Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday rejected the Opposition allegations of “selling family silver”, saying that the government has devised a clear strategy on divestment so that money of the taxpayers is spent wisely, PTI reported.
“It is not what the Opposition says about selling family silver, it’s not at all,” Sitharaman said at a meeting of business people in Mumbai. “Family silver should be strengthened, it should be our strength…Because you’ve spread it so thinly, there are many of them [public sector undertakings] that are not able to survive; and the few that can perform do not get the due attention.”
The finance minister also said that the government’s aim was to prime the public sector undertakings through its policy. “You need them, you need them to scale up so that they meet the aspirations of growing India,” she said.
In her Budget speech on February 1, Sitharaman had announced that two public sector undertaking banks and one…