NEW DELHI: India’s new government would seek to raise record $11.7 billion in asset sales in its maiden budget this week, a senior government source said, bolstering state finances and buying time for structural reforms to revive a weak economy.

The privatisation target could reach Rs700bn, almost equal to all proceeds over the last four years, in a budget Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes will launch the growth and jobs agenda that in May won him India’s biggest election mandate in three decades. The budget is due on Thursday.

“The finance ministry has approached different ministries to increase the divestment target,” said the senior official with direct knowledge of the budget process. The previous government had pencilled in sell-off proceeds of Rs569bn ($9.5bn).

The privatisation target could reach Rs700bn

The 63-year-old premier has made a decisive start by naming a streamlined cabinet, approving a slew of infrastructure projects and embarking on what promises to be a whirlwind first year of trade diplomacy.

But his government has been plagued too by the economic ills that brought down its predecessor: weak growth and high inflation caused by spending too much and investing too little.

Despite the market reforms of 1991 that brought down the curtain on decades of socialist isolation, tracts of Asia’s third-largest economy remain off limits to outside investors.

Modi wants to open up industries like defence, but selling controlling stakes in bloated state enterprises is out of the question. They are not competitive and any job cuts ordered by a foreign owner would cause an outcry.

Instead, he will whittle down state stakes in firms that have already been partly sold, like Steel Authority of India Ltd, without surrendering overall control, said the official and other sources familiar with the plans.

Also read: India should avoid fiscal slippage: World Bank

Indian stocks have enjoyed a Modi boom, rallying 23 per cent this year. Listed state firms have outperformed on hopes that wider ownership would discipline managers and that their bottom line would benefit from a loosening of price controls.

Leading the pack is Indian Oil, which has gained 62 per cent in 2014. ONGC, another oil firm, is up 46 per cent. Coal India has risen 36 per cent.

In setting an ambitious asset-sale target, the government will face inevitable scepticism from investors who are used to seeing its predecessors miss their privatisation goals.

The Modi government will also have limited scope to put its stamp on this first budget, which has been delayed by the election and will be delivered three months into the budget year to March 2015.

The deficit is already nearly half the annual goal inherited from the last government: 4.1 per cent of GDP.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is expected to roll out other revenue measures in addition to the asset sales, including a General Sales Tax that would unite India’s 29 federal states into a common market.

The measure would make it easier to do business and, over time, broaden the tiny tax base, which last year was a mere 8.9 per cent of India’s $1.9 trillion gross domestic product — about a quarter of the average for the OECD club of developed nations.

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2014