Press Release
11th March 2022
NATIONAL LAND MONETISATION CORPORATION:
ANOTHER DESTRUCTIVE PLOY
TO FACILITATE LOOT OF NATIONAL ASSETS
The Centre of Indian Trade Unions condemns yet another destructive drive of the Modi Govt at the centre to expeditiously facilitate the loot of national assets by the corporate lobby.
A wholly owned public sector entity titled National Land Monetisation Corporation (NLMC) is being created to sell out the huge land and allied assets at the disposal of the public sector companies and departmental undertakings in favour of private corporate class, both foreign and domestic. This atrocious move is to both supplement as well as facilitate another plundering project of the Govt, called National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP), which is meticulously designed to hand over in phases and tranches, the infrastructural sector in entirety viz., Railways, Roadways, electricity-grid network, petroleum and gas pipeline network, port & dock, coal projects, telecom network etc virtually free to private corporates to extract revenue from those assets with an arrangement of sharing a minority part of the same with the Govt.
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 etc at the disposal of various PSUs and Departmental Undertakings like Railways, Defence, Telecom etc. The huge prime landed assets with the PSUs and DPSUs could very well be utilized for expansion and modernization of those profit-making and core sector PSUs and DPSUs which are making regular and recurring contributions to national exchequer. But a Govt married with the notorious philosophy 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 the Govt. is obsessed with the programme of dismantling the 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 privatisation deals from VSNL to BALCO, IPCL, Airports, Air India etc had been fair and transparent and even CAG could not avoid commenting on many of those deals. Under the present political dispensation, the so called monetization of landed assets are destined to cause unimaginable loss to national interests, going to be sold at incalculably under-priced, as is natural phenomenon in any real-estate operation under the stewardship of the Govt in position. And the very idea of meeting the huge fiscal gap caused by lavish concessions to corporate class being piloted by the communal-corporate nexus in governance by way of selling the huge landed and infrastructural assets for a song, as articulated by this notorious NLMC reflects extreme and desperate perversion of those in governance and nothing else.
Soon after the announcement of the said 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 Govt. data, the total land available with the Railways is 11.80 lakh acres of which 1.25 lakh acres is vacant. The defence ministry has about 17.95 lakh acres of which around 1.6 lakh acres is within the 62 cantonments, and about 16.35 lakh acres outside their boundaries, according to data from the Directorate General, defence Estates. This huge land assets will be given to big corporates, both domestic and foreign, through this newly initiated NLMC at cheapest prices. The media buzz is that, the vast surplus land of BEML and HMT in Karnataka will likely to be sold soon.
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 design of plunder on 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.
Issued by,
Tapan Sen
General Secretary
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