Making NMP work

Dysfunctional govt-pvt sector relations must be repaired

The announcement last week of the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) has come in for some well-deserved critical comments, given the government’s poor record on disinvestment overall. As this newspaper has previously argued, there are also complex questions to be asked about how it will be executed. The NMP will need to be transparent and remunerative, as well as attractive to private sector investors. This is not an easy task under Indian conditions. The problematic experience with public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the past 15 years should have revealed that the interface between the state and the private sector in India is