India will need USD 4.5 trillion for quality infrastructure: Niti Aayog CEO

India needs to spend around USD 4.5 trillion till 2040 to develop infrastructure in order to improve economic activity, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said on Wednesday.

Addressing an event, Kant further said, "In India we start the project without adequate preparation. We must learn the art of perfection from Japan where not a single thing changes when they start any project."

The current trend shows that India can meet around USD 3.9 trillion infrastructure investment but there are certain public-private partnership (PPP) projects which are in arbitration because they were taken up without adequate homework, he stressed.

"Track record of the last four years in the sector across railways and airport shows that all the spending came from the government. It is better to create an infrastructure through government spending but as the projects complete government should soon move out of it because they are extremely poor at operation and maintaining infrastructure," Kant noted.

India achieved a growth rate of 7.5 per-cent but private investments in public-private partnership (PPP) projects have sharply fallen.

Cumulative figure for India's infrastructure investment gap would be around USD 526 billion by 2040.