| Arun Shourie | ||||||
Arun Shourie, India's minister for disinvestment, faced a verbal barrage in parliament a year ago when he announced the sale of a 51% stake in Balco, a profitable aluminium company, to Indian company Sterlite.
The opposition Congress Party alleged that Balco had been sold for a song and its workers went on strike, forcing a plant closure. A combative Shourie offered to annul the sale if Congress could find a buyer willing to pay more. It was many weeks later, after the Supreme Court upheld the sale, that the new owners of Balco, now saddled with a Rs2 billion ($41 million) loss, were able to move in.
On February 5 this year Shourie announced the sale of two big state companies - VSNL, a telecoms company whose monopoly over international telephony ends in April, to the Tata group; and Indo-British Petroleum (IBP), an oil-marketing company, to state-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), India's only Fortune 500 company.