New Delhi, March 1 (IANS) A motion for setting up a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) to probe the telecom policy and the 2G spectrum scam was moved in the Rajya Sabha Tuesday by Communications Minister Kapil Sibal.
A total of 10 members were nominated from the upper house for the JPC which already has 20 members from Lok Sabha.
‘A joint committee of the houses consisting of 30 members, 20 from Lok Sabha and 10 from Rajya Sabha, be constituted to examine policy prescriptions and their interpretation thereafter by successive governments, including decisions of the union cabinet and the consequences thereof, in the allocation and pricing of telecom licences and spectrum from 1998 to 2009,’ Sibal said moving the motion.
P.J. Kurien, Jayanthi Natarajan and Praveen Rashtrapal (Congress), Tiruchi Siva (DMK), Yogendra P. Trivedi (Nationalist Congress Party), S.S. Ahluwalia and Ravi Shankar Prasad (Bharatiya Janata Party), Ramchandra Prasad Singh (Janata Dal-United), Satish Chandra Misra (Bahujan Samaj Party) and Sitaram Yechury (Communist Party of India-Marxist) are the members of the upper house in the JPC.
The name of Natarajan was included at the last moment replacing Abhishek Manu Singhvi after Singhvi recused himself from the JPC, saying that he had appeared for a cellular operator in the court as a senior advocate.
The Lok Sabha nominated 20 members to the committee Thursday last week. The members from lower house in the committee are V. Kishore Chandra Deo, Paban Singh Ghatowar, Jai Prakash Agarwal, Deepender Singh Hooda, P.C. Chacko, Manish Tewari, Nirmal Khatri, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury (Congress), T.R. Baalu (DMK), Kalyan Banerjee (Trinamool Congress), Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Harin Pathak, Gopinath Munde (BJP), Sharad Yadav (JD-U), Dara Singh Chauhan (BSP), Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party), Gurudas Dasgupta (Communist Party of India), Arjun Charan Sethi (Biju Janata Dal) and M. Thambidurai (AIADMK).
A member from the committee will now be nominated as the chairperson by the Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. Sources says Kerala MP Chacko is likely to be named the chairperson.
The report of the committee is to be tabled in the parliament by the end of monsoon session.
