Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in Budget 2021, gave a huge push to privatisation, monetisation, disinvestment, attracting foreign direct investment, and cleanup of stressed assets.

The industry has had some time now since the Budget to digest the fine print. So, does India Inc believe the Budget does enough to support growth?

In CNBC-TV18’s Budget Townhall, a slew of industry captains quizzed the key architects of the Budget.

On IDBI Bank stake sale

Tuhin Kanta Pandey, Secretary at DIPAM said, “The IBDI Bank was announced last Budget and thereafter we have looked at the various legal issues involved. We need an amendment of legislation and that has been taken forward in this Finance Act which requires the licence to be continued under the IDBI Repeal Act after the disinvestment as well. That was the major issue and we should be moving forward soon on that.”

On LIC IPO

He said, “Post the announcement by the honorable finance minister in the last Budget, various issues need to be sorted. So advisors were appointed and they have done a fantastic job of identifying all those issues on which LIC used to work with. So we have also appointed an independent actuarial firm which will have to report the Indian embedded value which is a requisite thing for the IPO. LIC is separately working on several of those things which need to be enabled before the IPO is in place and the amendment has also been on the LIC Act for the purpose of IPO has been a part of the Finance Act as well. So the work is going on, on all sides and we hope to have an IPO in FY21-22 as announced by the finance minister in the Budget speech.”

On ARCs

Debasish Panda, Financial Services Secretary said “ARC warehouses stressed assets which are more complex and which are of the ticket size of more than Rs 500 crore. So it requires the domain expertise to resolve them as well. So, the idea is to move these assets to the ARC and thereafter it moves to the AMC. The AMC in the interim will try to operate those assets and thereafter through a market price discovery mechanism dispose it off either to a potential investor or to an alternate investment fund (AIF).”

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(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)