Work with India on funding infra, Sitharaman urges NDB

‘India’s response to pandemic spurring V-shaped recovery’

Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday urged the New Development Bank (NDB) to consider working closely with India’s new development financing institution for funding infrastructure. Set up by the BRICS nations in 2014, the NDB has so far approved 18 projects in India, including emergency loans of $2 billion to support health spending and economic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asserting that India’s quick response to limit the impact of the pandemic and to undertake massive vaccination drives are resulting in a V-shaped recovery, Ms. Sitharaman said that India had supplied 63.9 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to 80 countries, including 10.4 million doses of the vaccine as a grant. Ms. Sitharaman, who is India’s Governor on the NDB board, was speaking at the sixth annual meeting of the NDB with the theme ‘New Development Paradigms: The Evolution of Infrastructure” She advised the NDB to effectively meet the evolving development needs of member countries and encouraged it to develop a synergistic relationship with various other multilateral development banks and DFIs, including the new DFI being set up by India, the Finance Ministry said in a statement after the NDB board meet.