Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said that every interest of the personnel in banks that are likely to be privatised will be fully protected. She also said that interests of those who put in decades of service in these banks will “absolutely be protected– whether it is their salaries, pension, etc”.
“Even in financial sector, we will still have the presence of public sector enterprise. This means not all of them (banks) are going to be privatised,” she said, after a Cabinet meeting that approved a new Development Financial Institution.
‘More equity’
“We want financial institutions to get more equity and make them more sustainable. We want their staff to perform duties which they have acquired as a skill over the decades and run the banks. So to quickly conclude that every bank is going to be sold off is not right,” she said. Besides IDBI Bank, the government is looking to privatise two public sector banks and a general insurance company.
‘Have serious discussions’
Responding to a media query on comments made, usually as two liners, by Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, the Finance Minister said she would want him to engage in serious discussions rather than “throw these kind of two liners every now and then”.
She refuted his reported remarks that the current government was “privatising profits and nationalising loss” and highlighted that the erstwhile UPA regime were only resorting to “privatising taxpayers money”.
On the issue of allegations of nationalising losses, Sitharaman said that today public sector banks are loss making and prompt corrective actions are bringing them out because of the “telephone banking that happened during his time (UPA government)”.
“Nationalising corruption and privatising taxpayers money for the betterment of one family is what Rahul Gandhi should take as a reply for the tweet that some outsourced fellow in his team is feeding him with. He should be ready to stand for discussions and not throw allegations and go away,” she added.