Department of Public Enterprises (DPE), Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprise has recently issued guidelines to expedite the process for closure of CPSEs so that all administrative Ministries would follow uniform procedure for closure of the CPSEs. Earlier, DPE had issued guidelines for “streamlining the mechanism for revival and restructuring of sick/ incipient sick and weak Central Public Sector Enterprises: General principles and mechanism of restricting”. As per these guidelines, the CPSEs were to be categorized into strategic and non-strategic and revival/restructuring strategy was prescribed. However, there are certain CPSEs in non-strategic sector which have no scope for revival and are to be closed in a time bound manner. Since there are employees working in these CPSEs, Government decided that closure should not cause hardship to them and has now laid down a uniform policy to give workers VRS at 2007 notional pay scale irrespective of the pay scale in which they are working.
The guidelines also prescribe the modalities for disposal of movable assets and immovable assets. The guidelines prescribe that leasehold land would be dealt as per the terms of the lease and freehold land would be offered in following order of priority:-
(i) Central Government Departments.
(ii) Central Government bodies/CPSEs.
(iii) State Government Departments.
(iv) State Government bodies/State PSEs/State authorities.
In case the above categories are not interested in taking the land for six months, then the land would be auctioned through MSTC to any entity so that it can be put to productive use.