If govt could make CWG work, why not Infra?

It has been suggested that India's GDP could be quickly revved up if the fiscal deficit is cut. But that looks like a tall task. Some industry watchers believe that growth has slowed because infrastructure built over the years is inadequate; not enough power, coal or roads.

These are in short supply because projects underway are stuck, power plant projects are stuck for lack of coal or because consumers are not paying bills, roads are stuck because of shortage of land and so on. This has also led to a fall in fresh investment in capital expansion for the past two-to-three years.
So should the government's priority be to crank up investments and reinstall confidence to invest? Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman, Feedback Infrastructure Services, attempts to answer these questions on this edition of Indianomics on CNBC-TV18. Below is an edited transcript of the interviews. Also watch the accompanying video. Q: What should be the government's strategy? Take the top 50 projects, solve all their problems and get them going to tackle the ground rules first? Or formulate clear rules for land acquisition, environment and auctioning of nation’s resources? What is the best way out?
The infrastructure sector is currently in a fairly downbeat mode and the reasons are clear. Order books are down. L&T's annual results have indicated that the order books are down 30%. Existing projects have been indefinitely delayed and this is well documented.
This means that to get the earnings from the next milestone, construction companies and PPP companies cannot raise their invoices and record collections. So, advances from orders are down, collections are down, banks have become extremely vary of disbursing loans, stock markets are down and the PE funds are disillusioned.
In the current context, the important point is to clear the bottlenecks and logjam affecting the current crop of projects; projects which have already hit the ground. Looking away and announcing new projects is not going to help.
 So, here's answering your question of what to do with projects that are stuck on the ground for one reason or the other? If you start giving very broad policy brushstrokes then that does not give any confidence to the market, because policy brushstrokes we know, can take upto five years to come into being.
What is clearly required and this has been argued ad infinitum, is that the infrastructure ministry should be given the sovereign responsibility to clear obstacles. If that is politically difficult, the next best thing is to have an infrastructure fast-tracking board. A simple example is what was done during the Commonwealth Games.
In two months the government was able to pull together some of the eight brightest IAS officers and tell them to clean up everything before D-day. If you can do something like that for the Commonwealth Games, my argument is that you can surely you can do it for the infrastructure sector. Q: Assuming that such a committee comes in, are you really confident that things can be fast-tracked ? Because we have put ourselves in a situation of deep political distrust between civil society and polity. For instance, it is quite possible that the answer to certain power projects lies in granting in-house coal blocks. Is this, given under the circumstances, because of the hue and cry that coal blocks should be auctioned and that could take its own course of time?
You are right in part and I will tell you why. When implementing an infrastructure project on the ground, let us say I am building a 100-km road and on that road I require an obstacle to be removed or a place of worship to be moved. I require permission of the Railways to build what is called a rail overbridge, I require permission from the irrigation department to have -shall we say a bridge crossing a river, I require permission from a state distribution company (India) DISCOM to remove transmission towers in a particular manner, I require permission to get the district magistrate to acquire a little bit of land to extend the carriage way.
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Remember not all the problems of an infrastructure developer are due to the problems of coalition-politics level problems.
There are many such simple problems on the ground that do not get solved even assuming that even if they are just 30-40% of the cases. The government should be able to get 30-40% of such projects moving. Most of the projects are stuck or held up because there is nobody to see them through. Q: The government is attempting to implement your suggestion in the power sector. The Pullock Chatterjee committee is trying to get several heads together and eliminate roadblocks in the power sector. But even there, after an initial burst of activity from Coal India, coal output did rise in the months of November and December. Production was affected in March and April and insiders say that that it is because new coal blocks are not being sanctioned and the move to rehabilitate tribals and acquire land for sanctioned coal blocks is mired in confusion. So, even this single committee meant to push approvals is not working.
Once again you made a fair point. Let me respond by saying that concerted and sustained attention will be able to move projects. As principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Pullock Chatterjee was given a simple point agenda- get the power sector revving again. In three months' time from January to March-April, a series of initiatives were taken. Coal India was sufficiently woken up with the Presidential decrees. The chairmen of state discoms were called to increase tariffs and cut T&D losses.
Let us look at another example about the sheer power of concerted attention. In the debt crisis of 1991, India had no forex. So a new body was created - the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) similar to our suggesting of a fast-tracking of infrastructure board.
The  FIPB was housed in the PMO and on many Saturdays, the Prime Minister himself would come and chair the proceedings. On other Saturdays the principal secretary to the PMO would preside and by Monday morning or Saturday evening, the Indian press and the media received a list of all the FDI proposals cleared - from Coke to chewing gum.
Concerted, dedicated attention to a problem by the political establishment and then delegation to the bureaucratic establishment is what works. 
The need of the hour is an institution that can take decisions, twist tails, obtain Presidential decrees can be issued and get rid of non-performers. The past has shown that when this management action is unleashed, results happen. That is all we are asking for.