Can't allow privatisation of Chennai, Trichy airports: Tamil Nadu to Centre

Tamil Nadu Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan has slammed the Cente’s decision to go ahead with National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP).

“We are against the privatisation of Chennai or Trichy airports. Of course, we are going to take it up with the Centre. The fundamental problem is that the Centre not interested in inclusive decision-making or debate. The functioning of Parliament has been there for everybody to see – the proportion of bills that are sent to Committee, the extent of debate on a bill, the flexibility before anything has been made into a law, all this has suffered greatly over the last few years,” Thiagarajan told The Wire.

Thiagarajan has also been too vocal in his criticism of GST. He told The Wire that he saw the GST conflict between states and the Union government as a more pertinent issue.

“This notion that you can have one nation one tax is a contradiction in terms. If you think you can homogenise policy across the country, one nation one x – all of these are inherently a contradiction in terms because the extent of variability is so high across states, not just on their linguistic and cultural basis but because of the development between them has separated so far. For example, the doctor-patient ratio in Tamil Nadu is 7 times that of the poorest states in the Hindi belt. So, when you start looking at such great divergence, you realize how flawed this notion of ‘one law’ is,” he said.

Also read: 11 jargons help decode Centre’s National Monetisation Policy

The finance minister pointed out a recent instance, “In GST, at the 43rd Council, one issue that came up for consideration was for ease of doing business should it be considered that for small businesses (below Rs 5-crore turnover) who right now have to file every quarter but pay dues every month, should that restriction be eased so that they can pay every and file every quarter for ease of business. Most of our payers are below Rs 5 crore. If they pay every three months, our liquidity model would get damaged. In Tamil Nadu, I estimate that less than 15% of my GST payers are below the Rs 5-crore threshold. So, if it were in national interest, though it would cause some constraints, I am okay with it. But that is precisely why it is so different for different states.”

Thiagarajan told The Wire, “The rush to get GST done, not only left limitations in the design, but it also left serious limitations in the implementation and it is still functioning, in my opinion, sub-optimally even for the design that exists. We have data why don’t we use it? Doesn’t seem to ever come to the meeting.”

Stalin says he will write to the PM

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin said he would write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to give up the plan of rolling out NMP. He SAID the Centre hasn’t held enough talks with the state regarding the plan to raise money using the country’s infrastructure assets.

Stalin wrote to the Prime Minister saying that the plan would only lead to priceless government assets going to a few conglomerates or large corporations. He asked Modi to make his decision after conversing with stakeholders and state governments.

“People have right over public sector undertakings as land belonging to people and state governments were given for these,” he told NDTV, adding that the impact on the economy, employees of these undertakings and dependent small businesses was unclear.

Also read: Cong sold country’s resources, made kickbacks, Nirmala counters Rahul

The Centre aims to hand over already built assets like gas pipelines, roads and railway stations to the private sector for operating on a long-term lease. The government stressed that this did not mean privatisation.

The opposition parties, however, have opposed the plan.