India’s stockmarket swooned upon the information that Narendra Modi, the nation’s business-friendly prime minister, would return to energy diminished and in a coalition after a latest normal election. One benchmark, although, fell particularly sharply and has but to recuperate: the Bombay Inventory Alternate’s index for Public Sector Undertakings (BSE PSU). It contains 56 firms which have some personal possession however stay largely owned, and fully managed, by the state.
This curious company construction dates again to India’s independence from Britain in 1947 and the nation’s subsequent embrace of state planning, which was prolonged to embody, within the Marxist-infused language of the time, “the commanding heights of the financial system”. This got here to incorporate firms in every little thing from aviation and insurance coverage to synthetic limbs and banking. Solely when India’s financial system opened to the world within the Nineties did the method change. Since then, politicians have tried, with various levels of enthusiasm, to place corporations below personal management.
