India's permanent thrust area is infrastructure: Shankar Sharma

Et Now caught up with Shankar Sharma, Vice Chairman and Joint MD, First Global to get his opinion on core thrust area for the government this time in the budget.

Wanted to get your opinion on the core thrust area for the government this time around whether it is an announcement in the budget of outside of this event.

No, India's permanent thrust area is infrastructure. We have talked about it for 20 years. For the next 20 years, we will keep talking about it. Let's see what model emerges that Mr. Kamal Nath spoke about when he became minister. That helps us implement infrastructure that the PPP model clearly is something that is not that simple to implement, in fact even though it is easy to implement in theory.

The jury is still out on what will be a viable way to solve the problem of financing with the government fiscal situation is stretched. We all know that. The private sector will not get into projects unless it is assured of a certain amount of viability which means that the government needs to again provide some degree of subsidy if you can call it that which again for the government to come out with an acceptable solution of the private sector.

These are very tricky things and let's say one company might be agreeable to doing a project at a certain IRR while the entire pack may not be. So how do you have a model which is a uniform model, one size fits all that everybody in the sector will accept, that is a little bit of a tricky area.