• That’s not what some of the user ministries say. They say that the process issue has become so complicated and you’ve produced such perfect documents, the national highway authority being an example, that it’s impossible to work along with these. No contracting has happened for six months.

It is true we’ve had a new process. It’s not a complicated process. We have said when you have a public private partnership please work on a model concessional agreement where the risks and the obligations of different parties are clearly laid out. But for this you have to get the agreement of the finance, planning, and concerned ministries. That’s complicated. But the good news is all that’s over. We have agreed with all the ministries on a model concession for roads.

• You have not been inflexible?

We’ve not been inflexible. Our strategy always was, let us have a model but let us change the model to suit the specific circumstances. When you approve a project, the focus will only be on change. You know the model concession is a two to three hundred page document. If you had to appraise everyone and everyone was to make it to order, it would take months. Now we have a model and we can say, in different projects certain things will change and we can focus on those.

• There was a six month setback.

You can always have projects with bad concession agreements and run into problems later. Some of the bad eggs of the past are projects started when issues were not clarified.

... contd.