Mehta may head divestment panel

NEW DELHI, DEC 14: With his tenure as the head of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) coming to an end in February, the gove...

NEW DELHI, DEC 14: With his tenure as the head of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) coming to an end in February, the government has decided to appoint D R Mehta as the head of the new Disinvestment Commission which is to be reconstituted within the next week or so. Names of the other members are still being finalised.

Mehta’s name ran into rough weather with several bureaucrats arguing that his track record as the country’s top stock market regulator has not been very great in several cases, such as the price rigging of shares of BPL and Sterlite, SEBI’s actions have been too late and too little. But what won the day was the argument that even the previous Disinvestment chief G.V. Ramakrishna was a former SEBI chief. Mehta is also reported to be fairly close to influential BJP politicians.

With the government coming in for a lot of flak, including in Parliament, over its tardy implementation of the previous Disinvestment Commission’s reports of its recommendations for 53 PSUs, those for only 21 were accepted, and even fewer have been implemented it is now keen to quickly set up an alternative machinery to deal with disinvestment process.

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Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley was given additional charge of the disinvestment process just a few days ago. While announcing this, the government had also said that it would quickly set up another commission to replace the last one whose term ran out at the end of last month for six weeks prior to this, the government just sat on the resignations of the commission’s members, and refused to either accept or reject them.

while the new commission will make recommendations on what PSUs to disinvest in, and how this should be done, Jaitley will ensure that the process is fast and transparent. A full-fledged department will also ensure that there are no delays of the sort that take place currently.

EXCLUSIVE: EC brings in feature to check misuse of identity to seek voter list deletions

Political Pulse3 hr ago

The Election Commission has launched a new 'e-sign' feature on its portal and app to prevent fraud. This comes after allegations of misuse of online voter deletion forms in Karnataka. The feature requires voters to verify their identity using their Aadhaar-linked phone numbers, reducing the possibility of fraud.

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