Progress in privatisation not quite satisfactory: Pant

NEW DELHI: The progress in privatisation in India has not been quite satisfactory and has encountered significant roadblocks making the process slow and painful, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman K C Pant said on Thursday.
The process of privatisation was still facing issues relating to method of disinvestment, or how to optimise the basic objective of privatisation, Pant said while inaugurating an international conference on privatisation and corporate governance of State-owned assets organised by ICSSR and OECD.
"The Indian experience suggests that the targets of disinvestment have often not been met, and the process has not resulted in significant improvement of efficiencies in these units" Pant said.
"The progress in privatisation has not been quite satisfactory in most of the countries in South Asia, including India," he said adding that privatisation had encountered significant road blocks, making the process "slow and painful".
Stating that there were no templates which could be readily adopted, Pant said the concept of strategic sale has been criticised particularly in regard to the sale price of the real assets of the PSUs.