EDITORIAL

Sleaze Unparalleled

NOT satisfied with the unscrupulous loot of the public sector that this Vajpayee government is undertaking in the name of privatisation, union ministers are reportedly resorting to the gross misuse and abuse of the public sector. The Chief Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), it is reported, had told the prime minister about "union ministers demanding money and other favours from public sector undertakings". The prime minister and the government, however, maintain that the CVC did not mention any names.

Whether names have been mentioned or not is not the issue. Simply put the issue is the gross abuse of the public sector by ministers under whose charge these enterprises fall in terms of obtaining facilities and services which are not legitimately due.  PSUs have often been used as personal fiefdoms of the concerned ministers. The interference in their functioning and the exploitation of its facilities have, in no small measure, adversely affected the PSU's functioning.  This, in turn, is used as an index of their "inefficiency" justifying privatisation! For quite some time, we had been suggesting that the PSUs must be professionalised and separated from bureaucratic control and ministerial interference. Only then can the full potential of the PSUs be realised and its economic viability enhanced.

But that, of course, is not the objective of the government. The PSUs, particularly the blue-chip profit making PSUs, are sold on a platter to private capital.  The "Sweet heart deals" have already seen the siphoning off of thousands of crores of rupees through sleaze.  Public assets built assiduously by Indian labour over the years is not only being sold, undermining the foundations of economic self-reliance but it is being sold in a manner in which personal aggrandisement appears to be the singular motive.

In the  background of this, the alleged revelations of the CVC only suggests that this government, more cruelly and nakedly than any one in the past, has embarked on a gross misuse of  public sector undertakings. 

For some time now, it has become apparently meaningless to demand anything from this government that suggests the upholding of elementary political morality. Nevertheless, the government must be forced to take action on the CVC's report and inform the public of its actions.