LUCKNOW: At the traditional bell-ringing ceremony on December 2, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) listed bonds worth Rs. 200 Crores on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), in the presence of Yogi Adityanath, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The ceremony took place at BSE, Mumbai. This has made Lucknow the ninth city in the country to issue bonds for raising investments. In the listing on BSE, LMC has issued bonds worth 100 crores with a greenshoe option of up to 100 crores with a tenure of 10 years.
The listing received an extremely positive response with bids totalling up to 450 crores. This helped in bringing the interest rate down to 8.5 per cent, making it the second-lowest rate of all the municipal bonds launched till date. Adityanath said that Ghaziabad will be the next to issue municipal bonds and it will be followed by Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi, and Agra. He also urged UP’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) to make use of the stock exchange platform to raise equity capital to fuel their business growth.
In his speech, Yogi Adityanath expressed immense pride at the achievement of LMC. According to the LMC officials, the proceedings from the bonds will be reinvested in a water supply project being implemented under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation. This is a huge feat for Lucknow as it has demonstrated the development of LMC into a model for urban governance.