Govt has earned Rs 4.48 lakh crore from disinvestment since 2014. With inflation factored in, this still represents 57% of all disinvestment proceeds since 1991.
Days after the Union budget was presented in February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed that the “government has no business to do business”.
“Its [government’s] job is to think about food for the poor, make houses and toilets for them, get them clean drinking water, make health facilities available to them, make roads, to think about the small farmers. This is my priority,” he told ANI in an interview.
While the second part of his statement about what the government’s focus should be is a work in progress, disinvestment data for the last three decades shows that his commitment to getting the government out of business is not empty talk.
TCA Sharad Raghavan 