The Supreme Court on Thursday questioned Centre’s power to allocate coal blocks to companies, saying it has a lot of “legal explanation” to do as the statutory Act empowers only the states to undertake this task.

The apex court said that the Centre cannot undermine the Mines and Minerals Act which has given no power to it to allocate coal block to companies.
A bench of justices R M Lodha and J Chelameswar asked the government to go through other legislations particularly the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, to find out whether it is empowered to allocate the resources.