The Hindu Business Line : World Bank loan for rural projects

India’s GDP is expanding at a healthy rate and it may soon touch double-digit growth. The forex reserve is at an all-time high and the remarkable success in IT and telecom are really astonishing.

Our country has attained self-sufficiency in many fields.

On the flip side, more than 26 crore people are living below the poverty line and it has been estimated that about 15 crore of Indian households do not have electricity and 10 crore families live without proper access to drinking water. Literacy rate is just 65 per cent and the right to education to all is still a dream. Agricultural growth is abysmally low at 2-3 per cent.

India is struggling to bridge the gap between the rural and urban sectors and unemployment problem persists.

Hence India is still only a developing country and it will require huge amounts of capital to become a developed nation by 2020. It is not possible to mobilise thousands of crores of rupees every year by way of increasing the taxes alone as they have already reached saturation point.

In the given situation, India still needs World Bank loans since the loans are sanctioned at a low rates of interest. Further, in the long-run, some of the loans on community schemes are waived by the World Bank and India cannot afford to neglect the same.

S. Nallasivan, Tirunelveli

When there are many poor countries that desperately need funds from the World Bank, India has been seeking loans for many projects in spite of its mounting foreign exchange reserves.

The Government’s tax revenues get spent on many trivial things. Why is our country investing more in defence than in infrastructure? Why don’t they impose surcharge for building infrastructure?

The Government must ask big IT companies to contribute liberally towards infrastructure building as they are allowed to use the existing infrastructure at cheap rates.

The income-tax laws should be tightened and the tax net widened. The Government should get rid of corruption and the black market to ensure better tax compliance. If this is done, there will not be any need for India to seek loans from the World Bank.

Shashwat Shriparv, Thiruvananthapuram

India has certainly come a long way since Independence and its economy is one of the world’s fastest growing.

While it is true that India was dependent on loans, grants and aids to finance its various developmental projects, the dependency has reduced to a very large extent.

The forex reserves of India is swelling by the day and the Government is already looking at ways of spending these on infrastructure developments and other similar projects.

Any further loans from the World Bank may not be warranted, though these are on soft terms and have very long repayment tenure. Hence the Government can be selective in choosing between the options.

Krithivasan, e-mail

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