Cyrillic Partners

India will turn to private enterprise to build out the infrastructure it needs to sustain a 9% GDP growth rate over the next five years, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman for India’s Planning Commission, tells The McKinsey Quarterly (You can download the whole interview here: McKinsey Quarterly).

“About three-quarters of the of the increase in infrastructure investment above the business-as-usual projections would have to be privately funded,” he says. “The public sector cannot mobilize resources on this scale.”

There are lots of other interesting nuggets in the interview, but this one in particular jumped out at me. The business press has been talking about this problem for a while now. BusinessWeek did a great story on it earlier this year. I remember the cover image was of a crumbling stone elephant.

India will be a great economic experiment: a real crucible for the libertarian ideal of free markets and private enterprise. It’s an evolving case study that will no doubt be fodder for countless text book anecdotes.

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