(LiveMint)
The government on Monday announced the creation of a new Development Finance Institution (DFI) to spearhead its investment into India’s physical infrastructure space. Presenting the Union Budget for 2021-22, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will capitalise the DFI with ₹24,000 crore, allowing it to leverage debt of up to ₹5 lakh crore to provide much-needed financing to the capital-starved sector.
The minister also announced a massive push into asset recycling, a fund-raising route the government has experimented with in the last few years that allows it to raise funds by privatising public infrastructure assets and directing the proceeds into new large infrastructure projects. A national monetisation pipeline that will maintain a dashboard of public asset monetisation and will track its progress to investors will be launched. Under this, comes the launch of two infrastructure investment trusts (InvIT) from the National Highways Authority of India and Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd. Besides this, assets from the Railways under the upcoming dedicated freight corridors, oil and gas pipelines from GAIL, IOCL and HPCL, other railway assets, airports in tier 2 and tier 3 towns and public warehouses will also be included for monetisation.
