BY NITYASH JEET KAUR
TIA
NEW DELHI: The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Dr Murali Manohar Joshi on Monday said that he had received a letter from Prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh offering to depose before the committee, and said that appropriate decision would be taken on it at appropriate time.
"There are reports that CAG Vinod Rai had been summoned by the PAC to dispose before it on 2G spectrum scam. This is a wrong impression and I would like to correct this. He is our expert and he guides us on such matters. He is part of the PAC and attends the meeting in that capacity," Dr Joshi clarified.
To a question whether the committee was satisfied with his explanations, Dr Joshi said that CAG is a part of our accounts committee and gave us three models of calculating the losses and profit to the PAC.
" The minimum loss is around 57,666 lakh thousand crore and the maximum loss is 1.76 lah thousand crore. He told the committee that CAG goes into implementation of the policies but does not go into policies and how they were set up. So far 27 meetings of PAC have been held on various issues and 8 of them between July and December after I took over as the chairman from Gopinath Munde. Next meeting of the PAC would he held sometimes in January 2011 ," Dr Joshi said.
To a question whether the PAC is only going through accounting procedures, Dr Johsi said it was going beyond that and is also going through performance and implementation of the public money.
" We cannot directly summon a minister but we can tell the Lok Sabha speaker the speaker takes a decision on this issue”, he said. Without naming A Raja he said that the committee has received huge amount of files from PM’s office and other sources we would go through them and take a decision. If required he would be intimated, We will do things according to the provisions of PAC, he said.
CAG Vinod Rai told PAC that they had started from 2003 onwards because that was time when the then government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee had issued the guidelines for telecom sector. " We are not bound by the CAG report. If required we can go back to 2001 as well. If we feel that we should go back to 2001 then we would do the same", Dr Joshi indicated.
He parried questions whether there would be any need for JPC once they submit a report. " I am not going to answer any question about what government says, what congress says or what the opposition parties say," he said.