T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Doing a Lalu in education

OKONOMOS

Everyone knows that India faces a severe infrastructure deficit and that the government doesn't have the money to build it on the scale needed. Everyone is also agreed that more than anything else, it is this that will keep the growth rate in India down. Ergo, everyone is also agreed that the private sector will have to be let into the infrastructure business. The only question is how.

The accepted way, internationally, has come to be called public-private-partnership (PPP). India has been trying hard to get these partnerships going. If you measure success against the backdrop of what is needed, it hasn't been very successful.

Still, perseverance pays and, over the last couple of years, the wagon has at last begun to roll. Several PPP projects are now working. Funding through PPP and borrowings is expected to be of the order of $18 billion during the 11th Plan. The bait to get this money in is the policy of financial support to PPPs through a viability-gap-funding up to 20 per cent by the central government and an additional 20 per cent by the state government.

But no has got around yet to assessing, in a sector-specific manner, how these PPP projects are working. The latest issue of the Asian Journal* seeks to make good this gap. Most of the articles are case studies which aim to highlight the problems that have been identified in the last few years, and offer solutions to them.

The key issue to emerge is that PPPs must satisfy everyone