Coal blocks: SC conscious of industry need, says Salve

The Supreme Court has pronounced the terms under which coal blocks were allocated post 1993 as illegal but stopped short of deallocating the blocks. The conseqence of illegality will be determined on September 1, 2014. However, the big question now is, are coal blocks headed the 2G-way? Harish Salve, Senior Advocate, SC says, in 2G, the baby was thrown out with the bath water but in coal case, court is conscious of the needs of the industry.He said: “Unless something is brazenly unconstitutional, every illegality or every irregularity, every arbitrary action does not necessarily need the court to invalidate where invalidation of an individual action will be more productive  of public mischief, or cause public injury, greater than public good. That's a well established principle.” “Some of us who have been critical of the 2G judgement criticised it on this, the baby went out of the bath water. Here the court has very carefully kept that issue open & in the course of the little bit of interaction we had post judgement; Justice Lodha even said that we are considering  because we need to be very well informed and maybe we set up a committee of three retired judges, who tell us what the ground relaities are. So the court is perfectly conscious of balancing the need of industrialization,” said Salve.