New Delhi: Government on November 28 assured the Lok Sabha that there was no attempt to bail out Unit Trust of India (UTI) as Opposition members pilloried it for ''mismanagement'', saying the small investors were the worst hit.

Moving the Unit Trust of India (Transfer of Undertaking and Repeal) Bill, which seeks to replace an Ordinance in this regard promulgated on October 29, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh said ''there is no bail out of UTI''.

While it was thought necessary to honour the commitments made by the UTI to its investors with regard to the US-64 scheme and Assured Return Schemes, it was also decided to restrict the Central government's liability.

The Centre had also decided to distance itself from the UTI by bifurcating the UTI into two parts (1) Unit-1 comprising the guaranteed portion and (2) Unit-2 comprising all net asset value (NAV) based schemes and to repeal the UTI Act of 1963.

In a statutory resolution disapproving the Bill, Basudeb Acharia, CPM (Communist Party of INdia-Marxist), deprecated the government for coming out with the Ordinance on the eve of the Parliament session. It was ''unwarranted' and not in the interest of the country, he said.

He wanted to know why UTI had been split into two, one exclusively under the control of the government and one left to financial institutions. ''This is a step towards privatisation of UTI,'' he said.

Congress member E M S Nachiappan said the UTI mess was a result of the mismanagement of the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government.

PTI