Global rating agency Standard & Poor's is on a trip to discover the real India. On this trip to the country, the S&P team is visiting the Nagpur Municipal Corporation, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and Reliance Infocomm's facility at Navi Mumbai.
So far, the rating agency's trips to India have been confined to the sanitised confines of the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India.
The only places S&P officials had visited beyond North Block and Mint Road are Bangalore and Hyderabad, the nerve centres of business process outsourcing in the country.
This time, the S&P Ratings Services team -- led by its managing director for Asia Pacific corporate and government ratings, Paul Coughlin -- is visiting other places to see different facets of India.
"The world knows India for the success of BPO. But if the agency wants to see the progress of the Indian economy in diverse fields, it must visit other places. It has understood the logic and agreed to see other places," said a source familiar with the team's itinerary.
The team is visiting Nagpur to interact with officials of the local municipal corporation and get a first hand impression of its work. The municipal corporation has done well on the service front.
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Led by former municipal commissioner T Chandrashekhar, the civic body has transformed Nagpur into a city with four-lane roads, landscaped dividers, state-of-the-art streetlight maintenance systems, regularised residential and commercial layouts, introduced pay-n-park zones, hawker-free pavements, storm water drains and beautiful gardens. Its revenue collections have also increased manifold.
The team will visit the Jawaharlal Nehru Port, off Mumbai. Set up in 1989 and conceived as a world-class high-tech port, it started off with a container terminal and a bulk terminal. Later a liquid terminal was added.
In 1999, P&O Australia Ports constructed a second container terminal, which is even more sophisticated in terms of technology. The port controlled terminal crossed the one million TEU mark in handling container about 10 days ago.
Reliance Infocomm, a Reliance group company, has over six million subscribers. It has established a pan-India, high-capacity, integrated (wireless and wireline) and convergent (voice, data and video) digital network, to offer services spanning the entire value chain -- infrastructure, services for enterprises for individuals, applications and consulting.
S&P had revised the outlook on India's long-term foreign currency rating from negative to stable in December.
However, at that time it had left the rating untouched at a sub-investment BB grade. At that time, it had refrained from upgrading India on account of the government's "continuing difficulty in addressing fiscal problems and structural reforms".
A recent S&P report said sovereign ratings in the Asia-Pacific region would be mostly stable and the landscape would be dominated by elections due in at least eight Asian countries. Of the 18 sovereigns rated by S&P in the region, five were upgraded in 2003 (Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Cook Islands and Indonesia). The Philippines and Papua New Guinea were downgraded.