India should strike a balance between ramping up physical infrastructure and the social infrastructure such as healthcare systems, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) president Jin Liqun said on Tuesday.
Stressing that the country faces a ‘huge need’ to strengthen its healthcare infrastructure, the AIIB president said that the multilateral lender would look to fund both social as well as climate-resilient infrastructure in India in the coming years.
The AIIB will align its operations with the goals of the Paris Agreement to cope with climate change by July 2023, and expects to finance infrastructure projects to mitigate and adapt to climate change worth $50 billion by 2030, Mr. Jin said at a press conference ahead of the governors’ board meet.
‘Supplementing efforts’
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her interventions, emphasised the importance of multilateral banks in supplementing countries’ efforts to cope with the COVID-19 crisis and the looming climate crisis.
“She highlighted some of the expectations from the Bank, including the need to explore investment opportunities in the creation and development of assets in social infrastructure sectors; to further intensify private sector capital mobilisation for inclusive and green development; and to set up a Resident Board and Regional Offices to ensure accountability, transparency and quality of operations and investments,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement.
Mr. Jin said that India needed to develop modern infrastructure and when the Bank screened proposals, it worked with the government to ensure that priority was given to infrastructure projects which could deal with climate change.
‘Making key progress’
“I can assure you that we are making very much important progress in this regard. Second, we financed the projects to deal with the pandemic in India and, at this moment, I can see the projects we financed are already working. I am very glad to see the Indian government is quickly containing the pandemic,” the AIIB president said.
“What we are looking forward to is when we can quickly go back to normal infrastructure investment operations... which can also help the healthcare systems and social infrastructure.”