Economic survey a road without milestones: GMR Group

Excerpts from Your World at 10 on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » Nifty BSE | NSE 10/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Q: But you interact with all the ministry people, you interact with all the bureaucrats, is this only a vision, piece of direction or is this actually something that the government is thinking of operationalising?

Dalal: It is interesting and difficult to say that but one does hear contradictory noises, for example, in the press note 2 and 4, if you are an Indian-owned and controlled company on the downstream investment for example in multi-brand retail even today, the technical interpretation very clearly is that you can do it. On the other hand, the Industries Minister said that there is no intent to allow a backdoor entry into retail and here you have it right up there. So there are contradictory noises and I am not able to figure that out in terms of what the intent is but if the economic survey document is something to go by. I think the intent is there.

Q: What about disinvestments? They have put in a pretty aggressive target of Rs 25,000 crore a year, you know how government works from the inside so do you think that is going to be possible because in the President's speech it was never so aggressive. I think the targets were a couple of initial public offering (IPOs) this year, maybe Rs 3,000 crore in this year and then going in the year 2 and year 3 maybe it could pick up pace?

Dalal: Regardless of what has been said that divestment or disinvestment is not supposed to make-up for the fiscal deficit--that is at the back of mind. There is another aspect to this and that is that when you have disinvestment in greater public scrutiny and accountability, it somehow does lead to better management of public enterprises. So in that sense, it is a good statement of intent, it also depends on how the capital markets behave in the pricing issues. For example, we have a possibility of not a great monsoon. You have all sorts of global factors. So it is difficult to say whether it can be put to action but I think clearly the intent is there and it is a good intent, as I said, especially from the perspective not only of raising resources but also from the perspective of accountability.

Q: What are you looking for on Monday--are you looking for more such grand vision statements, are you looking for maybe less grand stuff but more operationalised stuff even if it doesn't seem very ambitious? It goes into the hardworking details of how we are going to change outdated laws, processes, etc.?

Rao: Important things like land reforms, direct taxes codes, scrapping of all the cesses and coal privatisation can be immediately implemented. So some of these land marking reforms can be implemented and act as a framework implementation to invite more and more FDI into the country into various sectors that can promote growth.