Infrastructure: Centre to help states

New Delhi: The Centre on Saturday said it was more than willing to assist states in developing infrastructure through the public-private partnership (PPP) route.

"We would be happy to assist states in capacity building and setting up PPP cells with a list of projects that are bankable and viable for PPP," Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters after a day long meeting of Chief Secretaries.

He said the financing requirements to fill infrastructure gaps were too huge and no amount of resource mobilization within the public sector can meet the demands.

As the Central government has embarked on PPP for several infrastructure projects like roads, ports, airports and railways, it was time that states too designed policies that were transparent and allowed "robust competitive bidding" for private players to feel safe to take up infrastructure projects.

Ahluwalia said the meeting, which was attended by all state Chief Secretaries and Secretaries of ministries covering infrastructure sectors, was to interact with the states and present before them the Centre's experience of PPP so that they could draw their own plans for development of the sector.

"Under PPP it should be private money and public projects and not public money and private projects," he said.

Participating in the meeting West Bengal Urban Development Secretary Nandita Chatterjee said they already had 30 PPP projects some of which are in the pipeline, in areas like housing, IT city, asset management in water supply and many other areas of urban infrastructure.

Chatterjee said the PPP projects took of due to policies with proper legal framework, risk sharing and priorities listed out.

Railway Board Chairman J P Batra said Gujarat expressed concern over the minor ports coming up and connectivity with them. The matter has been referred to Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd if a separate SPV should be set up for the purpose, he said.

He said, as there were almost 240 projects with estimated cost of Rs 47,000 crore for PPP, the states have been asked to review the projects and prioritise them.