U TI Mutual Fund, the largest independent asset management company in the country, has approached the government to set up a sub-fund under the finance ministry's National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF). NIIF is a government-sponsored fund that was announced in the Budget in February 2015 with an initial corpus of Rs 20,000 crore. The main objective of the fund is to kick-start stalled infrastructure projects, which could be commercially viable, and also to develop new projects in this sector.
Under the structure that is being proposed by the ministry, the government will infuse the initial Rs 20,000 crore into NIIF, which will put money into several sub-funds. In turn, these sub-funds will attract additional equity investments from other entities - domestic and foreign - and invest the aggregate corpus in domestic companies for growth. In a way, NIIF's funds will be leveraged manifold through such step-down structure.