Letters: And why it's too soon to cheer

Before we laud ourselves for a decade and a half of public-private partnership (PPP), we should wait for the Comptroller Auditor General’s (CAG’s) report on how these infrastructure projects have fared in terms of final costs, revenues, environmental effects and so on. Special purpose vehicles created under PPP, too, need to be audited by the CAG. There is a lot of potential danger if these are not brought under the CAG’s ambit. Britain’s auditor had stated that PPP works well when it is conceived properly, evolved clearly and implemented well. It is training its civil servants on how to deal with the private sector on projects by sending them to the Said School of Business at Oxford University. We need not send our civil servants to Oxford but our Indian Institutes of Management along with auditing bodies and the Planning Commission could tailor suitable training programmes to ensure a smooth implementation of PPPs.

S Subramanyan, Navi Mumbai

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