Former judges pumped up marks, and how!

The public hearings of the committee — comprising former Supreme Court judge S.C. Agrawal and former Delhi HC judge P.K. Bahri — appointed five months ago by the Supreme Court to probe all the allotments exposed last year, have so far dealt with only two of the 20 scam-affected States: Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The hearings on the Haryana allotments will begin on June 3.

But the pattern of evidence that has already emerged establishes the complicity of retired HC judges, who were appointed as chairmen of the 59 DSBs across the country, in the allotments that seem to have been made on extraneous considerations.

The whole scam is based on an arbitrary marking system by the DSB chairmen, under one or the other of the five heads for evaluating the eligibility of the candidates — personality, capability to arrange finances, educational qualification, capability to provide infrastructure and general assessment. As the DSB records were sealed after the allotment, this is the first time that the details of the marking system have emerged.

The most important candidate to have been examined till now is Akali Dal MP Tarlochan Singh Tur who was selected for a BPCL pump at Sheron, Punjab in December 2000. The DSB chairman who decided in Tur’s favour was former judge of the Punjab and Haryana HC, M.R. Agnihotri, who is currently facing a CBI case of disproportionate assets.

But at the time of Tur’s selection, the marks awarded by the chairman had the same weight as those allotted by each of the other two DSB members, who were oil company officers.

If Tur still managed to get the pump, it was because one of the two members was also partial to him. Both Agnihotri and that member gave Tur an edge, ironically, under the criterion of educational qualification, although he did not study beyond the higher secondary level. This proved fatal to the next candidate empanelled by the DSB, Kavita Wadhwa, who lost by an overall margin of 10 marks despite having BA and BEd degrees.

As it happened, a month after Tur’s selection, the Petroleum Ministry issued fresh guidelines which doubled the weight of the marks awarded by the chairman as compared to the other two members. That set the stage for someone like Agnihotri to swing the selections on his own without the collusion of either of his colleagues in the DSB.

A case in point is the selection, in May 2001, of Anurag Singh Thakur, son of the then Himachal Chief Minister, P.K. Dhumal, for a pump at Mand in Jallandhar district. What clinched the issue for Thakur was a 40-mark lead, given by Agnihotri, over his nearest rival, Manjit Singh, under the criterion of ‘‘capability to provide infrastructure’’.

This despite the fact that Manjit had better credentials because he offered his ancestral property on GT Road in Mand while Thakur only undertook to arrange suitable land within two months of being issued a letter of intent.

On a petition filed by Manjit, the Punjab &Haryana HC quashed the allotment to Thakur in March 2002, holding that his selection was ‘‘made possible solely because the chairman had kept a difference of 40 marks between the two candidates’’ and that it was ‘‘influenced by extraneous reasons.’’

The DSBs have also been lax in enforcing the basic rule that the gross income of an eligible candidate should not have exceeded Rs 2 lakh per annum in the previous year. Most of the politically connected allottees like Tur and Thakur are finding it hard to convince the committee in this regard.

Although Thakur admits to being a director of two private companies in Punjab, the IT returns the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association chief produced show that his gross annual income in the year 1999-2000 was a measly Rs 1,89,608. This was trashed by a ‘‘field investigation report’’ by the oil company, showing that Thakur had Rs 8,99,436 in one bank account alone at the time of his selection.

More astounding is Tur’s justification for not producing his IT returns. He asserted before the committee that he was exempted from IT, not only for his agricultural income but also for the salary and allowances he drew as an MP.

Tur claimed that his gross annual income from both sources was only Rs 1.70 lakh. The committee also questioned Tur about the requirement that the selected candidate has to be ‘‘a full-time working dealer’’ and that if he was employed, he should produce proof of acceptance of his resignation by his employer.

Vindicating the committee’s concern of his inability to spare enough time for the pump, Tur’s reply was late by over a month because, as he said, he was away in Geneva attending a WTOs-related meeting.