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Beyond Municipal Bonds: Building the Institutional Architecture for India's Urban Capital Markets

1. The Municipal Bond Moment India is beginning to confront an uncomfortable reality about its urban infrastructure: the scale of investment required to build and maintain its cities is far beyond what conventional municipal financing arrangements can comfortably provide. Water supply, sewerage, wastewater treatment, solid-waste management, urban transport, roads, drainage, and climate-resilient infrastructure all require substantial and sustained investment. Yet India's municipalities remain largely dependent on a combination of property taxes, user charges, transfers from higher levels of government, grants, bank finance, and government-backed infrastructure programmes. Municipal bonds offer a way of adding another source of capital to this system. In principle, they can connect the long-term savings of financial markets with the long-term infrastructure requirements of cities. In practice, however, India's municipal bond market remains extremely small. Only a limited number ...
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From DPR to Infrastructure Intelligence: Rethinking How India Plans, Builds, and Learns from Roads

1. The Problem Before the Road India is building roads at a scale that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. Highways and expressways are extending across regions, connecting cities to industrial clusters, linking ports to production centres, and shortening the distance between places that were once separated by difficult terrain. Yet the physical expansion of the road network has exposed another problem: the quality of the knowledge on which individual infrastructure projects are based. The issue is often described as a problem of faulty Detailed Project Reports, or DPRs. When a highway is badly designed, when an alignment creates an unforeseen safety problem, when drainage proves inadequate, or when geological conditions cause difficulties during construction, attention naturally turns to the DPR and the consultants who prepared it. Recent public discussions around highway safety have similarly focused on deficiencies in project reports and on the need for greater account...
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