Despite the poor performance of public sector undertakings, a growing consensus to privatise them, and a transparent and effective apparatus in place, India has been remarkably slow to actually privatise. It is currently hard to get managers and politicians to go along with the privatisation of PSUs, for the private benefits accruing to them from control of these enterprises can be immense. A new privatisation scheme is proposed to undo the manager-politician nexus by putting the onus of privatisation on managers of PSUs, while using competition to restrain any giveaways.
