Infrastructure Financing in India Trends, Challenges, and Way Forward

Governments the world over want to spend more on infrastructure (the benchmark for developing countries is 7-8% of GDP per annum) to lay the foundation for sustained and inclusive growth. India is no exception. It realizes that more needs to be spent on infrastructure for the country to regain its position as the fastest growing large economy in the world. While India spent about 7.2% of its GDP on infrastructure during the Eleventh Plan period (2008-12), this number has recently come down to approximately 5%. The backdrop of the book is the ambitious National Infrastructure Plan (NIP); the Task Force report on the NIP was finalized in April 2020. Since infrastructure investment is crucial to faster and inclusive growth, it is timely that the NIP is actioned now, given that the Indian economy contracted to 7.3% in the financial year 2020-21. This book discusses various aspects of infrastructure financing in detail, with a major section devoted to green financing of infrastructure.

1 - The Context: National Infrastructure Pipeline
2 - Sources of Infrastructure Finance
3 - Reasonable User Charges for Sustainable Infrastructure Financing
4 - Financing Economic and Social Infrastructure
5 - Project Finance (Non-recourse Financing)
6 - Augmenting Infrastructure Financing: Brownfield Asset Monetization and Value Capture Finance
7 - Moving from Bank Finance to Bond Finance: Credit Enhancement and Infrastructure Debt Funds
8 - Priority of Governments the World Over: Institutional Investment into Infrastructure
9 - Environmentally and Socially Responsible Infrastructure Finance
10 - Generic Issues for Sustainable Infrastructure Financing: Sanctity of Contracts and Autonomous Regulation of Infrastructure
11 - Current COVID-19 Pandemic and its Impact on Infrastructure and its Financing
12 - Some Questions

Kumar V Pratap is a Senior Economic Adviser in the Government of India and has earlier worked with the Prime Minister's Office and Ministry of Finance as Joint Secretary, Infrastructure Policy & Finance in New Delhi, and World Bank in Washington DC. Pratap is the author of Public Private Partnerships in Infrastructure: Managing the Challenges (Springer Singapore, 2017). He had been a visiting professor at the Indian School of Business Hyderabad, and Indian Institute of Management Shillong, teaching a course on 'Infrastructure and the Private Sector'. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow and a PhD from University of Maryland, USA. Manshi Gupta is Deputy Director in Infrastructure Policy and Planning Division, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. She has a Master's in Economics from Delhi School of Economics.