Speaking to newspersons on the sidelines of the Infranet-98 conference organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, Sinha said the effort was to clear the backlog of recommendations made by the Disinvestment Commission and refer new public sector companies to the commission.

On whether the UTI millennium scheme would be delayed, the finance minister said, "I see no reason on why the scheme should be delayed. It would come in this year."

"We are trying to initiate the reforms process in public-sector companies as quickly as possible so that we do not have any pending proposals before us," Sinha said.

The pricing of the issue is currently being debated between the government and investment bankers. The bankers do not want theissue to be priced too high lest they have to make a high provisioning if the price drops in a sliding market.

Earlier, speaking at the inaugural address of the conference, Sinha said hidden subsidies cannot go on forever as they are a hurdle in developing infrastructure. ``Subsidies, to a large extent, have created the resource crunch we are confronted with at the moment,'' he added. The government is grappling with this problem to bring the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation at par with other financial institutions in an effort to bridge the resource gap, he said.

Subsidies should be upfront so that the government clearly knows what is the outgo from the budget, Sinha said. In the current set-up, it is impossible to fathom how much the government is paying to which segment of consumers, he said.

Fresh resources have not been generated because of a high-level of subsidies, he said. Over the years tall promises have been made about providing certain services free, he said. As a result, thegovernment has either not been able to provide the services at all or been able to provide services of very poor quality, he said.

A dual price structure for certain services needs to be considered, he said. Electricity and other services could be supplied at different prices to different strata of society, he suggested.

Regulatory authorities in different areas are necessary to get the price administration right for various infrastructure areas. The fact that the BJP government has been able to set up a central regulatory authority and state level regulatory authorities for electricity is an achievement that needs to be recognised, he said. Regulatory authorities are essential as it is only through these bodies that disputes on pricing between service providers and customers can be resolved.