Union Budget 2021-22: Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi has targeted the Modi government over Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget proposal to divest some of the national assets under the monetisation plan. In a tweet, he said: “Forget putting cash in the hands of people, Modi Govt plans to handover India’s assets to his crony capitalist friends.” Ahead of the budget presentation, he had listed three sectors where he wanted the government to ramp up expenditure.

Earlier, the Congress party had also suggested ten policy prescriptions to revive the economy. One of the prescriptions was to make direct cash transfers to 20-30 percent of the families at the bottom of the economy at least for a period of six months. However, in today’s budget speech, there was no mention of direct cash transfer to the poor.

Sitharaman, on the other hand, introduced a monetisation pipeline under which some of the national assets would be privatised. She said railways will monetise dedicated freight corridor assets for operations and maintenance, and some airports will be monetised for operations and management concession.

Some other infrastructure assets which will be divested include: AAI Airports in Tier II and III cities; Railway Infrastructure Assets; Oil and Gas Pipelines of GAIL, IOCL and HPCL; Transmission Assets of PGCIL; NHAI Operational Toll Roads; Warehousing Assets of CPSEs such as Central Warehousing Corporation and NAFED among others and Sports Stadiums.