2 min readAhmedabadSep 11, 2015 07:25 PM IST
First published on: Sep 11, 2015 at 07:25 PM IST
Ever since the India Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd (IIFCL) was set up by the Government of India in 2006, the entity has funded more than 300 projects, said Sanjeev Ghai, the chief general manager of the company on Friday.
“In the last eight years, we have financed more than 300 projects, most of which are public-private-partnership projects,” said Ghai while addressing a conference on financing infrastructure organised by Confederation of Indian Industry and Gujarat NRE Knowledge Application & Facilitation Centre.
“The major portfolio comprises of financing of both state and national highways, power projects including generation, transmission and distribution, reneweable-energy projects and airports in Delhi and Mumbai,” he said about the company which provides long-term financing to infrastructure projects.
Talking about successful PPP projects in Gujarat, Dr JN Singh, additional chief secretary, finance department, Government of Gujarat, said, “One of the first PPP projects to succeed in the port sector in the country was Mundra port.”
According to Singh, between 2009-12, the government and private players took huge strides in PPP. “However, the honeymoon lasted only for about 3-4 years,” he said.
Sharing his experience Singh said, “About 70 percent of the road projects belong to 30-40 companies. The entire equity of these companies had got exhausted in the projects that were already under implementation or those that had got stalled. There is no fresh equity and as a result PPP projects in the road sector is almost nonexistent now.
Speakers at the conference also delved upon how infrastructure projects on the PPP mode have been de-growing owing to a shrinking equity resulting in a lack of promoters’ interest. A slowdown in the infusion of fresh equity have led to over-leveraged balance sheets of key developers of such projects, and a large number of delayed projects are also turning bank loans into nonperformance assets (NPA) and constraining banks from lending to the infrastructure sector.
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