PSEs competitive thanks to internal reforms, says Scope

Public sector enterprises (PSEs), barring few, have proved beyond doubt in last two years that they could withstand competition, Raji Philip, the vice-chairman of Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (Scope), and chairman and managing director (CMD) of Hindustan Paper Corp (HPC), said here today.

According to Philip, PSEs have become competitive because they implemented major internal changes, but these are apparently not visible to the public.

Addressing a national meet of the forum on 'Women in the public sector', Philip claimed that despite apprehension about the survival of the public sector, PSEs had done well in the era of globalisation and free trade.

In all, 69 central PSEs and nationalised banks are members of Scope.

"I should say that average PSEs have done better than the average private sector outfit in recent years, be it topline, bottomline or performance in the stock market," he said.

The Scope vice-chairman pointed out that market capitalisation of listed public sector outfits have increased manifold in the last couple of years.

"PSE scrips are doing quite well. There are several public sector outfits in the list of top five companies as far as market capitalisation is concerned," he added.

Philip said the main reason behind the improved performance is internal changes.

"PSEs did a lot of soul searching like product portfolio pruning, operation efficiency, manpower rationalisation and the way of managing the business and are getting the result of these changes," he added.

Philip said women employees of PSEs were entitled to equal benefits.

The president of the forum of women in the public sector, Preeti Kapur, suggested the need for a gender audit to assess that how far women in India have benefited from developmental projects.

"There should be a social audit and a gender audit to assess the benefits of development," said Jwahar Sarkar, the higher education secretary of the West Bengal government at the seminar.