Maharashtra to set up NBFC

The proposed NBFC will give loans at cheaper interest rates. The mounting debt of Rs 3 lakh crore reeling over Maharashtra is a cause of concern for its finance minister. Further, an interest payment of Rs 26 crore per day is a worry factor too. Hence, to partially ease out this situation, the Maharashtra government is likely to set up a non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) which will bring down its per day interest payment to a comfortable level. "The proposed NBFC will be a replica model of what the Gujarat government had implemented a few year ago", Sudhir Mungantiwar, Minister of Finance, Planning and Forest, Government of Maharashtra, told Infrastructure Today in an exclusive interview. When asked about the total corpus of this proposed NBFC, Mungantiwar suggested that since most of the state-owned units have stacked their cash in nationalised banks in the form of fixed deposits, the same will be utilised as a primary corpus of the proposed NBFC. According to him, a sum of Rs 50,000 crore has been maintained in the form of fixed deposits by state-owned companies. But, the entire amout will not be accounted as a corpus. However, he refused to divulge the names of these companies. Meanwhile, it is expected that through NBFC, the state government will transfer some amount of the debt, mounted on them to the proposed NBFC at much lower interest rates, bringing down the rising interest payment per day. In addition, the proposed NBFC will give loans to the statebased schemes or programmes at much cheaper rate of interests as compared to nationalised banks. It is also expected that this NBFC, in due course of time, will also fund necessary infrastructure projects in the state. -Rahul Kamat