Tweet: Suresh Prabhu clearly pursuing off-budget fund-raising for Rlys doggedly. After LIC’s R1.5 lac cr, World Bank working on $30 bill package.

World Bank funding for Indian Railways
The financial package from the World Bank is likely to be a major boost for the Indian Railways minister’s efforts to fund several big-ticket infrastructure projects. Prabhu is confident that the capital expenditure for the year will surpass budget estimates.

Tweet: Plan to interlink 37 rivers is clearly one of the largest public works programs (at Rs 11 lac cr inv) ever undertaken in India’s countryside.

Fractious inter-state relations to test ILR
According to experts, the ambitious ILR (Interlinking of Rivers) project, which is aimed at connecting 37 rivers through 30 links, 14,900-km canals and 3,000 storages, will require intense inter-state negotiations to succeed. Once completed, the ILR will add 35 million hectares to the country’s irrigated land and help generate 34,000 MW or over 12% of the current installed capacity.

Tweets: Current official road statistics: Present highway construction @ 13km/day. By April 2016 expected to be 18 km/day. PM wants 30/km/day.

Possible to hit 30 km/day road constrn? Yes—if system is  able to consistently award 10,000 km every year henceforth. LY was 8,000 km.

Roadmap for the roads sector
Industry players are confident that the road construction target of 30 km/day is achievable. This is expected to play a pivotal role in the fortunes of construction companies.

Tweet: Pragmatic Gadkari : Policy soon to compensate pvt infra developers for delays on account of regulatory & other clearances by Govt. At last!

Gadkari’s offer to bring relief
Botched up economics of private road projects are often a result of delays in clearances related to land, environment and forests; removal of utilities and permissions from Railways for overbridges. Gadkari’s statement should go a long way in soothing frayed tempers.

Tweet: Welcome tough talking Mr Jaitley: “If State Govts don’t make users pay for electricity, banking system cannot continue to support them.”

Discom reforms: Jaitley reads the riot act
The present government appears to have reached the end of the road regarding further central funding of state discoms’ burgeoning debt. Both the finance and power ministers are pushing the states hard to significantly improve discom performance as the only solution.

Tweet: Imp to note that much of the FDI flowing into Infra projects now are to do with acquisition of ‘brownfield’ projects—not ‘greenfield.’

Foreign investments on the rise
FDI investments in the January to June 2015 period hit a record $19.4 billion. This comes close on the heels of a World Economic Report in which India’s global competitiveness ranking has moved up by 16 places to the 55th position as a result of an overall improvement in the country’s macro-economic environment and better performance of the infrastructure sector.

Tweet: FinMin to create a list of projects where friendly foreign Govts can invest. Start with equity & debt options in the Nat Infra & Inv Fund.

Finance ministry’s proactive approach
In a bid to get stalled projects moving and garner international finance for new public-funded projects, the finance ministry is looking at creating a list of new and existing projects which could be readily offered.

Tweet: Truckers’ strike not about tolling. Angst is against installation of ‘weigh-in-motion’ platforms at toll plazas that catch overloading.

Truckers demand toll-barrier-free India
The strike has been called by the All India Motor Transport Congress to demand scrapping of the present toll collection system and in its place seeks a one-time payment of taxes and simplification of the TDS procedure.

—Vinayak Chatterjee is Chairman of Feedback Infra
His Twitter handle: @Infra_VinayakCh

A weekly selection of the author’s tweets—with a brief backgrounder—in the infra space, by Adite Banerjie