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Journalism of Courage
It’s messier than an oil slick. And it’s going to take more than a rapid clean-up effort to tackle the latest spill at the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation’s (ONGC) nerve centre in Mumbai.
The sludge washed up onto the coast last week when all the foreign offshore experts working on ONGC’s Rs 400-crore Single Buoy Mooring System and other rusty offshore support vessels pulled out of the oil firm’s exploration wells at Bombay High after months of uncertainty. Experts say production could be hit. The 10 international experts, mostly diving superintendents, decided to leave the country after they had not been paid for five months. Indian divers and other marine crew too have not received their wages since October last year, and have been on strike since January.
‘There are irregularities in management of the contract on the part of ONGC officials also,’ said Sharma in the report. ONGC C&MD Subir Raha in his letter ordering the probe and dated November 9, 2002 points out that the ONGC officers involved were ‘forcing junior officers to pass invoices without verifying the claims, and flouting RBI guidelines’.
Sources in ONGC disclosed that at least six sub-sea pipe lines carrying around 40,000 barrels of oil have developed snags as a fallout of the poor maintenance. And by conservative estimates, the loss due to stoppage of work has cost ONGC around Rs 110 crore, just on downtime since last October.
A senior company official denied any problems. ‘‘I have checked with the concerned officer and there is no production loss and the sub-sea pipes are not leaking,’’ said spokeswoman Madhulika Verman.
