The Supreme Court-appointed committee, which confirmed an investigation in 2002 by The Indian Express into irregular allotment of petrol pumps and called for cancellation of 296 allotments of the 409 it scrutinised, has recommended that MPs should not be allotted dealership of petroleum products.If such allotments are made, MPs should resign from Parliament before taking up the dealership, the two-judge committee has stated.In its report, the committee said an MP has to attend Parliament and meetings of parliamentary committees. This will result in long absence from the place of allotment of the retail outlet.‘‘They cannot thus run the dealership/distributorship themselves but have to engage employees to supervise work. They, therefore, do not fulfill the necessary condition of ‘full time working dealer’,’’ the report said.The committee felt that an MP, in the event of being allotted dealership/distributorship of petroleum products, should resign from the membership of Parliament before he/she could avail such allotment.Recommendations of the panel were quoted in an affidavit filed by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in response to a court query on the supply position of petrol, diesel and cooking gas in allotted areas in the event the court decides to cancel the allotments termed illegal by the committee.The Ministry said out of the 296 allotments not approved by the two-judge committee, only 201 dealerships have been commissioned and 95 were yet to be commissioned.In its affidavit, the Ministry said the committee has inferred that in the matter of evaluation of merits of the candidates, there had been arbitrary marking as there was wide variation in the marks given by the chairman of the dealer selection board (DSB) and marks of other members of DSB.Accepting the principles adopted by the committee in scrutinizing the tainted allotments, the Ministry in its affidavit said the cancelled retail outlets, where the land belonged to the company, should either be operated by the oil company or the ‘‘nearest best available existing dealer’’ till a regular dealer was appointed in accordance with the dealer selection policy.In cases where the land belonged to the allottee, the latter should be asked to transfer the land to the company and in case of refusal the oil company would have no option but to close the retail outlet, it said. But it promised to increase the supply to the existing dealers in the area to meet the shortfall caused by the closure of the retail outlet.On the LPG and kerosene dealerships, the Ministry said that those not approved by the two-judge committee should be cancelled and the affected area could be catered by the neighbouring dealers without causing any hardship to the public at large.The Supreme Court, after going through the affidavit filed by the Ministry, posted the matter for further hearing after four weeks.
