Govt to miss disinvestment target serially for fourth time in FY’17
With complete dimming of disinvestment in the current financial year, the government is likely to drastically scale down targets for realisation of resources from Public Sector Units’ (PSUs) stake sale in the upcoming budget for 2016-17.
“With just about a month to go for the budget presentation and the window of opportunity having been missed earlier in the year, there is no hope that the over-optimistic disinvestment target of Rs.69,500 crore for the current financial year could be reached,” said Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) in its latest release.
Hopefully, the Finance Ministry will desist from setting an un-realistic disinvestment yet again for the financial year 2016-17, ASSOCHAM paper on budget expectations pointed out.
“Oddness against the equity market and a grim in world economic prospects are resulting in less hope of a recovery in the financial markets in 2016. Thus, it is expected that next budget would be much more realistic in getting the revenue budget right,” said D S Rawat, Secretary General, ASSOCHAM.
According to the paper, government is likely to face a shortfall of at least Rs.55,000 crore with regard to disinvestment target in the current fiscal, with higher taxable and non-taxable as prime reasons.
While only Rs.12700 crore has been raised so far through PSU disinvestments in the current fiscal, the remaining months are expected to witness Rs.2000-3000 crore, thus resulting in ‘government missing its target for the fourth consecutive financial year’, pointed the study.
In 2013-14, the government raised Rs.15,819 crore against the target of Rs.40,000 crore and in 2014-15, Rs.24,277 crore was raised against the target of Rs.36,925 crore.
In fact, the disinvestment target for the financial year 2015-16 had been increased by 88% over the last financial year to Rs.69,500 crore with the objective of generating non-debt resources to both boost public investment and contain fiscal deficit, the paper noted.
January 29, 2016 | 04:20pm IST
to success.