WB to increase annual lending to India

It would increase its total annual lending to India to $ 4 billion ( Rs 18,000 crore) for the next three years, reports Gaurav Choudhury.

Simultaneous with the arrival of Isabel Guerrero, the World Bank's new Country Director to India, the bank on Monday announced it would increase its total annual lending to India to $ 4 billion ( Rs 18,000 crore) for the next three years. The current annual average is around $ 2.5 billion.

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"The focus will be on agriculture, infrastructure, energy and human resource development," said Praful C. Patel, the bank's regional Vice President for South Asia. "We will put special emphasis on states which are lagging behind, and scale up service delivery."

"Increased lending will mean greater challenges in improving implementation performance, and better monitoring and evaluation,” he added.

The World Bank is currently engaged in 63 projects worth about $ 12.7 billion in India.

Patel said that human development projects would receive approximately 18 per cent of the World Bank's total funding in India, followed by agriculture and rural development (17 per cent), infrastructure and energy ( 16 per cent), transport ( 13 per cent) and finance and the private sector 9 per cent.

The main emphasis in the human development projects will be on combating vector borne diseases, tuberculosis and AIDS. But $1.3 billion is also being lent to the education project Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and some vocational education programmes.

Email Gaurav Choudhury: gaurav.choudhury@hindustantimes.cm