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Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka said that he was open to an inquiry into all contracts related to Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) since 2014, amid recent corruption allegations over the tender allocations for a coal block in Naini, Odisha.
Journalist Vemuri Radhakrishna of ABN Andhrajyothy had alleged that Bhatti Vikramarka, who holds the Energy and Finance portfolios, had altered the tender qualification norms so their favoured company could get an unfair advantage. He had claimed that Bhatti had introduced a new requirement for bidders to obtain site visit certificates.
Opposition parties have demanded an inquiry into the allegations. In a letter to Union Minister For Coal and Mines G Kishan Reddy, Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader T Harish Rao demanded a judicial inquiry or a CBI probe into alleged irregularities in SCCL under the Congress government. Kishan Reddy, a BJP MP from Telangana, sent a two-member team from the Union Coal Ministry to investigate the Naini coal block tenders issue.
After the Andhrajyothy report was published, Bhatti Vikramarka said that he had directed SCCL to cancel the tender for the Naini coal block.
On January 24, the Deputy CM addressed the media and responded to Harish Rao and Kishan Reddy’s push for an inquiry. “I am open to inquiry on all Singareni contracts from 2014,” he said.
Calling Radhakrishna’s report false, "poisonous writing”, Bhatti said it was part of propaganda against the Congress government to benefit certain people with vested interests.
He said that tender conditions are not decided by the Energy Minister but by an autonomous SCCL board. Moreover, the requirement of a site visit certificate was proposed to SCCL as early as 2018 by the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute (CMPDI) which comes under the Union Coal Ministry, he said.
He also said that site visit requirements were common across government contracts, and not something exclusively brought in at SCCL after he became Deputy CM, as suggested by the Andhrajyothy report.
Radhakrishna’s article, published on January 18, kicked up a political row in Telangana. He claimed that Bhatti was trying to obtain the coal mining contract on behalf of NTV Chairman Tummala Narendra Chowdary, and that the channel had carried a defamatory report on Minister Komatireddy Venkat Reddy whose family was competing for the same contract.
Watch the Let me Explain episode on the NTV controversy and what it says about mainstream news media in Telangana: