India To Unveil Four-Year Asset Sale Road Map On Monday

India on Monday will detail a road map aimed at raising money from the sale of state infrastructure assets over four years at a time an increased spending on Covid-relief measures, coupled with revenue weakened by pandemic restrictions, widened the fiscal deficit.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will launch the National Monetisation Pipeline, comprising the central government’s brownfield infrastructure assets, at New Delhi, think tank Niti Aayog said in a statement.

“Besides providing visibility to investors, NMP (National Monetisation Pipeline) will also serve as a medium-term road map for the asset monetisation initiative of the government,” it said.

Earlier this month, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, secretary at the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management, had said India was working on a Rs 6-lakh-crore asset monetisation plan that would include pipelines of Power Grid Corp. to national highways.

The government is targeting to raise around Rs 1.75 lakh crore ($23.5 billion) in the year through March 2022 to compensate for the drop in tax revenue in the light of the pandemic.

The nation aims to narrow its budget deficit to 6.8% of gross domestic product in the ongoing fiscal from 9.3% in the previous year. But several economists, according to a Bloomberg report, expect the country will miss that target, set in February before the outbreak of a fresh virus wave.