New Delhi, Aug. 23: The government today told the Supreme Court it had not accepted a high-powered committee’s recommendation to allocate all natural resources through market-related processes, and said a Rajya Sabha reply that created confusion was now being corrected.

“The (Rajya Sabha) statement and the answer that the ‘government has accepted (the) 69 recommendations of the Ashok Chawla committee’ are not accurate,” the government said in a written submission to the top court.

“The correct position is that it was decided that the 69 recommendations would be pursued by the individual ministries in a timely manner. (The) department of economic affairs (finance ministry) is taking steps to correct the answer in the Rajya Sabha.”

Chawla, a former finance secretary, headed a committee set up by the Centre in February 2011 to suggest ways of efficient and transparent distribution of scarce resources such as telecom spectrum.

His report came out soon after the apex court, in February this year, directed the government to follow an auction-only policy in allocating natural resources while scrapping 122 spectrum licences granted on a first-come-first-served basis during A. Raja’s tenure as telecom minister.

In April, the government moved a presidential reference seeking clarification whether the ruling applied only to spectrum or all natural resources. Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy then asked the top court not to answer the reference on the ground that the Centre had already accepted the Chawla panel recommendations.

Today, the government claimed that the August 9 Rajya Sabha reply by a junior minister to an unstarred question only reflected the position of the group of ministers (GoM) that had considered the Chawla report.

The true position, it claimed, was reflected in the decision of a meeting held by the Prime Minister on May 25 that all “69 recommendations agreed to by the GoM would be pursued for implementation by individual ministries in a timely manner”.

“The reference to (the) government having accepted the recommendations was inaccurate because the decision taken at the meeting chaired by the PM was that the 69 recommendations would be pursued by individual ministries in a timely manner,” the government said.

The government further claimed that the Chawla committee had recommended transparency in non-market mechanisms too, implying that such mechanisms were acceptable in certain contexts.

“The general approach of the committee is towards using competitive market-related mechanisms that are open and transparent for allocation... but the considerations of effectiveness and sustainability may require non-market mechanism and the committee has recommended transparency in these mechanisms too,” it said.

Even if the panel had suggested only market-related mechanisms, this could not be seen as an auction-only recommendation, the Centre said.