NEW DELHI: World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick on Saturday announced that the multilateral agency would enhance its partnership with India as the government sought to guide the country’s rapidly expanding economy towards “inclusionary” policies to benefit all its citizens.
At a press briefing here after concluding his maiden visit to India as chief of the World Bank, Mr. Zoellick expressed keenness to hike lending in sectors such as infrastructure, environment, agriculture and poverty alleviation, and said: “If [the Indian] government wants our support, I believe, we can scale up lending across various arms — IBRD [International Bank for Reconstruction & Development], International Development Association and International Finance Corporation [IFC].”
“We will definitely scale up IFC lending,” he said, while noting that the aid quantum from the IBRD would depend on the government. As for concessional IDA loans, “it would depend upon the overall amount we get in IDA 15.” He said he he would persuade donor countries to be more generous in expanding the IDA corpus.
Presenting a gist of the road ahead, following his meetings with the country’s top leadership, Mr. Zoellick said: “India has had striking success. Yet there remains much to be done to address rural and urban poverty and to encourage the development of a healthy, educated and skilled population that will enable India to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth as a leader in the world economy.”
His India visit, he said, was to learn how the World Bank Group services could be “smarter, faster and cheaper” so as to make the Bank a better partner for India; how it could help some of the country’s lagging states catch up; and also how best to support the world-class economic team steering the country’s economic reform programme.
Mr. Zoellick pointed out that a part of the Bank’s contribution to India’s challenge was the global knowledge and experience it could bring from other parts of the world. “But just as important was sharing India’s knowledge with developing nations in Africa, for example, where India was beginning to make its own development contribution,” he said.
The Bank was also engaged across India in development areas that were beginning to reach the scale needed to make a real impact on poverty. These included rural water supply and irrigation critical to agriculture, rural livelihood programmes reaching millions of people and health, education and nutrition programs at a national level.
Mr. Zoellick said he learnt that implementation of development projects was a critical constraint around which the Bank could do more to support building much-needed skills.
Yet another major reason for the Bank’s partnerships with countries such as India and China was their increasing global role and growing profile in critical areas such as climate change and the global trading system. He praised India’s recognition of the challenge of finding a path to low-carbon growth in its own self-interest and said the Bank would make efforts to respond with innovations to support this.
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