“Those who sinned, those who looted Jharkhand, they have no shame,” said Narendra Modi. (Source: Express Photo by Manob Chowdhury) “Those who sinned, those who looted Jharkhand, they have no shame,” said Narendra Modi. (Source: Express Photo by Manob Chowdhury)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that no one from the previous government has yet apologised for what he termed as a loot of the country’s coal wealth.

“Those who sinned, those who looted Jharkhand, they have no shame. They have troubled the nation so much,” said Modi. “Has anyone from the previous government apologised yet?” he asked the crowd, which roared back in the negative.

Modi was in Hazaribagh for the third time in under a year to inaugurate the 70 km Koderma-Hazaribagh rail line and flag-off a DEMU service between the two stations. Including the Hazaribagh railway station, the stretch has seven new stations and two halts. However, he chose to dedicate most of his 28-minute speech to the ongoing e-auction of coal.

Modi emphasised on the fact that the auction, which is still in its initial stages, is all set to go well over the Rs. 1.86 lakh crore loss estimate that the CAG had made in 2012. “We have auctioned off 15 coal blocks to date, but we have already received Rs. 75,000 crore,” said the PM, making sure the crowd repeated the figure after him.

Modi said that only two of Jharkhand’s 40 blocks to go under the hammer has been auctioned yet, but they have already fetched Rs. 12,500 crore. “This money used to be looted…. Even the CAG has been proven wrong,” said the PM. He told his audience that they had lost their coal bit had not received any money in return to date. “When the CAG took his report to the Parliament, some people in the government had come up with The Theory of Zero back then,” he said, recalling the UPA-II government’s claim of zero loss.

Earlier, Modi had words of praise for former Union Minister and Hazaribagh MP Yashwant Sinha. Sinha’s son Jayant Sinha is the sitting MP of Hazaribagh. Telling the crowd that Sinha had championed the much-awaited project – whose foundation stone was laid in 1999 by the then-PM A.B. Vajpayee – Modi said that it was a sign of how the country had progressed in 60 years since Independence: “Hazaribagh is not small panchayat, it is a large town…. I was observing Yashwant Sinha since arriving here today. He looks happier than the day he took oath as a minister.”

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