THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), in a statement issued on March 11, has condemned yet another destructive drive of the Narendra Modi government to expeditiously facilitate the loot of national assets by the corporate lobby. A wholly owned public sector entity, named National Land Monetisation Corporation (NLMC), is being created to sell out the huge land and allied assets at the disposal of public sector companies and departmental undertakings in favour of the private corporate class, both foreign and domestic.

The CITU noted that this atrocious move is to both supplement as well as facilitate the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP), which is meticulously designed to hand over to private entities the infrastructural sector such as railways, roadways, electricity-grid network, petroleum and gas pipeline network, port and dock, coal projects, and telecom network. Corporate entities are to be handed over these sectors in phases and trances virtually free to extract revenue from them with an arrangement of sharing a minor part of the same with the government.
 
The NLMC is conceived to practically operate as a kind of real estate agency to preside over and operationalise the sale of huge land and other assets like buildings at the disposal of various PSUs and departmental undertakings like railways, defence, telecom, etc. The huge prime land assets with the PSUs and DPSUs could very well be utilised for expansion and modernisation of those profit-making and core sector PSUs and DPSUs which are making regular and recurring contributions to national exchequer. But a government committed to privatise the State-owned undertakings in entirety in favour of their corporate masters is not expected to be committed to such basic economic prudence.
 
When a government is obsessed with the programme of dismantling PSUs at any cost and by any means, national assets being sold under their supervision can never be in national interests. Till now, none of the privatisation deals – from VSNL, BALCO, IPCL to airports and Air India – were fair and transparent and even CAG could not avoid commenting on many of these deals. Under the present political dispensation, the so-called monetisation of landed assets is destined to cause unimaginable loss to national interests, which are going to be sold at incalculably under-priced rates. And the very idea of meeting the huge fiscal gap caused by lavish concessions to the corporate class being piloted by the communal-corporate nexus in governance by way of selling the huge landed and infrastructural assets for a song, reflects the extreme and desperate perversion of those in governance and nothing else.
 
Soon after the announcement of the NLMC, mainstream media outlets started publishing the excess land figures. Railways and defence are the biggest government land owners in the country. According to available government data, the total land available with the railways is 11.80 lakh acres, of which 1.25 lakh acres are vacant. The defence ministry has about 17.95 lakh acres, of which around 1.6 lakh acres are within the 62 cantonments, and about 16.35 lakh acres outside their boundaries, according to data from the directorate general, defence estates. These huge land assets will be given to big corporates, both domestic and foreign, through this newly initiated NLMC, at the cheapest price. The media buzz is that the vast surplus land of BEML and HMT in Karnataka is likely to be sold soon.
 
The CITU vehemently denounces such anti-national dubious exercise of so-called NLMC along with NMP and calls upon the working class to resist and oppose such notorious designs of plunder of the national assets, through united struggle – raising the observance of two days’ countrywide general strike on 28-29 March 2022 to a massive height of success and thereby paving the way for determined defiance and resistance.