Ladies and gentlemen, it is our privilege to invite you to join us in welcoming our esteemed chief guest Shri Gautam Adani, Chairman, Adani Group. May I request Shri V. Chandrasekaran, Chairman, CareEdge Group, and Shri Mehul Pandya, MD and Group CEO, CareEdge, to welcome our eminent chief guest by presenting him with a bouquet as a gesture of our warm welcome. May we have the bouquet, please? May we please have a round of applause for a warm welcome? Thank you, sir, for gracing us with your presence here.
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. On behalf of CareEdge, it is our pleasure to extend a very warm welcome to our esteemed chief guest, distinguished speakers, panelists, industry leaders, partners, and all our valued invitees. Thank you for joining us for CareEdge Infrastructure Landscape: Vision for Viksit Bharat, an evening dedicated to insightful conversation on the opportunities, priorities, and ideas shaping the future of India's infrastructure. My name is Bharatvaj, senior economist at CareEdge Ratings, and it is my privilege to be your host for the evening. I look forward to taking you through today's program. Once again, welcome and thank you for being with us. We now move to the first formal address of the evening. As India pursues its vision of becoming a developed nation, infrastructure continues to serve as a cornerstone of economic progress, enhancing connectivity, enabling investment, and driving sustainable growth. To set the context for this evening's conversations, I'd like to invite Shri Mehul Pandya, MD and Group CEO, CareEdge, to deliver the thematic address. The stage is yours.
CareEdge Group, distinguished leaders from the industry, and esteemed guests, good evening and a very warm welcome to CareEdge Infrastructure Landscape. It is my privilege and a genuine personal pleasure and honor to welcome our chief guest, Gautam Adani, Chairman, Adani Group. Sir, thank you for being here. There are very few individuals whose working life can be read as a map of India's own infrastructure journey. And history records how India built the foundations of its rise globally—it cannot tell that story without telling yours. Infrastructure is the lifeline of any economy, and more so in the case of India with a 21-year journey to Viksit Bharat. Robust and modern infrastructure has a positive influence in the form of three critical factors. First, it has a multiplier impact on economic growth. Second, it has an impact in the form of debottlenecking and lowering of costs. And third, it is a critical enabler of businesses and households. For much of our history, we have construed it as our constraint, but today it is our competitive advantage.
Our public capital expenditure has increased sixfold over the last decade or so, and our major ports have handled record cargo in the last financial year. But the real story is being written elsewhere, and that is in the change of philosophy from assets in silos to an integrated ecosystem. There is also a second, quieter shift that deserves our attention: what we count as infrastructure. That definition itself is broadening, broadening beyond physical assets as traditionally known, and even digital public infrastructure systems in an efficient and rapidly modernizing economy. New layers are getting added. Can anyone of us imagine today having a smooth ride on the highways without FASTag? With smart meters at scale, utilities are moving to prepaid billing. Collections have been robust and regulators can price time-of-the-day tariffs which could stabilize the grid. Sagar Setu now covers all 13 major ports and 41 non-major ports. So is the tolling layer infrastructure? Is smart metering infrastructure? I would argue yes, and the list keeps on growing: green hydrogen, EV charging, chip fabrication, and data centers.
And here is why that matters in this room: this broader infrastructure carries the same economic DNA as the traditional kind—heavy upfront capital, long gestation, monopolistic features, necessity of regulation for orderly management, and early policy support. No wonder, then, it must be financed and assessed with the same long-time horizon and the discipline attached to that. And consider the scale: a McKinsey report puts the global infrastructure investment requirement at $100+ trillion by 2040. For our own country, an FAI report states the requirement of the next 20-odd years at 770 lakh crores. And when we put that against our ambition of becoming a $25 trillion economy by 2047, even that looks like an underestimate. Earlier this year, our honorable Prime Minister set out the road ahead in a single sentence, and I quote, 'The last decade has witnessed record infrastructure upgrading. We are committed to building next-generation infrastructure for the people of our nation to realize our vision of Viksit Bharat.'
So what does the roadmap require? Four things. First, stop thinking in projects and start thinking in corridors. A cluster linked to a freight corridor, a modern port, and reliable power is worth far more than the sum of its parts. Second, private capital must carry a larger share. Our PPP model is mature; new sectors like railways are getting added to that, and CareEdge Ratings estimates InvIT assets AUM near 7.5 lakh crores in the last financial year, double the FY22 level, with asset recycling deepening through the TOT model. Third, the role of government remains central and not residual. The central capital spending has crossed 10 lakh crore rupees, that is above 3% of GDP. And fourth, and that matters to us as a rating agency, is innovation in financial structures: partial credit guarantee, future flow securitization, and the infrastructure risk guarantee fund—they are all steps in the right direction. And through all of it, let's also remember that physical infrastructure is social infrastructure. A road is a child going to school; a transmission line is an operation theater not going dark.
A brief word about your host today: CareEdge Ratings started its journey in 1993, and in these 30+ years, we have assessed credit risk in the economy through cycles, through macroeconomic challenges, and through the long arc of India's deepening finance. In infrastructure, we have the deepest coverage across the rating industry with more than 35% coverage, and when I look at that from the spectrum of sectors like renewables, power, telecom, and ports, that coverage goes right up to 60%. That experience and that coverage gives us the vantage point, and that is something encouraging. Our credit ratio for this sector has remained quite strong, and this assessment voice has now gone global in the form of CareEdge Global Ratings, which we started about 20 to 22 months back. Today we are rating more than 45 sovereign countries, which cover more than 85% of global GDP, and the third edition of our sovereign rating coverage was released earlier this year by our honorable Commerce and Industry Minister Shri Piyush Goyal in London.
Why does that matter in this room filled with infra builders? That is because the cost of each single project and the cost of capital attached to it depends upon how the world prices India's risk, and that is long shaped by frameworks which have been designed thousands of miles away. An economy that is funding itself deserves to be assessed on evidence and not on inherited assumptions. I must confess one aspect about my profession: rating analysts are trained skeptics. We are conditioned to imagine what can go wrong, and we are rather good at it. So when a rating agency tells you that it is genuinely optimistic about India's infrastructure decade ahead, take it as a strong signal. Let me take you back to my early days of professional career in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, first in lending and then in rating. In both these roles, it required predicting the future by projecting cash flows, and the horizon that we looked at was about four to five years. We were taught that beyond five years, forecasting becomes fiction. At around that time, some distance away, Shri Gautam Bhai was investing in barren land in Gujarat and building a port on a vision that was not for four to five years, but for multiple decades. Projects of that long gestation belong to the government, but this leader was unusual: he not only visualized it, but he successfully implemented it.
Mundra Port today is an economic jewel of India, and he has gone on to add many more such jewels to India's infra landscape. Hence, it is entirely appropriate that we call Shri Gautam Bhai as the face of India's infrastructure landscape. In his own words at an AGM of his company earlier this year, I quote, 'While others debated, our group built, advancing its journey as the world's most integrated infrastructure platform across energy, transport, logistics, and industrial manufacturing,' unquote. And he further elaborated on what drives him, again I'm quoting, 'Not the noise that surrounds us, but the strength of our response; not the intensity of the challenge, but the clarity of our purpose; and not the criticism, but the nation-building we intensely believe in,' unquote. The record stands behind the words: over 1.5 lakh crore in hard infrastructure in FY26, more than 30% of India's entire new private sector capital expenditure, over 500 million tons of cargo going right up to a billion by 2030, and a new international airport in Navi Mumbai, and that also in four years. Sir, I would say that in this city, perhaps a housing society may not be able to decide on the color of its exterior paint in four years, and you have built an airport.
At an earlier AGM of his company, he shared his mother's counsel. I quote, 'History does not remember sailors who sailed in still waters. It remembers those who fought the wildest storms and yet returned home.' Sir, our vocation is forecasting the weather, and yours has been to sail regardless. Friends, one closing thought: 21 years separate us from 2047. Not a very distant horizon—in fact, one single investment cycle. Most assets that will define Viksit Bharat will be financed and commissioned by the people in this room. The generation before us consolidated our freedom from colonialism; the generation after us will inherit whatever we leave standing. Ours is the generation that must build the unshakable foundation of Viksit Bharat. What is being asked of us is clear: not merely highways, but corridors; not merely capacity, but capability; and not merely concrete and steel, but credibility. Decades from now, no one is going to read our quarterly results, but they will drive on our roads, they will fly from our airports, they will ship from our ports, and they will switch on our grids. India's infrastructure decade has begun. The intent is national, the capital shall be available with our global heft, the talent is ours; what remains is our resolve. So let us build a nation that is connected, competitive, energy secure, digitally empowered, and decisively confident. And let us build it fast enough that our children never have to describe India in future tense. Shri Gautam Bhai, once again a very warm welcome, and I'm sure that your passion shall rub off on all of us as you take the podium. Thank you and Jai Hind.
