the goan I network
PANAJI
The Goa Government is expected to take a final decision on whether to file a review petition on mining before the Supreme Court over the next two days, with sources indicating that despite senior counsel Harish Salve opining that the chances of the petition being successful were ‘close to zero’ the government could push ahead and file the review petition.
Highly placed sources in the government have told The Goan, that the opinion of the senior counsel will be placed before the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar for a decision and, depending on his decision, the matter will then be placed before the Cabinet for its approval.
“Salve has agreed that there are several strong arguments that the state has going in its favour, but despite that, Salve has said that the position of the state is unlikely to find any favour with the Supreme Court,” the source said.
The fact that the petition is likely to come up before the same bench that initially passed the order is the cause for pessimism.
It is likely that the government will persist and file a review petition, clinging on to whatever little hope is there, as the state has nothing to lose by filing the review petition.
It is hoped that the Supreme Court will further clarify some of the observations it had made in its earlier judgement cancelling Goa’s leases.
Once a decision is taken, the file will be sent to the Attorney General of India K K Venugopal who is then expected to file the review petition.
The state government is expected to make a case that it has followed every direction issued by the Supreme Court in the 2014 order and has put several systems in place to monitor and track the movement of ore to ensure that there is no illegal mining, and that the Supreme Court’s mandate that a cap on extraction of ore be imposed at 20 million metric tons was religiously followed.
“In the Supreme Court’s previous order they have mandated that the extraction of iron ore be capped at 20 million metric tons per annum. What was the rationale behind this figure? It implied that if you restrict your extraction to 20 MMT, all other concerns especially that of environmental regulation is taken care of because there is a cap,” the source said.
The government will also argue that the Supreme Court’s observation that “the decision was taken only to augment the revenues of the State…” was difficult to comprehend because on one hand the Supreme Court was saying that the government needed to maximise revenue through either an auction or any other means that maximizes revenue but on the other hand they are saying that the decision was taken only to augment revenues.
