Budget 2021: See building health infra as big opportunity, says L&T's R Shankar Raman

The government's planned capital expenditure for the current fiscal has been increased by a record 34.5 percent in Budget 2021. R Shankar Raman, the Whole Time Director and CFO of India's biggest infra major, Larsen and Toubro, discussed the fine print.

“Health-related services will get a fairly decent allocation. This would mean building health infrastructure in the country,” he said.

“Water both in terms of availability of clean drinking water as well as possibly the affluent and sewage treatment as part of Swachh Bharat programme could also get a fair bit of allocation. The country is getting more and more committed to the climate change initiatives and hence renewable energy will get an allocation in terms of power,” he added.

He believes the spread of the sector is quite wide and it narrows down into three-four major ministries in which the spend is happening.

“The government has been practical in realising that the investment momentum has to be led by the government’s own spending programmes as well as the PSU capex. The private sector will take a little while to join the party. So the tailwind would be in terms of getting the programmes that have been laid out in the budget plans to actual bids and then award them quickly,” he said.

“The planning has been spot on, the economy has to revive by creation of jobs getting more people engaged in do productive activities and that is possible only by investment,” he said.

In terms of order pipeline, he said, “The way we are positioning in the competitive value chain that we tend to win large complex orders. We have a win rate of 20-25 percent. If we are chasing about Rs 75,000 crore worth of orders, normally four times that would be the pipeline of interested orders that we will be pursuing.”