NEW DELHI: NITI Aayog and the World Resources Institute India organised a virtual workshop on ‘Financing for Decarbonisation of Transport’ on February 22, with the help of GIZ India. It was organised as part of the NDC-Transport Initiative for Asia project. The objective of the workshop was to enable organisations financing the development of the decarbonised ecosystem to work efficiently in a coordinated manner through proper planning. It brought together a wide spectrum of stakeholders including startups, service providers, financial institutions, etc. for peer-to-peer learning and information exchange.
Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog delivered the keynote address of the event. He said that the need of the hour is to provide more financial instruments for providing a further impetus to clean mobility in India. He said that mobility must be fostered by leveraging private sector investments and by unlocking financing for e-buses in the cities. He mentioned that the aim of the government should be to balance the needs and aspirations of the citizens, improve liveability and productivity by improving connectivity bring down the cost of logistics and accelerate clean mobility while taking a climate-centric and sustainable approach. He added that this should be done from a financial perspective in addition to the environment point of view. According to him, green financing will enable low-interest-cost financing of electric vehicles.