Bombay high court seeks CAG’s performance audit report on sugar factories. The Bombay high court on Monday asked the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) to submit “performance audit report” of management of cooperative sugar factories in Maharashtra for the period between April 2007 and March 2010.
In response to another PIL, high court also asked regional provident fund commissioner to launch prosecution against those sugar factories which have failed to remit PF amounts to government repeatedly. CAG is to submit the report “as expeditiously as possible, and preferably within six weeks,” said the division bench of Justice BH Marlapalle and Justice UD Salvi, which was hearing the PIL filed by Ashok Kulkarni.
Kulkarni, who works as project consultant for sugar factories, had written a letter to the High Court in 2006, pointing out wide-spread malpractises in the coperative sector. It was turned into a PIL. Among other things, Kulkarni had complained that government was allowing new cooperative factories to come up in the areas where there was no sugarcane available.
The high court, on July 12, 2006, had asked government not to allow new factories to come up, or existing ones to expand the capacity. But today, Kulkarni alleged that several cooperative factories were getting around this ban by starting “unit 2”, which would be, in effect, a new factory.
PTI