New Delhi:
There was chaos in the Rajya Sabha today as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took a question on the ISRO-Devas deal.
Seeking to clear the air on the controversy over the allocation of S-Band spectrum, the Prime Minister said the deal to allocate transponder frequency on two satellites to the Indian arm of a US firm never came to his office for approval.
"There is no question of Prime Minister's Office being asked to approve the deal. It never came to that level," Singh said.
This provoked outraged responses from the Opposition, which demanded to know how it was possible that the Prime Minister's Office did not know of it.
The PM was intervening during Question Hour in Rajya Sabha when Opposition members sought to know who in the PMO was responsible for approving the deal between Devas Multimedia Pvt Ltd (the Indian arm of Forge Advisors of US) and Antrix Corp, the commercial arm of ISRO.
Antrix, he said, is a commercial arm of ISRO and in normal course its deal with Devas does not go to the government for approval.
Only the launch of satellite "did come to the Cabinet," he said. But the Devas-Antrix deal "was not mentioned in the Cabinet note."
To this Arun Jaitley, the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, said, "Now are we to understand that when all this was happening, the PMO, despite the participation of all senior officials including the MoS, was completely unaware that a valuable public asset is being placed in the hands of an Indian company, which is the arm of an American company...and an inadequate consideration and we were completely unaware of this." (With PTI Inputs)