“Niti Aayog is confident of breaching the disinvestment target for the second year running and raising over Rs 1 lakh crore in the current fiscal”, a government official reported us.

Our sources reported that a few days back in this month Niti Aayog advised to lower down the stake of government in all non-strategic state-run companies below 50% in order to raise the revenues and providing better functional autonomy to the companies for better performance. Beside this Niti even explained the reason behind this suggestion and said that this action will provide hike to the government stakes in non-strategic state-run companies, as there are more than 250 CPSEs including NTPC, Power Grid and Steel Authority of India where the government has more than 51% of share.

On such a suggestion and proposal by Niti Aayog, one of the government official shared his views and said that it will not at all be fair to remodel the ownership and management structure of the companies where the government shares are higher because many of these companies are performing very well and their performance will get affected by such unfair actions. The official even added that ” government holding in several PSUs was much more than 50% and it would not There was adequate headroom to raise revenue by decreasing shareholding without bringing it down to 49%”.

Apart from this the government is moving ahead with the disinvestment programme and is very confident that similar to previous year this year also it will exceed its disinvestment target and reach above 1 lac crore.
The above government official further continued that laying back the privatization plan of Air India won’t have any impact on government’s disinvestment programme.

“We are not too worried over the delay of Air India stake sale. There are other companies and the government will exceed the disinvestment target this year as well,” said the above government official.
Besides all these the finance ministry is at its urge to introduce the second tranche of Bharat-22 exchange-traded fund (ETF) on 19th June 2018 with a lot of positive hope this ETF will help raise up to Rs 8,400 crore from the markets. And to add in the series the government has initiated the process of strategic disinvestment in 23 CPSEs, and will soon introduce some more exchange traded fund (ETF) offers including debt ETF.