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Union Budget 2012-13 has lot of potential for Infrastructure & Real Estate The Union Budget for FY 2012-13 has a lot of potential for Infrastructure & Real Estate sector. Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee stated clearly that lack of infrastructure is a major concern in India and there is grave need to remove infrastructure bottlenecks. I too, strongly feel the same. While we continue to be one of the fastest growing economies, our pace of development is unlikely to continue unless it is supported by an equally robust development of its infrastructure. There is a balanced scope of development in both Urban and Rural areas but more stress has been given to enhance & develop the Rural India. There are some critical challenges mentioned in the Budget, like lack of monitoring resulting in time and cost overruns or acquiring land for projects, the implementation gaps, leakages from public programmes and the final quality which pose a serious challenge to the industry & overall growth. There are a lot of crucial things which needs immediate attention like proper Master-planning, Transport connectivity, strengthening basic infrastructure on water, irrigation, sewage-system, power-electricity, etc. All this has been mentioned in this year's Budget and would be duly taken care of by the government by the Infra-investment fund of Rs. 50,000 Crores. The total investment in infrastructure including roads, railways, ports, airports, electricity, telecommunications, oil gas pipelines and irrigation is estimated to have increased from 5.7% of GDP in 2007 to around 8.0% in 2011. This year's budget aims for an increased growth rate between 9-10% with the fund-allocation of Rs. 10,000 crore on developing the National Highways alone. Budget 2012-13 gives major thrust on accelerating the pace of investment in infrastructure, as this is critical for sustaining and accelerating an overall growth. Efforts to attract private investment into infrastructure through the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) route have met with considerable success, not only at the level of the Central Government, but also at the level of the individual States. A large number of PPP projects have taken off, and many of them are currently operational in both the Centre and the States. Since resource constraints continue to limit public investment in infrastructure, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) based development has been strongly emphasized in this year's Union Budget. Special attention has been paid to the financing needs of private sector investment in infrastructure. Infrastructure investment (defined as electricity, roads and bridges, telecommunications, railways, irrigation, water supply and sanitation, ports, airports, storage and oil-gas pipelines) would be increased from about 8% of GDP to about 10% of GDP. The total investment in infrastructure would have to be over Rs. 45 lakh crore or $ 1 trillion in the next five years. Financing this level of investment requires larger outlays from the public sector, and this has to be coupled with a more than proportional rise in private investment. The growth curve of Indian economy is at an all time high and contributing to the upswing is the real estate sector in particular. The Union Budget 2012-13 is very promising for the infrastructure sector and would fetch great results if implemented effectively. For economic and financial policymakers, new incentives to attract capital and projects have emerged. The ambitious FDI policies provide greater access to global capital markets will further expand the mix and amount of resources available for development.

Infrastructure challenged India represents a fertile opportunity for a new approach that would attract needed financial resources for sustainable development and allow even greater participation in the global economy. With major National & Global players making large-scale investments, the coming year would boost up the development of infrastructure and thus construct a developed Nation."