EPFO all set to invest around $100 billion in infrastructure debt funds

17 Apr 2013 Evaluate

In a major boost for India’s infrastructure sector, the Employees' Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), the country's largest pension fund, is finally ready to route some of its $100 billion corpus into the sector through Infrastructure Debt Funds or IDFs. The move will help the cash-strapped core sector that requires an estimated $1 trillion over the next five years.

Long-term funds would be crucial for building new infrastructure that faces severe funding constraints as banks having little room to deploy fresh funds into long-gestation projects due to the concerns over rising asset liability mismatch. Therefore, the finance ministry has been knocking insurance as well as pension funds to push more investment in the infrastructure sector. 

Further, under the new norms, the maximum tenure for AAA-rated PSUs has been raised to 25 years from 15 years and to 15 years from 8 years for AA-rated PSUs. AAA ratings denote the highest level of safety for bond investments. With EPFO opening up its Rs 500,000-crore corpus to IDFs, fresh money could trickle into infrastructure.

Although, the EPFO is expected to get better returns on this investment as it had just offered 8.25 per cent return to its subscribers in 2011-12 because of the strict investment guidelines that allow a majority of its corpus to be put in government backed securities.

IDF provides an opportunity to channelize savings and global liquidity to create an alternate pool of capital, for investing in public-private projects in ports, railways, roads, highways and other such infrastructure projects, which have already commenced commercial production. The first IDF was set up earlier this year jointly by ICICI Bank, Bank of Baroda, Citibank and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) with a corpus of $2 billion.

Meanwhile, the government has identified the development of infrastructure a most critical requirement for sustaining the current growth momentum of the economy. The infrastructure sector’s growth lingers to a great extent on the investments made and timely execution of the projects. Hence, in order to bring in adequate resources for setting up of a sound and efficient infrastructural base, the government has entered into the 'Public Private Partnership (PPP)' programme.

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