The Centre on Thursday handed over the management control of national carrier Air India to a subsidiary of Tata Sons. With this Air India's strategic disinvestment was complete after the Centre received a consideration of Rs 2,700 crore from the 'Strategic Partner' -- Talace -- which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.

Besides the upfront payment, Talace will retain debt of Rs 15,300 crore. Notably, the transaction covered three entities - Air India, Air India Express and AI SATS.

Speaking exclusively to CNBC-TV18 after the completion of formalities, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, DIPAM Secretary (Department of Investment and Public Asset Management) expressed relief.

He said that the transfer of Air India has been legally challenging.

"It has been a real challenging process. So at the end of the quite relieved that this transaction stands closed. Dewas was only one of the obstacles which came in its way, there have been several but with perseverance these have been tackled."

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The DIPAM Secretary said that the new Air India board has already met. The board will have four existing directors.

"After the mutually decided way, the board transfer has taken place and the new board of Air India has already met. The 4 existing directors have continued."

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The Air India deal has brought a fair amount of inter-ministerial learning. The DIPAM Secretary said that one was the need to take private sectors advice.

"There is a big difficulty in one size fits all approach in employee related issues. In the BALCO judgement Supreme Court has given a detailed guideline and gone into the processes as well as the employee rights and so on. It is a judgement which actually is the law of the land as on date."

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The DIPAM Secretary has his eyes set on the LIC IPO which he says is, "a very important and big task".

"Our next big important task is LIC IPO. We are quite sanguine that we will be able to bring it in last quarter of the financial year. We intend to probably bring the IPO out in early March and accordingly we are working very hard to see that the necessary documents are filed with SEBI."

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The DRHP should be filed soon, according to the secretary.

"We have been in intensive discussion with SEBI, IRDA, bankers and the exchanges as this also involves a huge amount of retail interest given the size of the issue that will come, so a lot of technical back stopping is going on, technical testing is going on in terms of capacity of the entire system to see that the retail transactions during the IPO go on smoothly."

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)