NEW DELHI-Destruction of Fertiliser Corporation

NEW DELHI Destruction of Fertiliser Corporation B M THE long pending move to break up the Fertiliser Corporation of India has at last been pushed through. The entrenched bureaucracy in the Petroleum and Chemicals Ministry which had been conducting a running battle with the management of the FCI, in particular its professional-technical leadership, is jubilant and is preening itself for having ensured that key posts in the public sector fertiliser industry will fall into its lap with the creation of four separate corporations into which the FCI is to be split. What came as a surprise, however, was the unusual alacrity with Which minister H N Bahuguna announced the decision in Parliament while presenting his demands for grants in the current budget session, Bahuguna is known to have been far too busy otherwise to pay much attention to the work of his ministry since his assumption of office, what with the strains over the merger of CFD into the Janata party and the subsequent keen interest he had to take in the state assembly elections, in particular in his home state of UP. He had absolutely no time to apply his mind to the scheme for the break up of the FCI which the top bureaucracy in the ministry had prepared nearly two years ago but which, in the face of strong opposition to it from many quarters, including from inside the government, it had been obliged to shelve for so long. The scheme was suddenly resurrected by the bureaucracy when it saw that there was a clear vacuum at the political leadership level and it felt confident that any close questioning of the scheme could be avoided.