World Bank to assist Centre to create US $500mn infra fund

Kolkata, Jun 3(UNI) The Centre, with the help of World Bank, will create a National Urban Infrastructure Fund, with a corpus of US 0 million, to assist various projects taken up by the states.

Speaking to mediapersons here today, Ministry of Urban Development Secretary M Ramachandran said,''The World Bank will give us loan of US 0 million to build up the corpus for this fund.'' An asset management company would be floated by the Centre and various financial institutions like IDFC and banks to create a large corpus. Besides, Asian Development Bank might also particiapte in this fund.

The fund would be utilised for various municipal or local bodies promoted projects.

The Urban Development Ministry is currently in talks with the Planning Commission and Department of Economic Affairs Ministry for approval of the fund.

''We are also awaiting the approval from Cabinet Committee for Economic Affairs,'' he said.

''Before the amount gets floated, we are getting all the municipal bodies rated by four SEBI approved Credit Rating Agencies, including Crisil and ICRA,'' Mr Ramachandran said.

''We can float the SPV only after the the whole process gets approved by the Planning Commission and CCEA,'' he added.

UNI