India Plans Port-Financing Arm to Help Boost Harbor Capacity
March 03, 2011, 5:39 AM EST
By Karthikeyan Sundaram
March 3 (Bloomberg) — India will form a state-owned company to help raise funds for ports as it works on a ten-year plan to triple capacity at its busiest harbors.
“We need a specialized arm,” Rakesh Srivastava, joint secretary in the Ministry of Shipping, said in an interview in New Delhi today. “The ministry is not equipped to do the fundraising job,” he said, without elaborating on when the company would begin operations.
The new Maritime Finance Corp. will issue 50 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) of tax-free bonds in the fiscal year starting April 1 to help pay for projects in 12 ports, Srivastava said. The country, Asia’s third-biggest economy, plans to spend as much as 2.87 trillion rupees on ports in the 10 years ending 2020 to support growth.
The port bonds were among the 300 billion rupees of tax- free infrastructure bonds announced by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in his annual budget speech to parliament on Feb. 28.
India plans to boost the annual capacity at major ports to 1.6 billion tons from 616 million tons by 2020, according to the government’s Maritime Agenda. Major ports are defined as those with multiple berths.
–Editors: Neil Denslow, Vipin V. Nair
To contact the reporter on this story: Karthikeyan Sundaram in New Delhi at kmeenakshisu@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Neil Denslow at ndenslow@bloomberg.net