Public-Private Partnership and Infrastructure Development in India- An Introspection

Abstract

A Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a long-term contractual agreement between a government agency and a private partner for the delivery of goods or services can take various forms and include both collaborative (non-legal binding) or contractual (legally binding) agreements. Infrastructure bottleneck has been a serious concern in India in its way of robust pace of economic progression. While many advanced economies and fiscal constrained developing countries have developed their physical infrastructure successfully either through private participation or through public-private partnership (PPP) model, in India, private participation in the process of infrastructure development has received lacklustre response. While private telecom services are a success story in India, the PPP constitutes a miniscule share in overall infrastructure building despite initiation of various policy adjustments and sector-specific reform programmes. In an emerging economy like India the importance of PPP model has gained greater momentum for increasing and sustaining the current pace of socio-economic development. The focus of this paper is to provide an analytical abstract of sector-wise infrastructure developments in the country and the status of private participation and the PPP in building such public infrastructure. This paper raises some specific concerns in the power, transportation, telecom, petroleum, and urban infrastructure sectors and puts forth suggestive measures to enhance the private participation. It also identified some generic issues such as inadequate transparency of procedures, inappropriate risk allocation, proper project appraisal, cost and time overruns, overlapping of regulatory independence, dearth of good governance, etc., which need attention to attract private investors to participate in the public infrastructure building. The present study is exploratory in nature to provide a clear guidance for empirical research. For this purpose, secondary data were collected. The secondary data were collected through newspapers, magazines, books, journals, conference proceedings, Government reports and website.