Union Budget 2023: Infrastructure is the backbone of a growing economy and an increase in its investment pushes that growth to the next level. The Economic Survey 2022-23 which was tabled in the Parliament on January 31, 2023, by Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman stated that in the past eight years, the government has created just the platform to complete this ambition.
The survey suggested that India now has the physical and digital infrastructure to raise the manufacturing sector share in the economy and make a realistic bid to be an important player in global supply chains.
With 10,457 km of roads constructed in FY22 as compared to 6,061 km in FY16, there has been a significant rise in the construction of National Highways (NHs)/roads, according to the Economic Survey 2023. It said that the total budgetary support for investment in the road transport sector has been increasing rapidly for the past four years.
InvIT, launched by the National Highways Authority of India in FY 22 with the objective of monetising public sector assets, raised more than Rs 10,200 crore from high-quality foreign and Indian institutional investors (up to Dec 2022).
The National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP), on the other hand, presently has 8,964 projects with a total investment of more than Rs 108 lakh crore which is currently under different stages of implementation. The Survey said that the pipeline project launched by the government had a forward-looking approach and projected infrastructure investment of around Rs 111 lakh crore during FY20-25.
The Survey further highlighted that the Indian Railway during FY22-23 carried over 976 million tonnes of revenue-earning freight traffic, as against 901.7 million tonnes during the corresponding period in FY21-22, which means it saw an increase of 8.3 per cent.
The capital expenditure on Indian Railways’ infrastructure has also seen constant growth in the past four years with Capex of Rs 2.5 lakh crore in FY23, up by around 29 per cent compared to the previous year, as per the survey.There are many more initiatives taken by the Indian railways which include the Gati Shakti Multi-Modal Cargo Terminal, Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-speed Rail Project, Dedicated Freight Corridor Project, Induction of Vande Bharat Trains, Electrical/Electronic Interlocking System among others.