The World Bank is willing to lend up to $3 billion over the next three years to help develop rural infrastructure. This amount would, however, come from the bank's existing lending commitment of $9 billion for the next three years. | |
| World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who wrapped up his first visit to India on Saturday, indicated that the multilateral body would not step up overall lending to the country. |
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| "The current plan is to lend $3 billion per year for three years. Doing any of these projects the right way involves a lot of work. I don't know if we could scale up that rapidly," he said. |
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| The bank is already active in some of the areas covered under rural infrastructure development programme, Bharat Nirman, and has approved new loans worth $1 billion in the last two years in areas of irrigation, roads, drinking water and sanitation. |
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| On the government's viability gap fund to help infrastructure projects, Wolfowitz said that details of individual projects would have to be looked at. "Infrastructure constraints are an impediment to growth. |
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| The government has rightly made provision of rural infrastructure and investments in hard infrastructure a priority. The World Bank feels privileged to support these efforts," he said. |
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| However, there was no firm commitment to increase the lending for the area, which is estimated to require $100-billion investment in the next seven years. |
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| On India's growth prospects, Wolfowitz said it would be dangerous to make predictions but the last 15 years had been 'phenomenal'. India's human capital had enabled it to grow at a healthy pace, he said. |
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| However, he warned that if the country did not follow sound fiscal and monetary policy and encourage a climate friendly to private investment, it would find it difficult to sustain the 6-7 per cent growth. |
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| Ruling out the possibility of the bank lending to nuclear power plants in the country, he said that the G-8 leaders had asked the bank to construct a framework to facilitate investment and technology transferto ensure more and cleaner resources for energy in developing countries. |
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| However, nuclear technology involved issues of waste disposal and "We are not sure that we are ready to go there as yet," Wolfowitz said. |
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