Saudi Aramco-like IPO for LIC key to success of India's Budget math

By Anirban Nag

India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is staking the success of her fiscal math on a big-bang share sale of the nation’s largest state-run insurer.

With tax revenue seen shrinking as a percentage of the total budget for a third straight year, Sitharaman will be relying on the 2.1 trillion rupees ($29 billion) she plans to raise by selling state-owned assets to bridge the budget gap. A bulk of that -- as much as 900 billion rupees -- is likely to come from sale of shares in Life Insurance Corp. of India, which has total assets of $434 billion.

A lot of preparation will be needed before the “big-bang” stake sale can go through, said Pranjul Bhandari, Chief India economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Mumbai.

Changes to a law and a buy-in from employees’ unions are some of the preparatory work needed for selling a stake in LIC.

There is a chance that the stake sale -- which investors likened to the initial public offer of Saudi Aramco -- may not happen next year, and that could derail Sitharaman’s budget calculations, analysts said.

“There might be a potential slippage,” Bhandari told BloombergQuint. “In terms of the math there might be a slippage of 0.3% of gross domestic product in revenues if these asset sales don’t take place.”

Disinvestment targets have been missed several times in the previous years.