Indore (Madhya Pradesh): Leftist thinker Ashok Rao on Thursday said, “Developments in public sector have been a roller coaster. The situation became difficult as India took hefty loan from World Bank, and the changing laws only worsened the situation.”
He was addressing the sixth day of 62nd Summer Lecture Series organised by Abhyas Mandal on “Dangers and effects of privatisation of publicly owned assets.”
Elaborating on the subject, he said that in 2003, the then Union finance minister Manmohan Singh took a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank and the situation in public sector started changing. He said, “All public sectors are now being assessed in form of profit and loss, while it is clearly written in our Constitution that these public enterprises will not be seen with profit and loss angle.”
Government promoting private sector
Rao said that the government handed over the entire system of education to private sector.
He said, “If we take a brief look at BSNL it shows how government handed over the entire sector to private companies like Airtel and Jio. BSNL does not even have 4G yet while other private sector companies are talking about bringing 5G. Look at the tourism sector, there was a time when private sector was not ready to build five star hotels at any place. Government took it as an opportunity to rather compliment their business and introduced multiple schemes so that private market could rule the sector. If we talk about petroleum companies, forgetting the conditions under which the government nationalised these companies, now this entire sector is being handed over to the private sector.”
