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Journalism of Courage
It would be unfair to say that all public sector units PSUs are inefficient and a drain on the exchequer. But if anyone had any doubt about how many are sick, go no further than the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General CAG. The report on PSU accounts for the year 2001-02, tabled in Parliament recently, show just why many PSUs ought to be privatised or shut down. As an Express report pointed out, of the 136 profit-making PSUs, only 26 in four sectors coal038;lignite, telecom, petroleum and power earned Rs 38,242.41 crore or 81.53 per cent of the total profits of Rs 46,905.14 crore. And in these four sectors, PSUs enjoyed a monopoly or near-monopoly status in 2001-02. Till March 31, 2002, the central government had invested close to Rs 94,000 crore and in return got a dividend for the year 2001-02 limited to only around 6 per cent!
If a private company had come up with such figures its management would have been given the marching orders, the workforce downsized, the company restructured or sold out. However, in the case of PSUs, where the government is the owner, no administrative ministry feels accountable. It is not about dividend payments as the numbers don8217;t justify this. The reasons, again, lie in some of the numbers put out by the CAG report which point to companies such as Kochi Refineries Limited, which has spare stocks of 17,333 per cent over its consumption. This is just one outstanding case, but there are several other PSUs which have a spare stock to consumption ratio of over a 1,000 per cent. 8216;8216;Inefficiency8217;8217; would not be the right word to describe here. No prudent management would allow this unless there was a directive from the top to buy from some favoured supplier or the other. Small wonder then that ministers put up staunch resistance whenever there is a proposal to sell off one their geese that lays golden eggs.
