That India’s infrastructure needs a dramatic makeover is stating the obvious. There are three prerequisites to make it happen: large-scale investment, certainty of business for investors, and value for users’ money. Since the three feed on each other, you can’t have any one without the other two in the long term. The focus now seems to be singularly on attracting money, the other two prerequisites — certainty of business and value for users’ money — have received inadequate attention.

In the last eight months, there has not been a single transaction in the infrastructure space. And despite users paying more money for better roads, ports and airports, the quality of service doesn’t seem to be getting better. What caused this major imbroglio is not any mega policy disaster: the eye of the storm is the model request for qualification document that came to define the bidding process for infrastructure last November. Conceived by Gajendra Haldea, advisor (Infrastructure) in the planning commission, it is a bold attempt to standardise documentation process while awarding public-private partnership, or PPP, projects. The problem provision is the one that suggests short-listing not more than five, at most six, bidders for any project. People on the ground are not exactly enamoured of this: not a single road project has been bid out successfully; modernisation of two non-metro airports — Udaipur and Amritsar — has been hanging fire; building of a container terminal at Ennore is mired in controversy; and the ambitious New Delhi railway station modernisation project is in suspended animation. In short, the movement in the bidding process of most projects in the PPP mode has come to a grinding halt.

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