Virendra Mhaiskar is batting for PPP
For someone who is on the road a lot, Virendra Mhaiskar doesn’t come across as travel-weary. That is probably because the soft-spoken entrepreneur from Maharashtra loves the outdoors and can’t stay away even though it means spending most of his time away from home.
The 43-year-old chairman and managing director of IRB Ifra, who has been building roads for two decades now, is excited about his airport venture at the picturesque Sindhudurg on the Konkan coast, just a couple of hours from Goa. With the economy going for a complete toss, so have developers’ estimates of toll collections and construction costs. Mhaiskar’s firm IRB Infra, which he set up in 1998, has been among those that have opted for rescheduling premium payments to the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI)—for the Ahmedabad-Baroda and Timkur-Chitradurg stretches.
While there has been much debate on PPP (public private partnership), risk-takers like Mhaiskar prefer it to the more traditional EPC—engineering, procurement and construction—route since the upsides can be bigger. As he says, estimating the traffic is critical and given how the slowing traffic has hurt cash flows, it is important to have deep pockets to be able to hang in there.
Source: The Financial Express
EPC model, EPC projects, IRB Ifra, National Highway Authority of India, NHAI, PPP, Public-private partnership, Virendra Mhaiskar
