Billionaire Gautam Adani on Monday (August 31) shared his vision for a ‘Viksit Bharat’ (developed India), while speaking as the chief guest at the CareEdge Ratings Infrastructure Landscape event. Adani spoke about India’s economic growth and infrastructure development, outlining his dreams for new India.
‘India needs wider lenses’
Adaniย urged India’s credit-rating agencies to adopt broader analytical frameworks for assessing infrastructure projects, arguing that conventional models can underestimate the economic and strategic value of large platforms that create new markets and industrial ecosystems.
“Our roads are expanding at unprecedented speed. Our ports are transforming. Our airports are connecting more nations than ever before. Our renewable energy capacity is growing faster than any other nation on earth. Our digital infrastructure is reaching hundreds of millions. But, as the scale of our ambition grows, so does the importance of the frameworks that judge it. Transformational infrastructure can be constrained not only by a lack of ambition or capital, but also by the frameworks through which its risks are assessed,” he said while speaking at the CareEdge Group Annual Summit in Mumbai.ย
The Adani Group chairman said India did not need lower credit standards but “wider lenses” to assess infrastructure whose value extends beyond the cash flows of a single asset.
“This is not a call for less scrutiny. It is not a call for easier ratings. And it is not a call to compromise independence. My point is exactly the opposite. India does not need lower standards. India needs wider lenses,” Adani said, calling on CareEdge to develop what he described as the world’s first comprehensive credit framework for “integrated platform infrastructure.”
“I believe many of our analytical frameworks were developed for an age in which infrastructure evolved incrementally, demand was relatively visible, and the boundaries of an asset were easier to define,” he added.
He argued that conventional credit models, often built around individual assets and projected cash flows, can struggle to capture the economic spillovers created when infrastructure is connected to other assets. “They were typically built on siloed single-asset Discounted Cash Flow models that price risk by isolating an asset from its environment. India has now entered a very different period. The nature of infrastructure has changed, and the sophistication of our rating frameworks must evolve alongside the sophistication of what India is building,” Adani said.
The remarks come as India accelerates investment in ports, renewable energy, power transmission, digital infrastructure and manufacturing as it seeks to build a more developed economy by 2047.
Gautam Adani divides infrastructure into 3 categories
The Adani Group chairman divided infrastructure into three categories: replacement infrastructure, where traditional rating models are generally adequate; growth infrastructure, where models should account for ecosystem effects; and platform infrastructure, which he said can create entirely new capabilities, markets and industrial clusters.
“Platforms like Mundra, Vizhinjam and Khavda do not just satisfy existing demand. They create new demand. They create new ecosystems. They create new capabilities. They change the economics around them. And therefore, they require an analytical framework capable of measuring not just standalone cash flows, but also ecosystem multipliers, strategic resilience and adjacency value,” Adani said.
From ports to industrial platforms, Adani cited Mundra port in Gujarat as an example of infrastructure whose value expanded far beyond the original asset. “What began decades ago as a port project on a relatively undeveloped coastline has evolved into a broader logistics and industrial ecosystem linked to rail, logistics centres, power generation and manufacturing,” he said.
Mundra is now a major maritime gateway to northern and northwestern India, with extensive multimodal connectivity and industrial infrastructure around the port.
Adani said such projects illustrate the limitations of assessing infrastructure solely through standalone discounted-cash-flow models. “If we build only for the demand we can see today, India will always be late for the opportunities of tomorrow,” he said.
He made a similar argument for Vizhinjam International Seaport in Kerala, saying India had for years relied on overseas hubs for transshipment despite the port’s strategic location close to major global shipping routes.
Vizhinjam, commissioned in December 2024, is India’s first deep-draft mega transshipment port. It handled 1.3 million TEUs in its first year and crossed 2 million TEUs within 18 months, according to Adani Ports. The port is being expanded to 5.7 million TEUs of annual capacity by December 2028.
Adani said traditional financial assessments had struggled to capture the broader strategic value of the project. “The greatest risk was never in building Vizhinjam. The greatest risk was India continuing to believe that it could not,” he said.
Adani Green Energy developing 30-gigawatt renewable-energy
Adani also cited the group’s renewable energy project at Khavda in Gujarat’s Kutch region, where Adani Green Energy is developing a 30-GW renewable energy project spread across around 538 sq km.
As of March 31, 2026, around 9.4 GW of capacity at Khavda was operational, with the company targeting completion of the entire 30-GW project by 2029.
Adani argued that Khavda should not be viewed merely as a power-generation project. He said large-scale clean energy infrastructure could serve as a foundation for data centres, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries, creating value far beyond electricity generation alone.
“AI may look like software. But ultimately, AI runs on infrastructure,” he said, citing the need for electricity, data centres, cooling, transmission networks and land.
He saidย that the competitive advantage in AI could ultimately depend not only on software and algorithms but also on the ability to build infrastructure capable of supporting computing at massive scale.
Adani stressed that his proposal was not a request for easier ratings or weaker scrutiny.
“I am not asking you to compromise your independence or say yes to unviable ambition,” he said. “I am asking you to use your independence to build dynamic models that recognize the compounding power of national platforms.”
Also Readย
PM Modi hails 10 years of UPI, some facts that prove India leads global digital payment revolution
India’s GDP grows 7.8% in April-June quarter of current fiscal year, beats RBI forecast