The Supreme Court will give on Thursday its advisory opinion on the Presidential Reference moved by the Union government on whether all natural resources should be auctioned transparently, in line with its ruling in the 2G scam case, or the directive should be confined to spectrum auction.
On August 16, at the end of marathon arguments from July 10, a five-judge Constitution Bench reserved orders on the reference moved by the government on April 12. The Bench comprises Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices D.K. Jain, J.S. Khehar, Dipak Misra and Ranjan Gogoi. The Centre for Public Interest Litigation had argued that the court should not permit the government to invoke the advisory jurisdiction under Article 143 of the Constitution to circumvent inconvenient judgments like the 2G ruling. The present reference was a convenient or expedient exercise to overcome an inconvenient ruling.
Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy had produced documents to prove that the reference was unnecessary as the government had accepted 69 of the 81 recommendations of the Ashok Chawla Committee that suggested natural resources be auctioned. However, the Centre informed the court that it had not done so.
