Budget should have focused more on asset monetisation: Former Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar

Former Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Thursday said the Budget should have focused more on asset monetisation and privatisation, besides allocating more funds to the social sector schemes.

Finance Mininster Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2023-24 in the Lok Sabha on February 1. Participating in a discussion on 'Union Budget 2023 and Beyond' organised by Ananta Centre, Kumar said, "there should be (have been) a lot more focus on privatisation and asset monetisation, which I do not find reference to here (Budget)".

He also said Rs 51,000 crore disinvestment target is way too low. "And in some sense, I feel that the space for private investment, actually has been shrinking in the economy. And I think that's something which can also be seen in the fact that we brought the commercial bank credit growth in double digits finally, but the commercial bank credit to industry is still in the very mid single digits, hardly any demand for credit at all," he said.

He suggested that funds raised through asset monetisation should be used to retire public debt. For the next fiscal 2023-24, the Budget has pegged disinvestment revenue at Rs 51,000 crore.

The government has also scaled down the disinvestment target for the current fiscal to Rs 50,000 crore, from Rs 65,000 crore budgeted last year. Further, about Rs 10,000 crore is expected to come from monetisation of government assets in the current year and well as in the next fiscal.

Expressing his views on the Budget during the discussion, Naushad Forbes, Chairman of Ananta Aspen Centre and Co-Chairman of Forbes Marshall, said the Budget is for India growing at 5, 6 or even 7 per cent.

"So having a budget that did no bad is a good thing. And it is an achievement and something that we should appreciate," Forbes said. According to him, the Budget talks about fiscal consolidation, shifts towards capex in spending, and continues transparency on bringing more and more expenditure items into the budget and not leaving them off-budget.

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