From the Press
The Great Indain Gas Robbery
- Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
We are publishing here excerpts from an article appeared on the pages of EPW,
December 5 issue. This articles shows how the big bourgeoisie in India thrives on robbing
the public assets and the character of Indian big bourgeoisie as not only comprador but
also bureaucratic.
- Editor
I t is a dispute without any
precedent, at least not in this
country. India’s largest public sector
company and the biggest producer
of oil and gas, the Oil and Natural
Gas Corporation (ONGC), has
accused the country’s biggest
privately-owned company, Reliance
Industries Limited (RIL), of stealing
gas from one of its reservoirs
located beneath the ocean bed in
the Bay of Bengal off the coast of
Andhra Pradesh along the basin of
the Krishna and Godavari Rivers.
What is worse, the Ministry of
Petroleum and Natural Gas
(MoPNG) in the Government of
India has been accused of being
complicit in the alleged theft.
The dispute between ONGC
and RIL is more than two years old.
After months of legal wrangling, the
warring companies agreed on an
independent consulting firm based
in the United States (US) which
would give its technical findings in
the dispute. This consultant,
DeGolyer and MacNaughton
(D&M) based out of Dallas, Texas,
in the US, submitted an interim
report on 9 October which stated
that natural gas worth $1.7 billion
or over Rs 11,000 crore had been
extracted by RIL in an
unauthorised manner from an area
on the ocean bed where gas
extraction was supposed to be
controlled by ONGC.
Earlier, in May 2014, ONGC
had alleged in the Delhi High Court
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that gas worth almost $5 billion or
aroundRs 30,000 crore had been
stolen by RIL in violation of the
production sharing contract that
the company had signed with the
Government of India represented
by the MoPNG. Whereas the last
has not yet been heard about this
dispute, it is the biggest one of its
kind in India and an important link
in a long series of controversies
relating to the Reliance Group’s
operations to extract gas in the
Krishna–Godavari (KG) basin.
The interim report of D&M on
the technical aspects of the dispute
between ONGC and RIL stated
that around nine billion cubic
metres (bcm) of natural gas may
have flown out from ONGC’s block
in the KG basin to RIL’s adjoining
reservoir. It was claimed th