Washington– The Narendra Modi government’s ambitious Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan is based on the knowledge sharing from a similar project in Egypt, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said here.
“Through our new structure of global practices, knowledge sharing across countries has become easier and faster. When the Government of India came to the bank to prepare a major programme to expand sanitation services for the poor, we were able to transfer knowledge and experience from Egypt’s Rural Sanitation Project and apply it in India,” Kim said at the plenary meet of the World Bank held on Friday.
“That resulted in the $1 billion Swachh Bharat Rural Sanitation Project in India, which applied knowledge of good service delivery – in the areas of local governance, transparency and accountability to citizens – that had already been taken to scale in Egypt,” he added.
Kim said that the bank was looking to share knowledge from these two projects globally to help deliver better results on the ground.
He said that the World Bank is also looking to crowd in private sector investment in sectors like infrastructure.
India has one of the largest networks of roads in the world, but the the two per cent of its national highways carry 40 per cent of traffic, causing bottlenecks that can limit productivity and slow economic growth.
“Infrastructure is key to integrating economies and delivering services. To help improve India’s roads, International Finance Corporation invested $250 million in the Singapore-based firm Cube Highways. The firm is acquiring a portfolio of toll roads in India, injecting much-needed funds for road developers to complete their projects,” Kim said.
