JOIN USAfter lending support to the government’s startup initiative, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday said it will go in for more regulatory easing to give government’s effort a push.
“We are open to regulatory changes as the situation demands, as nothing is cast in stone. We are sensitive to demand,” RBI Deputy Governor H R Khan said.
Khan’s comments come after Governor Raghuram Rajan’s assurance that regulations will be there, but in an easy-to-understand and well-enforceable manner.
RBI has recently eased overseas borrowing norms for businesses including startups. RBI’s latest assurance comes as the government seeks more private investment in infrastructure projects and simplifying restructuring norms which create attractive investment opportunities.
India needs Rs 31 lakh crore worth of investment in the next five years in new infrastructure projects, in which a lot of foreign sovereign and pension funds have evinced interest.
Apart from these, there are stalled projects worth Rs 10.7 lakh crore, in which scarcely any private investor shows interest.
However, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said that a number of funds like Apollo, Blackstone, Edelweiss were looking at these brownfield stalled projects.
He said there were a variety of projects on offer for investors including stalled, greenfield and cash-generating developed projects.
“The government is currently engaged in packaging these together to make them more attractive to investors,” according to a source.
The government has also launched the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund which besides funding infrastructure projects, is also meant for buying bad loans of banks and help them lend more towards infrastructure sector.
NIIF has been set up with a corpus of Rs 40,000 crore in which hald the money is expected to come from private sector.