Chandigarh, May 13: I fully empathise with Prime Minister @narendramodi’s appeal to save foreign exchange in this time of crisis and uncertainty.
One way to do this is to consume less. The other way is to produce more. PM’s pain points are oil and gold, India’s two biggest imports, more than 30% of the total. If you add other resources from below the ground, it becomes 50%.
Given our geology and our existing assets, we can massively increase production quickly. It has happened in past.
Two things are required: privatisation and self-certification in clearances.
Overall, in the below-the-ground sector, there are 24 PSUs which can be privatised and will result in manifold increase in production.
Completing the privatisation of companies like HZL (govt holds 26%) and BALCO (govt holds 49%) will also result in much more output and jobs.
When Vedanta acquired HZL in 2002, India was import-dependent for zinc. Today, we are self-reliant. With exactly the same assets. We did R&D and started producing silver and lead, which no one had imagined. And now we are in the process of doing R&D to produce rare earths.
In aluminium, output was 1 lakh tonne, and now we are in the process of producing 60 lakh tonnes.
I am 100% confident that India can produce enough resources domestically with existing assets (new assets take longer) to mostly take away imports.
Government should trust the private sector to entirely eliminate any vulnerability on account of imports of oil, gold, silver, copper, fertiliser, and many other resources.