PSU Disinvestment Data: How Much Modi’s Government Raised

Selling government stakes in public sector companies, known as disinvestment, has been a recurring revenue strategy for the Modi government since 2014. This article compiles the year-by-year data, the biggest individual deals, and how consistently the government has hit its own targets.

The Year-by-Year Numbers

According to PRS Legislative Research’s compiled data, disinvestment proceeds against annual targets have swung considerably: Rs 37,737 crore actual against a Rs 58,425 crore target in 2014-15, Rs 42,132 crore against Rs 69,500 crore in 2015-16, and Rs 47,743 crore against Rs 56,500 crore in 2016-17. The government actually exceeded its targets in 2017-18, raising Rs 1,00,045 crore against a Rs 72,500 crore goal, and again in 2018-19 with Rs 94,727 crore against Rs 80,000 crore. Since then, most years have fallen well short: Rs 50,304 crore against Rs 1,05,000 crore in 2019-20, and a sharp miss in 2020-21 at just Rs 32,886 crore against a Rs 2,10,000 crore target, according to the same PRS data.

The Recent Shortfalls

More recent years have continued this pattern of missed targets. Business Standard’s reporting found disinvestment receipts in FY25 were on track to hit an eleven-year low, and the FY24 target itself had already been cut to a more “realistic” Rs 51,000 crore, down roughly 21 percent from the year before, according to the outlet’s coverage at the time. By contrast, more recent activity in FY27, including proceeds from a large Life Insurance Corporation share sale, had brought receipts to roughly Rs 59,000 crore against an Rs 80,000 crore target as of August 2026, according to Business Standard’s tracking.

The Air India Sale

The most significant single privatisation of this period was Air India, sold entirely to a special-purpose vehicle set up by Tata Sons, with the deal completing in January 2022, decades after the government first began attempting to sell the loss-making national carrier. The airline had originally been founded by the Tata family before its nationalisation decades earlier, making the sale back to the Tata Group a widely covered symbolic moment as well as a financial transaction, according to coverage of the deal’s completion.

The LIC IPO and BPCL Reversal

The government’s 2022 Life Insurance Corporation initial public offering, in which it sold roughly 3.5 percent of its stake, was India’s largest-ever IPO at the time, though a separate, larger LIC share sale in 2026, involving roughly 6.5 percent of the company, was described by Business Standard as India’s largest-ever such offer-for-sale transaction. Not every planned disinvestment has gone through, however. The government’s attempt to privatise Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, selling its roughly 53 percent stake, was formally called off in May 2022 after interested bidders, including Vedanta, withdrew from the process, according to Business Standard and The Print’s coverage at the time. Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri later said in 2024, according to Business Today, that BPCL’s privatisation was “completely off the table.”

The Pattern of Missed Targets

Taken as a whole, PRS Legislative Research’s own assessment notes that disinvestment targets have “become aggressive” in the years the government has set them, while “actual receipts have fallen short… in most years,” with the government exceeding its own target in only two of the years examined since 2014. A Parliamentary Standing Committee separately raised concerns about the slow pace of the disinvestment process itself, according to Deccan Herald’s coverage, citing repeated rounds of bidding revisions on individual deals as a factor in the delays.

Why Disinvestment Targets Are Hard to Hit

Setting an ambitious disinvestment target and actually completing a sale are two very different challenges, since each individual transaction depends on finding a willing buyer at an acceptable price, securing regulatory and sometimes union approval, and navigating market conditions that can shift the value of a stake considerably between when a target is announced and when a sale is actually completed, a gap that helps explain why the government has missed its own targets in most years even while individual deals like Air India and the LIC IPO have gone through successfully.

The National Monetisation Pipeline as an Alternative Approach

Alongside outright disinvestment, the government has increasingly leaned on a related but distinct strategy: monetising existing public assets, such as roads, railway stations, and power transmission lines, by leasing operating rights to private players for a fixed period while retaining ultimate government ownership, rather than selling the underlying asset outright. This approach, formalised through the National Monetisation Pipeline, lets the government raise upfront revenue without the political and logistical complexity of a full privatisation, and has become a larger part of the government’s overall asset-revenue strategy in years when traditional disinvestment targets have been missed by wide margins.

What Economists Generally Say About the Trade-Offs

Economists broadly agree that disinvestment of loss-making public sector companies, like Air India before its sale, can reduce the ongoing fiscal burden of subsidising unprofitable state enterprises, while disinvestment of profitable public sector companies raises a different set of trade-offs, since the government gives up a recurring future revenue stream, dividends from a profitable company, in exchange for a one-time upfront payment, a trade-off that depends heavily on what the government does with the proceeds and how the sold company performs afterward under new ownership.

Bottom Line

The Modi government has raised tens of thousands of crores annually through PSU disinvestment since 2014, exceeding its own targets in only two of those years, with the Air India sale and the LIC IPO standing as its two largest completed transactions, even as other planned sales, most notably BPCL, have been abandoned entirely after failing to attract acceptable bids.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma