A $750 Billion Gap in India’s Push for Top Infrastructure
ByIndia’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to speed up environmental and other approvals for major projects since taking office a year ago. Photographer: Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg
To see the challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces to improve India’s ailing infrastructure, ask the state-run company specializing in lending to the sector. It estimates $750 billion of debt is needed for the task.
That’s more than twice the size of Singapore’s economy, and five times the existing 9.2 trillion rupees ($144 billion) of bank loans to Indian infrastructure projects. The solution is to rethink current funding techniques, according to S.B. Nayar, the chairman of India Infrastructure Finance Co. Ltd…