By Gaurav Singh and Bibhudatta Pradhan June 19 (Bloomberg) -- India is considering selling a 10 percent stake in Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=BHEL%3AUS>, the nation’s biggest electrical equipment maker, Heavy Industries Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said.
The government is “positively thinking” and a final decision has yet to be taken, Deshmukh told reporters today in New Delhi, without giving more details. The sale would raise 99.38 billion rupees ($2 billion), based on yesterday’s closing price of the shares. Selling state assets will help Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government raise funds needed to fulfill election pledges of supplying food at lower prices and spending more on health and education. The proceeds may also help Singh to rely less on market borrowings to fund public works and narrow a seven-year-high budget deficit. Bharat Heavy <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=BHEL%3AIN> rose as much as 3.4 percent to 2,100 rupees and traded at 2,061.8 rupees as of 2:30 p.m. in Mumbai. The shares have risen 51 percent this year, in line with the Bombay Stock Exchange key index’s 48 percent gain. State-run Bharat Heavy, which said on May 28 it had orders worth more than 1.2 trillion rupees, plans to almost double its manufacturing capacity to 20,000 megawatts by March 2012 as it expects demand for power projects in India to rise. The government plans to add 13,000 megawatts of new capacity every year, President Pratibha Patil told lawmakers<http://presidentofindia.nic.in/sp040609.html>on June 4. The country needs more power capacity to cut peak-hour shortages that may rise to 12.6 percent, according to a Central Electricity Authority<http://www.cea.nic.in/>report. -- Thanks & Regards, Abhishek Kothari --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""GLOBAL SPECULATORS"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalspeculators?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
