In a bid to spruce up investments in the cash-starved infrastructure sector, commerce minister Anand Sharma on Monday said India and the US could jointly set up an infrastructure debt fund amounting to $10 billion. The fund, which would be on a public-private-partnership (PPP) model could address key issue of infrastructure funding in India and the US, he said.
Sharma said the idea was mooted in the Indo-US CEO conference in Mumbai which had been approved in principle by the Indian government. He said the move to jointly develop the booming infrastructure space in India was just one of the many steps the two countries were taking together as a part of the strategic partnership.
In fact, experts argue India has progressively moved towards allowing foreign private sector firms to participate in the country’s infrastructure story. Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during his visit to Tokyo, had invited Japanese firms to invest in infrastructure projects. Singh had said during the next Five-Year Plan beginning 2012, investments in infrastructure projects would be as much as $1 trillion, which gave opportunity to countries like Japan to invest.
Sharma also said the government had a ‘positive mindset’ on the contentious issue of allowing up to 51% FDI in multi-brand. ?We have a very positive mindset (on allowing FDI in multi-brand retail… in a multi-party democracy there are issues that have to be discussed,? he said.
?Many concerns have been answered ? India does not differentiate between an Indian and a foreign investor,? he said. He said the stakeholders’ meeting on the paper issued by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion earlier this year had been completed. ?There has been an energetic debate on the issue of FDI and many concerns have been raised,? he said. The discussion paper had argued that FDI in retail would lower prices and benefit the farmers.
last month, in a brief visit to India , Wal-Mart Stores’ CEO Michael Duke had said he was ‘optimistic’ of India allowing FDI in multi-brand retail which would help the world’s largest retailer set shop in the country.