Industry & Economy
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Infrastructure
All questions, no answers
Last weekend, the Planning Commission held yet another day-long session on infrastructure development. The conference had top billing — the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Finance, Commerce and Industry, Railways and Shipping and Road Transport. Journalists were surprised that the Power Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was a notable non-invitee, though the Prime Minister chose to focus extensively on the poor progress of this sector.
As expected, there were a number of speeches with the top honours going unanimously to the Railway Minister, Lalu Prasad. He intertwined humour with his plans for the railways and regaled the audience with his rustic wit and humour.
So what did the conference ultimately achieve? An aware audience of top bureaucrats, top industrialists and in-the-know media was again reminded about the criticality of infrastructure development and some mind-boggling figures were given out as the fund requirement for this over the next five years. No one, however, thought it fit to work out how such huge sums of money would be mobilised — public-private partnership, viability gap funding notwithstanding — as the amount involved is huge — some Rs 14,50,000 crore.
Our Delhi Bureau
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