Revive Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in national interest –EAS Sarma
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in News/ August 8,2024
E A S Sarma, Former Secretary to the Government of India questions the intent underlying the government’s policy of privatisation of the CPSEs and its likely adverse impact on the national interest. And seeks to revive the Visakha Steel plant.
Sarma has written to union finance minister on August 6 ( Tuesday ) that the way your government has been dealing with the fate of Visakha Steel Plant, creating an adversarial environment for handing over its highly valuable assets and manpower to a private company for a song, raises questions about the privatisation policy.
Earlier Sarma wrote to the Union Steel Minister about the proposed privatisation of Visakha Steel plant and said that plant could have been supported financially from the central budget to revive one of its blast furnaces but, instead, the Centre forced it to outsource it to a private company. It may be mentioned that government recently agreed to provide more than Rs 13,000 crores subsidy to a US company, Micron, to set up a semiconductor unit in Gujarat, without any requirement of the beneficiary companies generating employment and net domestic value addition”
He views that reviving a CPSE steel giant like Visakha Steel Plant will uphold the national interest far more than providing a subsidy of Rs 13,000 Crores to Micron, a profit-earning US company. He laments that is it not ironic that your government should permit high-quality iron ore to be exported to China and depend on that country for finished steel products, while Visakha Steel Plant is nonchalantly allowed to bleed?
Revive Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in national interest –EAS Sarma. Weakened financially as a result of the deliberate policy of government, Visakha Steel Plant is unable to repay its loans to CPSE On the other hand, there have been instances when CPSE banks were made to over-stretch their finances to accommodate highly indebted, defaulting private oligarchs. There seems to be one set of rules in the government for big businesses and another for CPSEs.
V K Gupta spokesperson All India Power Engineers Federation said that the privatisation policies of the central government are ruining the public sector at the cost of the corporate sector.
