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• Jaipal Reddy, a politician with a gift for repartee and a belief in Keynesian doctrine, insists he is not presiding over regime change in the oil ministry aimed at asserting the power of the sovereign in dealings with Reliance Industries.Instead the minister, 70, who spent two decades in Third Front politics after leaving the Congress in 1977 in protest against the Emergency before returning to the grand old party in the late 1990s, asserts he is firm in supporting steps, including those by RIL, to boost investment and raise oil & gas production.

• But a vast gulf in perception separates him from many in the industry who say his industry-friendly aspirations are not reflected in the actions of key officials who deal with oil & gas companies.Private companies operating in the petroleum sector, Reliance Industries and Cairn India, have impatiently waited for approvals to increase output from exploration blocks. Cairn waited for months for permission to raise oi production by at least 25,000 barrels per day, while it took RIL more than two years to get government approval to develop new fields.

• For Reddy, who succeeded Murli Deora in January 2011, his mission is clear. "The job of a minister is to help improve production and productivity, whether it is oil, steel, cement or power," he told ET in a rare interview.With this in mind, the government cleared RIL's proposal to develop satellite fields of KG-D6, an oil & gas field off the eastern coast, overcoming resistance from a bureaucrat and the top official of the directorate general of hydrocarbons (DGH), who did not attend the meeting where the proposal would have been cleared.

• But a senior industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said RIL continues to face rough treatment from the oil ministry.Even after the field development plan was cleared, the DGH, according to this person, has imposed stern conditions that forbid a survey vessel from operating in any area of the D6 block other than the section where the satellite fields are located.

• But this makes no sense as the wells in the satellite fields need to be connected by pipeline to other parts of the block, and equipment weighing hundreds of tonnes cannot be installed without surveying the surface, the official said."The government and an oil company are partners in a production sharing contract, not adversaries. They need to work together," an oil industry official said. A Reliance source familiar with the matter confirmed this account of events.

RIL, CONG GO BACK A LONG WAY

• All this is deeply unsettling for Reliance, whose founder, the late Dhirubhai Ambani, was close to Congress Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. Reliance flourished in the 1980s, during Indira's third term (1980-84) and later under Rajiv (1984-89).

• In contrast, it clashed bitterly with VP Singh, the prime minister during 1989-90 and a rival of Rajiv, episodes that have featured in movies and books. Some even compare RIL's current equations with the Congress-led UPA government with the VP Singh era. Senior RIL officials dispute this and say the company is simply a victim of slow decisionmaking that has marked the second tenure of the UPA, a phenomenon widely described as 'policy paralysis'

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