Govt for enhanced PPP model to boost infrastructure

Mayaram wants less regulatory hurdles

The government is working on a sophisticated and flexible framework for the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model to boost infrastructure development, Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram said on Wednesday.

“What we need to do is to have a more sophisticated PPP framework which we are working on now. Which means a framework which looks at PPPs in a manner where there is flexibility to factor in the changes in the circumstances that run over a period of 25-30 years,” he said at a Ficci event here.

Mayaram also underlined the need for de-stressing the PPP model, which is facing various regulatory hurdles, for infrastructure development.

Define stress

“There is a strong case to see whether we can look at developing a framework which is going to decide what stress is, who is responsible for stress, what is causing the stress and how we deal with them.”

“We would meet to now look at what a stress is and how it can be defined,” he said.As regards the risks associated with PPP projects, Mayaram made it clear that the government alone cannot bear the entire responsibility. The risk should be shared between the private sector and government, he added. Although over 900 PPP projects are under various stages of development, they suffer from various weaknesses including contractual rigidities and lack of quick dispute redressal mechanism.

Corpus fund

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech had proposed setting up of an institution to provide support to mainstream PPPs called 3P India with a corpus of Rs 500 crore.

The 3P India will look at issues relating to regulation, financing structures, stress in project, management of contract over a period of time and also issues relating to capacity building both in public and private sector, Mayaram said.

“It will be a unique and powerful institution which will rejuvenate the entire universe of PPP which seems to be slowing down at the moment,” he added.