Finance Minister rejects ‘selling family silver’ charge

Mumbai, February 7

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday rejected the Opposition’s charge of “selling family assets” through the Budget stress on privatisation, terming it a “lazy allegation”.

All previous governments had done disinvestment in the past, and the Narendra Modi regime had formulated a clear policy on which companies to be divested and the strategic sectors that not to be touched rather than doing one company sell-off at a time, she said in an address to business honchos here.

The Budget proposals to divest stakes, which includes the sale of two public sector banks and a general insurer, have been panned by the Opposition. “It is not what the Opposition says about selling family silver, it’s not at all,” she said.

“Family silver should be strengthened, it should be our ‘takat’ (strength)… because you’ve spread it so thinly, there are many of them (PSUs) that are not able to survive and the few that can perform do not get due attention. Our aim is to prime them through this policy. You need them, you need them to scale up so that they meet the aspirations of growing India,” she said.

She said the idea was to ensure that there were a few state-run companies that achieved scale to deliver on the aspirations of a country like ours.

For many years, taxpayer money has been spent on recapitalising inefficient state-run companies and it is the government’s intent to ensure that the available resources are spent in the best possible manner, which can be done only by reducing the number of such enterprises, she said. — PTI