By Shivangi Acharya
(Reuters) -India’s divestment secretary urged mutual funds on Wednesday to include state-run firms in stock portfolios, saying they had paid record dividends of 1.5 trillion rupees ($17.31 billion) in the financial year 2024/25.
Public sector firms distributed about a quarter of overall dividends, even though they accounted for just a tenth of market capitalisation, Arunish Chawla told reporters in the capital, New Delhi.
“We would suggest to fund managers to include public sector stocks in their portfolios,” he said, adding that such a step would allow productive deployment of savings by ordinary investors, senior citizens and minority shareholders.
The government received dividends of 740.17 billion rupees ($8.54 billion) from such firms in the last financial year, or nearly 200 billion rupees more than the budgeted figure, Chawla said.
He urged private firms to declare dividends fair to minority shareholders so as to ensure parity in profit-sharing across all classes of investors.
Budget documents show the government expects dividends of 690 billion rupees from state-run firms in the next financial year, 2025/26.
($1=86.6330 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Shivangi Acharya; Writing by Surbhi Misra and Shubham Batra; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Clarence Fernandez)
