Sinha Calls For Planned Development Of Urban Clusters

Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha expressed his concern over the massive mega urban clusters developing in the country.

"Urbanisation is much more pervasive as a phenomena and more widespread than the numbers we pick up", he said, suggesting that projects are being developed in a very spontaneous and but not planned.

Speaking at a conference, Sinha cited the example of three major clusters developing in India. They are: the NCR, including Faridabad, Manesar, Meerut, the Mumbai-Pune region and Bangalore-Chennai area. These are witnessing a continuous urban settlement and growing at an unprecedented way.

"Development of clusters is the most organic way of urban development. With the Indian economy growing at 7%, it is bound to become $4-5 trillion worth in terms of numbers and clusters like the great NCR would be equivalent to countries like UK, given policy management," he said.

Sinha mentioned the extraordinary development of global urban clusters like Shanghai, Boston and New York, and called for better connectivity in the country.

"You would be blown away by the infrastructure connectivity amongst these clusters in comparison," he said.

Touching upon the major challenge of financing, especially shortage of long-term equity risk capital to take development risk in India, Sinha said stability and predictability is important for the burden to not dwell on the tax payers.

"Risk in time costs money for India and expensive in terms of returns. With challenges of land acquisitions, regulations, clearances, it is tough to take development related risk. For that matter, the NIIF (National Infrastructure Fund), is a vital step taken in that direction," he said.

"We need to set up companies where the path of financing, the ownership, the structure is clear and the legal structure complies with the corporate structure", the minister said.

Sinha also emphasised on the development of the airports in the country which will drive urbanisation and development and make the clusters a convenient transfer experience, both domestically and globally.

"The first round of bidding of the UDAN scheme has been very successful with flight services to 43 un-served airports. With focus on regional connectivity, we want to connect hubs like Ludhiana, Jamshedpur, and Gorakhpur to drive India urban development," he said.

"Aviation is very comfortable with sale and lease; we just need to take care of the airports infra and finances. We already have 30,000 crore of capital expenditure for the capital airport which could go up by 50-60 thousand crore of capex in the future, the single largest in the world", added Sinha.