The heavy industries ministry will write to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to transfer the Department of Public Sector Enterprises (DPE), which looks after the state-owned companies, to the corporate affairs ministry.
“It (the DPE) should be with the corporate affairs ministry. I will write to the prime minister in this regard in February,” Heavy Industries Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said.
“Why should we have a separate department with a separate secretary? The man who is looking after the affairs of private companies can also look at public companies,” he said, adding he had already discussed the matter with his counterpart, Salman Khurshid, at the corporate affairs ministry.
“Informally, I had talked (about this) to Khurshid last week. I told him since you (Khurshid) are looking after private companies, why not public sector companies as well. Why should there be a separate department for that? Khurshid liked the idea,” Deshmukh added.
Although DPE looks after 242 CPSEs, including BHEL, ONGC, SAIL, NTPC and PFC, they also remain under the administrative control of respective ministries.
During 2007-08, there number of profit-making CPSEs stood at 159 while that of loss-making Central PSEs was 54.
