India asks World Bank to increase dev fund to USD 100 bln

Washington: India today asked the World Bank to increase its developmental fund to USD 100 billion a year from the existing USD 50-60 billion and called for enhancing the share and voice of developing nations in the management of institutions providing assistance under it.

The World Bank provides developmental assistance through International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

"These three institutions provide approximately USD 50-60 billion per annum in concessional, non-concessional and private sector resources," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in his address to the Development Committee of the World Bank.

"Within next five years, we should work to raise annual financing volumes from the World Bank Group to USD 100 billion a year," said Jaitley, who is here to attend the annual Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

"This would be a kind of minimum contribution from the Bank Group for the developing countries, in their task of bringing about development and finance reconstruction," he said.

Observing that the World Bank is highly capital constrained, Jaitley said the IFC has no space to invest today even at low level volumes it has been doing for some years.

IBRD would not be able to maintain lending levels of even USD 20 billion per annum in two years' time, he said.

To better reflect the increasing weight of Developing and Transition Countries (DTCs), their share and voice in the management of these institutions also needs to grow, Jaitley asserted.

"We should therefore plan to have a Selective Capital Increase (SCI) to raise Developing and Transition Countries (DTCs') voting share to 50 per cent and a large general capital increase in IBRD and IFC for being able to finance USD 100 billion per annum going forward," he said.

Jaitley stressed that the time has come for raising partnership of DTCs in the IBRD and IFC to 50 per cent.

This would require that the economic weight captured by GDP remain the primary factor in the formula, with share of purchasing power parity (PPP) based GDP of not less than 60 per cent.