“Intent, Inclusion, Investment, Infrastructure and Innovation— these five things are important to speed up India’s development and make it ‘atmanirbhar’. - Prime Minister Narendra Modi Infra-Nirbhar, the free webinar series by Construction World and Swarajya magazine, will begin with the session “Metro Vision” tomorrow, Monday 22 February, from 3:00 to 4:30 pm. Hardeep S Puri, Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs, will deliver the Keynote Address. To bolster infrastructure development the government proposed to increase the capital expenditure to Rs 5.54 trillion which is 34.5% than what was allotted to infrastructure development last year. As Puri said, “Budget 2021 pushes the envelope on spending with a huge 34.5% capital expenditure … This will lead to a cycle of economic revival with job creation, pick-up in demand, creation of long term assets and gradual increase in tax revenues leading to medium-term fiscal consolidation.” The Budget has given equal importance to various physical infrastructures including metro rail. NCRTC received a whopping Rs 44.72 billion allocation which is approximately double of what was allocated last year. Further, the Budget emphasises on the development of metro rails in the PPP mode in different parts of the country and also talks about deploying two new technologies, Metro Lite and Metro Neo, to provide metro rail systems at a much lesser cost with similar experience in tier-2 cities and peripheral areas of tier-1 cities. Other speakers at this webinar are: Aashish Chandorkar, Columnist and Writer (Moderator) Pratap Padode, Editor-in-Chief, Construction World Abhay Mishra, CEO & MD, Mumbai Metro One Nalin J Gupta, MD, J Kumar Infraprojects Pradeep Yadav IAS, Managing Director, Chennai Metro Rail Surjit Madan, Head-Rail Systems, Amaravati Metro Rail Corporation Click HERE to register for the FREE webinar. Also read: Infra-Nirbhar: Webinar series by CW and Swarajya