Guest lecture: Innovative ways of financing urban development

This session has been designed to provide an insight into an important aspect of urban management and development: project financing. In the project cycle, it is observed that many city governments are not able to meet the aspirations of citizens due to financial constraints, which in turn results in poor tax realization and ultimately constraints to improvement and up-gradation of services. This vicious cycle needs to be broken by way of financing which is project-specific and uses alternate sources of recovery.

This session is prepared with an objective to argue the non-conventional ways of project financing, which can yield quality infrastructure at minimal cost to the city exchequer. Since urban infrastructure projects are generally non-remunerative in nature, we would focus on effective tools of cost realization for seeking finances towards their implementation.

The guest speakers are:

Mr Rajiv Sharma

Mr Rajiv Sharma, the president of the Alumni association India, works at HUDCO (the Human Settlement Management Institute) as General manager (Projects). He was India counterpart to UNESCO-IHE Project on Water Education and Research (PoWER) and was invited as an expert by UNESCO to finalise training material on Water Management for working professionals. Further, he has contributed to capacity building projects of UN-Habitat, DFID, WHO, World Bank and UNICEF.

Mr Sanjib Sarma

Mr Sanjib Sarma is Civil Engineer and worked at HUDCO and HSMI. His speciality is in the area of Urban Infrastructure with emphasis on Water Supply, Sanitation, Storm Drainage and Solid Waste Management. He is associated in a number of projects in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. He has lectured at the I.H.S. on numerous occasions including conducting a one-month Course Unit on Urban Infrastructure. He is also an active member of the IHS Alumni Association in New Delhi.

You are welcomed to join us at the IHS, Mandeville building, Erasmus University Rotterdam campus.