Navy chief Adm. Sunil Lanba said that by 2050, India will have 200 ships, 500 aircraft.
Economists have said if a stimulus is needed it should be different from what was provided in 2008-09, when the economy faced the ripple effects of a global meltdown following the Lehman Brothers collapse.
While the private sector has been involved in a small way in upgrading government-owned Industrial Training Institutes and certain health initiatives, the PPP projects have not really taken off in a big way in these areas, PM said.
The projects include six-laning of highway stretches in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, four-laning of highway stretches in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and two-laning with paved shoulders of stretches in Punjab and Rajasthan.
MSD Wellcome Trust Hilleman Laboratories, the joint venture to develop affordable vaccines for low-income countries, will take off by next year.
The policy aims at attracting quality investments, increasing employment opportunities in the state, develpoing special investment regions, encouraging public private partnership model, setting up of mega projects and core infrstructure projects, said minister of state for industry Saurabh Patel, who released the policy in Ahmedabad. The first objective of the policy is to attract investments in the areas of SIRs, PPP projects, mega projects, innovative projects etc.
The Airports Authority of India plans to privatise 15 out of 40 non-operational airports across the country on a public-private partnership basis to make them function again."Out of 40 non-operational airports, 15 have the potential to operate and we have planned to give the airports to private developers to operate it for a concession period," said a top AAI official, who did not wish to be identified.
Privatising the railways is not on her agenda. But the minister wants to earn revenue for the government by all means possible, and also do social good. railway Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee talks of her pet public-private partnership and Vision 2020. Edited excerpts:
The meeting is a prelude to the framing of a public private partnership policy for the railways.
Despite higher allocations, core sector likely to see reduced profitability.
The government will launch a project for modernising employment exchanges, which will help the youth to get jobs by registering themselves online at any exchange in the country.
The government's ambitious highway projects under the public-private partnership mode are in serious trouble. Construction companies have either not put in bids or have withdrawn from 20 such projects, which fall under the build, operate and transfer scheme.
After the infrastructure sector, the public-private partnership model will be extended to rural job generation as well.
The government may consider a public-private partnership (PPP) mode for setting up national gas highways to ensure distribution across the country.
According to a note prepared by the ministry for these projects, each Indian Institute of Information Technology would be set up at an investment of Rs 200 crore (Rs 2 billion) and the government would bear 85 per cent of the expenditure.
More than 50 startups have graduated from Startup Village's Physical and Virtual Incubation Programme and eight startups from Digital Incubation
India needs long-term thinking for long-term projects and a better handling of PPPs, says Business Standard.
A division bench headed by chief justice A P Shah dismissed a bunch of petitions that alleged that both the Delhi International Airport Ltd and the Mumbai International Airport Ltd were collecting ADF in an illegal manner, without having any authority.
The Karnataka government will soon select a consortium bidder for the 35-km high-speed rail transport between Bangalore International Airport at Devanahalli and the city centre, a top official said in Bangalore.
4,000 dialysis units to be set up across India, government working on providing free basic healthcare to BPL families.
A Reserve Bank panel has decided against the inclusion of any other national leader's image on banknotes saying that no other personality could better represent the ethos of India than Mahatma Gandhi.
Long-term funding was a requirement for infrastructure projects, and asset-liability mismatch in the banking system, impacts the access to finance for infrastructure projects. One of the key challenges would, however, be to get private sector back into investing.
The affordable housing segment will offer business opportunities worth over Rs 5,00,000 crore (Rs 5 trillion) as India requires more than ten million houses to be built by 2013-14.
If the Indian Railways, therefore, wishes to implement its expenditure plans as outlined in the Interim Railway Budget, it has to look for alternative sources of funding. One option under study is to adopt the PPP route to implement new projects. Mamata Banerjee's first Railway Budget in the United Progressive Alliance government, therefore, may outline major PPP initiatives for several new projects, say railway officials.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who took additional charge of the finance ministry recently, has rejected a Planning Commission proposal to increase the upper limit for Viability Gap Funding (VGF) for infrastructure projects coming up under the public-private partnership model.
The Andhra Pradesh government would develop a tourism project on about 2,000 acre at Gandikota in Kadapa district under public private partnership, said tourism minister J Geeta Reddy.
The Union Road Transport and Highways Ministry proposes to build a huge network of expressways by 2022, also the final year of the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.The ministry plans to build expressways in 3 phases -- by 2012, 2017 and 2022 -- and, accordingly, it has prepared a draft report for a network of the proposed 17,661-km of stretches.The report has suggested the government set up the proposed expressways on both an annuity and a public-private partnership (PPP) basis.
FDI inflow of $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2008-09 showed an impressive growth of 124 per cent over the same period last year. Earlier, in October the government had expressed optimism saying India would exceed its target of $35 billion this fiscal. Sectors that attracted maximum FDI in 2007-08 were services, telecom, housing, construction activities, real estate, electrical equipment, computer software and hardware.
'No Budget has so far has addressed the issue of the government's abysmal productivity of capital spending, improving which will be the big game changer. 'But, the government's tight lock on businesses, banks, education, and even essential services like transportation and large parts of infrastructure and healthcare is destroying capital year after year,' points out Debashis Basu.
A host of factors including the reform measures taken by the government and decline in global oil and commodity prices have led to lower inflation, the Finance Ministry said on Wednesday.
The government had planned to complete the bidding process and award the final contract for these projects by December 2008. An official from the National Highway Authority of India said, "Now that PPPAC had given approval to these 21 highway projects, we will be speeding up the bidding process."
The US Treasury's new acronym in its long list of programmes - PPIP or the Public-Private Investment Programme - has lifted market hopes that the administration is moving closer to restoring stability in the US financial system.
The Competition Commission of India has asked the government to amend existing rules to allow more competition in maintenance of highways and airports under the public-private-partnership model.
"It is a huge scam. . . . The CPI-M has been opposing this. The Parliamentary Standing Committee, of which I am the chairman, has also all along opposed it," Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said. He said the public-private participation route, pursued by the Planning Commission, was 'disastrous as finally the burden falls on the people'.
Through two stimulus packages, the Indian government recently allowed IIFCL to raise Rs 40,000 crore through tax free bonds to aid the financing of infrastructure projects which were being carried out as public-private partnerships, the Bank said.
Under the new norms, if a developer is bidding for a PPP project worth Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion), it should have a record of executing projects worth Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion), or at least double the cost of the new project. Earlier, to qualify, a developer needed to have executed projects one-and-a-half times the cost of the proposed project in the last five years.
The scheme is expected to activate the measures announced for the housing construction sector under the economic stimulus packages. It will increase the stock of houses ranging from 300 sq ft to 1,200 sq ft plinth area built at affordable rates on land provided by state governments.
The centres will be set up under a pilot project on PPP (public-private partnership) mode across the country, principal advisor (skill development mission) of Planning Commission Jayati Chandra said, adding that these are expected to come up by the middle of the year.
The ambitious Rs 50,000 crore (Rs 500 billion), 3,289 km Dedicated Freight Corridors are a case in point. Although the project started under former railway minister Lalu Prasad and was renamed Diamond Rail Corridors by incumbent Mamata Banerjee, not a single project has been awarded yet.
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