Scam Is In The Air!

This may well turn out to be the Mother of all scams. According to a latest CAG report, the country could have lost trillions of rupees since independence because of the failure of successive governments to auction or tax the most important natural resource: Air.

Using a complex set of formulae, the federal auditor concluded that greedy corporates made a killing by using the air freely without having to pay anything to the government. The private sector should have been brought under “pay-as-you-go” regime where the organisations pay air tax on the income they earn.

“These profit-driven private companies have been breathing it easy, quite literally. Instead, the governments should be breathing down their necks. How can we afford to lose such an important source of revenue?” the C AG said in a report titled “ConAir, an anatomy of national loot.”

The CAG proposed a scientific formula to calculate the total volume and density of air that a private firm uses depending on the area it occupies, number of people it employs and its productivity. “Once the private entrepreneurs submit project reports, the governments concerned should have gone for either auction route or calculated an appropriate tax structure for utilizing the crucial natural resource,” the report said.

By not doing so, the nation has suffered an incalculable loss, the CAG said and pegged the figure at 65 ⁹⁶⁰ trillion rupees. “We are not here to air-brush the economy but to clear the air about what we think is the biggest scam in Independent India,” it said.

However, a junior CAG field official, who retired recently, disputed the figure and the manner in which it was arrived at. He said he had suggested a much lower figure of 12 ²³⁰ trillion but was overruled by his superiors.

Meanwhile, the Union Minister for Countering Scam Reports, Kapil Sibal, dubbed the loss as “notional and presumptive”.  “Clearly, the CAG has overstepped its brief and transgressed into the policy making area which is the prerogative of the government,” Sibal argued.

The BJP had initially wanted to seize the opportunity to attack the UPA government for perpetrating yet another mega scam but soon realized that the “ConAir” report talked about the cumulative losses since independence.