethi, and the chairman of the Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers, Suresh Prabhu, to `arbitrate' over each other's jurisdiction.

The tussle is over who will approach the PMO with day-to-day recommendations of the Task Force. There is ambiguity over whether the Task Force chairman should approach the Prime Minister directly or through the Water Resources Ministry. Incidentally, it was Mr. Sethi who had opined that Mr. Suresh Prabhu be given a Cabinet charge as chairman of the Task Force, he being a former Cabinet Minister.

Although on the face of it there is no clash of interests, the Water Resources Ministry feels out of sorts with some of the crucial decisions taken by the Task Force. If Mr. Prabhu were to report directly to the Prime Minister, the Water Resources Ministry — which is the nodal Ministry — will have no say in what is happening with the Rs. 560,000 crore river interlinking project, except for giving logistics support. And, if Mr. Prabhu were to route all his recommendations through the Ministry, then his position will be undermined.

Not only that, Mr. Prabhu is in a hurry to meet the deadline set by the PMO and would like to do away with the administrative red tapism of getting approvals for office space, mobiles, cars, his personal secretary and so on from Finance and Urban Development Ministries. The Task Force is to submit its Action Plan-I by the month-end.

So far, the Water Resources Ministry has forwarded the recommendations of the Task Force, on the part-time members to be nominated to the Task Force, to the PMO. It had suggested some names that were turned down by Mr. Suresh Prabhu.

Finally, the PMO approved the names of K.V. Kamath, Managing-Director of the ICICI Bank, K. Kasturirangan, chairman of the ISRO, Deepak Dasgupta of the Highway Authority, R.K. Pachauri, Director-General of Tata Energy and Resources Institute, Piyush Goyal, chartered accountant from Mumbai and G.C. Sahu, retired engineer-in-chief, Government of Orissa.

Of these, Mr. Dasgupta was a nominee of the PMO, while the rest of the names were recommended by Mr. Prabhu and the Water Resources Ministry.

Mr. Prabhu is understood to have additionally recommended the names of Dr. Kambhampati Hari Babu, an MLA from Andhra Pradesh, and Dr. B.R. Chauhan, a legal expert. The names of M.S. Swaminathan and B.G. Verghese are also doing the rounds.

So far, there has been no indication of the involvement of people's representatives of the stature of Anna Hazare, Rajinder Singh, Medha Patkar, Sunita Narain, Himanshu Thakkar or Ashish Kothari in the 10-year-long project, which will displace thousands of people, apart from affecting flora and fauna.

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