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EDITORIAL
Auction
For Air India
An open
bid approach to kick-start privatisation
Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie's announcement that the sale of 40
per cent of Air-India's equity will be carried out through open bidding
could have profound implications. If taken to its logical conclusion the
proposal has the potential to vitalise India's comatose privatisation
programme. So far even the piece-meal hawking of public-sector equity
has inevitably invited charges, from opposition parties, of discounted
values. Suspicions that certain ministers and sundry lobbyists are only
too keen on private deals have not helped. These obstacles are not new.
Indeed, they have been around since the time of P.V. Narasimha Rao's government.
Air-India is only a case in point. Its merits and demerits, and those
of its potential suitors, have been the subject of obviously slanted newspaper
reports for months now. Added to that have been contradictory statements
from within the Union Cabinet. A process as monumental as privatisation
has been left to the atmosphere of a vegetable bazaar.
Shourie's
approach solves many problems. Inviting open offers, which can be bettered
by other candidates within a specific time frame, will ensure transparency.
The alternative is a self-defeating proposition-nobody knows what the
next person has quoted, the public knows nothing at all and some know-all
bureaucrat declares open season on post-tender negotiations. All the minister
has to do now is ensure two prerequisites. First, the bidder has to establish
its financial and business credentials. If a non-aviation corporate house
is eager, it would do well to take on a junior partner with proven experience
in the industry. Second, effective denationalisation of Air-India should
foster competition and not create a monopolistic aviation behemoth. If
Shourie can pull it off, then the road map for the sale of every one of
India's 240 Central psus, in theory, would have been laid.
Despite
the Dam Busters
The Supreme
Court's verdict should put the seal on the Narmada debate
 With
the Supreme Court upholding the validity of the Sardar Sarovar Project
on the Narmada river, a long and bitter drama is hopefully moving into
its final act. When completed, the project will irrigate 18 lakh hectares
of parched land and generate 1,450 MW of electricity. Extending over Gujarat-likely
to be its greatest beneficiary-Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, it will also
displace 40,000 families and submerge 245 villages. The resultant upheaval,
especially given the feeling that even the government's best efforts will
not be able to ensure foolproof rehabilitation, has made Narmada a subject
of intense controversy. The global debate on big dams has added to the
obstacles, causing the World Bank to withdraw from the project. Today,
the anti-Narmada brigade is a loose confederation of ngos, alternative
development theorists, Naxalites, rss cottage industrywallahs, Luddites
at large.
Given the
intensity with which it has fought its cause, the Narmada Bachao Andolan's
(NBA's) disappointment at the ruling is understandable. Even so, calls
for the President to intervene are simply not on. When Gujarat argues
its farmers must be allowed to draw the benefits of big dams, just as
the Bhakra Nangal project laid the ground for the Green Revolution in
the north, it cannot be scoffed at. Decades after pioneering them, the
US may suddenly find fault with big dams but there's hardly an international
moratorium on them. China's Three Gorges project is a case in point. Of
course, there has been no scope for protest in China. That Narmada has
been openly argued for and against in India lends it a certain social
sanctity. Instead of blindly opposing it, the nba would do well to use
its prodigious energies to monitoring rehabilitation-and allow Gujarat
the way to its destiny.
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar