“Over the years, India has emerged as the country to go to within Asia if you wanted to deploy large cheque sizes in a regulatory, stable framework,” Shukla told CNBC-TV18 on the sidelines of the bank’s 10th Annual India Conference.
Shukla said India continues to be one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets globally. “One [reason] is a very strong regulatory push that the government has towards growing the capacity addition of renewable projects in India. And then finally, you also have structural cost-competitive advantages in India, which make us one of the lowest-cost energy nations in the world. These are actually very big differentiators,” he noted.
He pointed out that investor interest in India’s renewable energy space is moving beyond private funds into public markets. “We’ve seen the IPOs of NTPC Green and Acme get done, and then you have Juniper and Clean Max, who also filed their DRHPs to hit the market soon. So clearly that part of the market is moving from traditionally being a private investor market to a lot of public markets as well,” he said.
On the infrastructure side, Shukla highlighted the success of the government’s TOT programme, which allows for the transparent auction of road assets. “We’ve seen tremendous interest from all kinds of international investors, be it strategics or private equity. Once you have assets that are seasoned, that have a demonstrated track record of operations, it becomes very easy to flip these into InvIT structures. These are then accessible to normal retail and HNI offices, which makes it a very exciting space,” he added.
Watch accompanying video for entire conversation.