The triple 'R' of Budget 2025: Rethink, Refocus and Redraw

The Centre's disinvestment policy appears to be marked by flip flops. If anything, there seems to be a shift towards reviving ailing PSUs.

- S MURLIDHARAN

Corporate buzzwords like zero-based budgeting and outcome budgets find resonance in the Union budget too, but one wonders whether they are used in the platitudinous sense just to instigate desk-thumping during the budget speech. Zero-based budgeting is all about making a fresh appraisal of the entire situation as against the tendency to tinker with the existing figures by adjusting them for inflation and so forth. But it is too late for the upcoming budget because such an exercise, without being bogged down by baggage, requires at least three months of freewheeling discussion by the budget makers.

What, however, can be done is to use the budget exercise to make a few paradigm changes in our policies and principles that can end dithering and show the government means business.

The Centre's disinvestment policy appears to be marked by muddled thinking and flip flops. One thought the bold move to sell the entire stakes in Air India to Tatas would be the template for future disinvestments. But there was a deafening silence in the entire last year. If anything, there appears to be a shift towards reviving ailing PSUs, as evident from the ill-advised move to infuse 11,440 crore into Rastriya Ispat Nigam Ltd. RINL is neither a strategic PSU like BARC or ISRO nor is it a well-run undertaking. It is better gotten rid of from the government stables.

Let RINL be sold strategically to a private sector steel-maker for whom it could be a perfect fit. Ditto for government hotels owned by the ITDC, the land they are sitting on alone can fetch a fortune.