Trade unions to protest against National Monetisation Pipeline today
The trade unions plan to carry out an awareness campaign today to voice their protests against the NMP scheme. The unions have also dubbed October 7 as “national protest day”, having planned agitations at the district level.
A joint platform of trade unions is scheduled to hold protests on Thursday against the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP), a scheme introduced by the central government to raise as much as $81 billion by leasing out state-owned infrastructure assets over the next four years. According to the Union ministry of finance, the NMP will help fund new capital expenditure without putting pressure on government finances. However, the trade unions call the plan a “destructive” and “nefarious design” to hand over public infrastructural assets to private hands at little to no cost.
The joint platform of trade unions consists of the All-India Trade Union Congress, the Indian National Trade Union Congress, the United Trade Union Congress, the Labour Progressive Federation, the Self Employed Women's Association, as well as the Hind Mazdoor Sabha, the Trade Union Coordination Committee, and the All-India United Trade Union Centre.
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In a statement issued last month, the trade unions alleged that the National Monetisation Pipeline announced by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is merely a scheme to hand government assets to private hands “virtually free”. They said that the NMP enables the private players to generate revenue without any obligation of capital cost; only a small part of that “huge revenue” will be shared with the government, they claimed.
In accordance with this discontent, the trade unions plan to carry out an awareness campaign today to voice their protests against the NMP scheme. The unions have also dubbed October 7 as “national protest day”, having planned agitations at the district level.
Meanwhile, according to the government vision, NMP is envisaged to serve as a medium-term roadmap for identifying potential monetisation-ready projects, across various infrastructure sectors. The NMP has been prepared after insights, feedback, and experiences consolidated through multi-stakeholder consultations undertaken by Niti Aayog, the finance ministry, and the infrastructure line ministries.
For now, the government has only included the assets of infrastructure line ministries and CPSEs working in the infrastructure sectors. Monetisation through disinvestment and monetisation of non-core assets have not been included in the NMP.
