Urban development secretary Sudhir Krishna on Friday stressed the need for revisiting the model concession agreements for PPP projects across urban infrastructure verticals.
He said the PPP documents for urban projects should be formulated in such a way that they have an inbuilt flexibility to meet all future eventualities.
FE had reported a slew of policy changes being mulled by the ministry, including the flexibility in viability gap funding (VGF) to make metro projects more attractive for private players.
Krishna said metro projects in India are the cheapest in the world due to availability of abundant manpower resources, “I discovered that our metro projects are the cheapest in the world. I am not able to make a solid claim because corporate data you have to collect…The next highest is something that is 20% more than us but generally 40% more than Indian metro projects,” he said.
While India was not manufacturing all the components, the key lies in the country’s large population that allows us to deploy more people in a project, he said. “I have found this is a strength. Because we can break the project into different components and then bid for different components and you get the best possible competitors who are experts in those fields, whether it is the signalling system or the rolling stock or whether it is the construction of the civil structure,” Krishna said.
