PR Jaishankar, Chief General Manager, India Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd (IIFCL) says that old models of development financing need a complete overhaul. He feels while development financing still holds relevance, it needs to be viewed in the context of the dynamic needs of the emerging environment.

Arun Lakhani, Chairman and Managing Director, Vishvaraj Infrastructure, says users will pay for drinking water if service providers improve service and engagement levels. Lakhani, whose firm has successfully rolled out the much-acclaimed 'Nagpur 24x7 Water Supply Scheme' in partnership with the French firm Veolia, also feels that the government needs to enunciate a policy on water reuse to make treated water an attractive proposition for the industry.

There are a variety of challenges in water and wastewater management. One of the major issues is that of the widening demand-supply gap in the water sector as well as treatment of wastewater.

India is urbanising at, what a Union Minister has termed, a very 'dramatic' clip. It today has 50 cities with a population of over one million. As per the 2011 Census, the total number of cities and towns in the country had increased to 7,936 from 5,161 in 2001.

The decision of the Government of India to spend $10 billion towards airport infrastructure development is a critical move. India is one the few nations in the globe which has recorded a year-on-year passenger growth of nearly 23 per cent.

The new civil aviation policy is aimed at creating an ecosystem of affordable flying for the masses as well as easing industry-related concerns which were long due. To do so, the policy has addressed issues from the regulatory, financial and operational perspectives in a comprehensive manner in three main areas

The new aviation policy has brought in a lot of forward-looking changes to boost the slumping aviation industry; these changes have been made to make the industry more dynamic and lucrative for all the players and to level the playing field. One of the major changes which have been welcomed by the smaller airlines is that, prior to the policy change, an airline needed to have 20 planes and five years of local operations to fly overseas.

Airports are the next infrastructural buzzword that will be the game-changer in India´s developmental leap. This buzzword is expected to be exploited using existing growth drivers like exponential growth in passenger traffic and incremental cargo volumes over the next decade.

The reactions are positive and industry is also quite optimistic on the introduction of NCAP 2016. The objective of the government through NCAP is to establish an integrated ecosystem enabling significant growth of the civil aviation sector, which in turn would promote tourism, increase employment and lead to balanced regional growth.