Economic Survey 2022: Air India sale will boost privatisation drive, says Govt

The Government of India has hailed the privatisation of Air India as an important milestone in terms of not only generating disinvestment proceeds but also for boosting the Centre’s privatisation drive, as mentioned in the Economic Survey for the fiscal 2021-22. It further said that The New Public Sector Enterprise Policy and Asset Monetisation Strategy reaffirm the government’s commitment towards privatisation and strategic disinvestment of PSEs.   “The New Public Sector Enterprise Policy and Asset Monetisation Strategy introduced by the Government reaffirm its commitment towards privatisation and strategic disinvestment of Public Sector Enterprises. The privatisation of Air India has been particularly important, not only in terms of garnering disinvestment proceeds but also for boosting the privatisation drive,” the Economic Survey tabled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman read.   It further said that the Air India handover, coupled with a boost to digital infrastructure and structural reforms in telecommunications, will have a positive impact on the pace of recovery while adding that “further growth is likely to continue due to consistent efforts of the government to bring in various structural, fiscal and infrastructural reforms in addition to a slew of measures/schemes like the production linked incentive scheme (PLI) to support industries.”   Disinvestment of Air India, however, is just one step that the Government of India has taken to boost the aviation sector. Among other steps taken to boost aviation sector is the privatisation, modernisation and expansion of airports. The Aviation Ministry has planned to privatise six airports under Airports Authority of India (AAI) – Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Mangaluru and Thiruvananthapuram for privatisation, modernisation and expansion.   The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has awarded the aforementioned airports to Adani Enterprises (AEL) for operations, management and development under the public private partnership (PPP) mode for a 50 year lease period. As per the Economic Survey, the government has earmarked 25 AAI airports for asset monetisation between 2022-2025 under the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP).   These are Agartala, Amritsar, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Calicut, Coimbatore, Chennai, Dehradun, Hubli, Imphal, Indore, Jodhpur, Madurai, Nagpur, Patna, Rajahmundry, Ranchi, Raipur, Surat, Trichy, Udaipur, Vadodara, Vijayawada and Varanasi.