Sell-off: PM calls meet ahead of CCD

NEW DELHI: The Prime Minister will chair an informal meeting of key ministers on Saturday, ahead of the Cabinet Committee on Disinvestment, now slated to be held later in the day, in an effort to hammer out a compromise formula on whether to follow the strategic sale route for privatising the oil sector PSUs HPCL and BPCL.
With Cabinet ministers, including those belonging to the BJP, holding divergent views on this, the PM has been constrained to call a second meeting on the subject this week.
The only difference is that the PM, Deputy PM L K Advani, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh and Defence Minister George Fernandes, who attended the first meeting, will be joined this time by Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie and Petroleum Minister Ram Naik as well.
The meeting will decide whether the CCD will be held on Saturday. However, sources added that the Deputy PM, who was assigned the task of talking to the various ministers concerned separately, was confident that a formula would be worked out.
On Friday, Naik, who met Fernandes in Zurich last week, spoke to Advani on the phone soon after he returned from Brazil. Predictably, he opposed the strategic sale of equity in oil PSUs, the line that has been taken by Fernandes.
Naik also spent the greater part of the day closeted with the petroleum secretary and other senior officials to finalise his presentation for Saturday.
Adding to the government''s woes, the RSS announced that oil was a strategic sector and should remain under state control.
RSS spokesperson M G Vaidya, questioning the rationale for privatising the strategic oil PSUs, asked the government to re-examine whether profitmaking PSUs should be privatised, as well as answer several questions, including fears about the creation of private monopolies.
Saying that while the RSS was not opposed to disinvestment in principle and was against "governmentalisation of all means of production and distribution", Vaidya stressed that the government alone should have a role to play in strategic sectors such as railways, defence production and the oil sector.
He also said that before any part of the public sector was privatised, the government should answer some key questions:
•Whether profit-making PSUs should be privatised and public revenue allowed to go into private hands;
•Whether it could ensure that private monopolies were not created;
•Take into account the interests of PSU workers;
•If 25 per cent or so shares are sold to private companies, how will the government ensure these enterprises don''t control the whole industry.