Unido Offers Tech For Road, Port Projects
The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (Unido) has offered to share its expertise in developing road and port projects on a build, operate and transfer (BOT) basis in India.
Unido s country director Wilfred S Nanayakara told the inaugural session of a three-day Unido sponsored BOT workshop on roads and ports yesterday that the organisation has gained world-wide experience on build, operate and transfer projects including the technical and financing aspects apart from overall strategy and the certification prodcedures. India could also benefit from this, he said.
Surface transport secretary Yogendra Narain, who inaugurated the meet, said that keeping in view the enormous fund requirement for development of the road and the port sectors, tapping of the domestic capital market becomes necessary.
He said the success stories in the infrastructure sector all over the world have shown that domestic capital and the domestic investors constitute the backbone of such projects.
But in India, he said, no serious attempt has been made to tap this domestic capital to finance infrastructure projects.
This is a challenge for established financial institutions like Infrastructure Leasing and Finance Services (IL&FS) and the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) because domestic problems must have indigenous answers , the surface transport secretary said.
He said the state-owned National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), the capital base of which was expanded from Rs 200 crore in 1996-97 to Rs 500 crore in the current fiscal, would be floating a tax-free bond of Rs 40 crore this year, a sanctioned amount which could not be floated last year.
Narain said that another equally important factor is quick decision making by the concerned officials who need a specialised training to reorient them to the new privatisation culture.
The surface transport secretary said that about Rs 1,000 crore would be required annually only for rehabilitation and maintenance of roads.
Another Rs 50,000 crore would be required to build additional capacity at the ports to enable them to handle the projected 850 million tonnes of traffic by the end of the 11th five-year plan.
The government can barely afford half of it, hence the rest must come from the private sector, he said.
The workshop was organised by NHAI and the surface transport ministry under the aegis of Unido.
Participants included financial institutions, private investors, consultants besides experts from Unido.