On Strategies and Limitations

Privatization of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) increasingly dominated the policy canvas for the better part of a decade until the coming of the UPA coalition. The previous BJP-led government made sweeping privatization of non-core SOEs its mission, with fair number of sales, until its denouement with the HPCL/ BPCL controversy. Thereafter, Manmohan Singh’s government pulled back the privatization reins. In this whole period, one would have thought a plethora of debate and analysis would emerge around the merits and conditions favouring private sector operation. Sadly, ideology and turf-war politics have dominated the discourse. On the one hand, the Disinvestment Ministry boasted about the profitability of strategic sales of SOEs, while the Left lamented the garage sale of well-performing public assets. The only substantive questions debated were,