The third Annual Meeting of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was held in Mumbai on 25-26 June 2018, and the Global Infrastructure Hub was asked to join one of the panels organised by India, as the host nation.
Mark Moseley, the GI Hub’s Chief Operating Officer, spoke on the panel dealing with Building Resilient and Quality Infrastructure, which was moderated by the Honourable Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs. The Minister spoke of the explosive growth in the demand for infrastructure services in India, especially in urban areas, and other speakers, from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and from the National Disaster Management Authority, stressed the need for high-quality infrastructure that would be able to withstand climatic and other disasters.
In his remarks, Mr. Moseley emphasized that quality needed to be a focus throughout the lifecycle of infrastructure projects, including the phases of design, procurement, construction, operation and handback. In this regard, he referred to the GI Hub’s new tool on PPP Contract Management Tool. Mr. Moseley also referred to the Government of India’s development of new approaches in respect of ‘brownfield projects’, i.e. projects constructed by the public sector which are then offered to the private sector to operate. Mr. Moseley indicated that the GI Hub had committed to work with India’s Ministry of Finance to build a body of expertise in this area.
In the margins of the AIIB Annual Meeting, the GI Hub also met with officials of India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) to discuss future collaborations, especially in regard to the GI Hub’s forthcoming tool on National Infrastructure Banks, to be released at the end of 2018.
