Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy met with officials from the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB) on Thursday, who have sanctioned a loan of Rs 6,000 crore for the state.
The NDB delegation, including its Vice President N. Jong and Project Head Rajpurkar, have said that the loan will be approved soon. The amount is set to be used by the state government for social infrastructure projects. The Chief Minister has reportedly sought more assistance from the NDB, in order to complete various projects related to infrastructure development, like building of schools, hospitals and supply of clean drinking water. The loan is to be repaid in 32 years.
The Shanghai-based NDB was formed by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations in 2014, to aid infrastructure and sustainable development efforts in these nations.
Earlier in July, the World Bank withdrew an expected loan of $300 million for construction of the Andhra Pradesh capital. A few days later, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) also dropped its plans to fund the project with $200 million.
However, the state government had shown optimism over the World Bank funding other development projects in the state. The World Bank had said that they were ready to provide whatever support the Andhra Pradesh state and the Government of India might request. Shortly after the World Bank issued a statement, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), in a release, expressed happiness that the World Bank would compensate by funding other important projects in the state.
The AP CMO cited rampant corruption besides flouting of various socio-economic norms and inviting of project tenders before the loan details were finalised, to be the reasons behind the World Bank backing out of the Amaravati project. This claim by the Andhra Pradesh CM is despite the World Bank in their release stating that the request to drop the project came from the Government of India.
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