World Bank should focus on creating a liveable planet, says Ajay Banga

The definition of eradicating poverty is inadequate without including challenges with climate change, pandemics, fragility and food insecurity, which are all intertwined, World Bank president Ajay Banga said on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 finance track meeting. 

“The World Bank should amend its vision to go from just being poverty focused to saying ‘yes, we want to create a world that is free of poverty but we have to be on a liveable planet’,” Banga said. 

He also stressed that municipal financing is the way for India to progress, while highlighting the need to bolster the lagging private sector flows to provide new infrastructure and services for these cities and replace and upgrade aging infrastructure. 

“We have all been talking about private capital flows that should somehow flow miraculously into all these places. We haven’t done a very good job,” Banga said. 

He said that the absence of project de-risking and innovative finance are some of the barriers that have been holding back private investment in sustainable and quality infrastructure.

“The scale of these challenges are too big for any one government or one multilateral bank to do so on its own and getting the right level of partnerships across multilateral banks is going to be important to scale…even more important is getting replicability, scalability,” Banga added. 

Speaking at the investor dialogue on the sidelines of the G20, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the cumulative climate investment needed for cities in emerging markets to mitigate and adapt to climate change is estimated at USD 29.4 trillion between 2018 and 2030.

India has also launched a pilot programme on tax and financial crime investigation in collaboration with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the South Asian Region starting July 18, 2023, the FM said.

She was speaking at the G20 High Level Tax Symposium on combating tax evasion, corruption and money laundering. 

“In leveraging the interconnectedness of investigation in tax evasion, corruption and money laundering, there is a scope for evolving solutions that can help tackle financial crimes in a more synchronised and effective manner,” she added.