Vijay Kelkar heads panel to recast PPP model

The government on Tuesday named former finance secretary and economist Vijay Kelkar to head a panel that will recast the model of infrastructure development in which the government partners private firms. Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, in his budget speech, had announced the committee after stating that the current model was not robust enough to reduce risk for the private companies to increase investment in infrastructure—a challenge that the government faces. He had advocated increased public spending and promised to look into ways to resolve issues hampering the so-called public-private-partnership (PPP) model. “The PPP mode of infrastructure development has to be revisited and revitalized. The major issue involved is rebalancing of risk. In infrastructure projects, the sovereign will have to bear a major part of the risk without, of course, absorbing it entirely,” Jaitley had said in the budget speech.

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