The realty: Rs 25,000-crore fund can only help 6% of stalled constructions

India’s plan to set up a Rs 25,000-crore ($3.5 billion) fund to salvage stalled residential projects will only be sufficient to complete about 6% of constructions that are running behind schedule in Asia’s third-largest economy.

The new program announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday is an improvement on a $1.4 billion real-estate corpus announced in September and, unlike the previous plan, it will also support projects written off by lenders as bad loans. With $63 billion of housing projects stuck for lack of funds, the latest measure will help unclog the financing pipes, said Anuj Puri, chairman of