Govt plans to create sovereign wealth fund

Earlier, it was proposed as a fund with a Budgetary allocation of around Rs 30000 crore, but considering that the finance ministry is fiscally constrained at this point in time it is mulling other alternatives like it being a government-backed fund instead of purely government fund and using reserves of large PSUs as well as raising debt.

The idea of the fund is to allow for acquisition of natural resources abroad especially in the oil and mineral space.

One also needs to check out if the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) comes on board for this and allows for the use of forex reserves for the purpose of acquisition of assets abroad. One needs to see that will it be actually announced in next year Budget.