The projects financed by the World Bank were mainly in the fields of Electric Power, Transportation, Communication, Agriculture, Forestry and Industry.
The regional distribution of the loans was as follows: Asia-31%, Europe-27%, North and South America-21%, Africa-15%, and Australia-6%.
Criticisms:
The Bank’s loan policy has been criticized on two grounds. It is said that the insistence on specific project loans restricts the Bank’s usefulness to underdeveloped countries. The Bank does not give general assistance for development. This restriction, however, has a good effect. It prevents the wastage of resources on unsound projects.
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Close examination by the Bank of all proposals have been found to be very useful. It is also said that the Bank wants to exercise too much control over the projects financed by it. This also is good from development point of view. The screening of projects by the Bank will not hamper the development if the screening is on economic grounds and is impartial in character.
World Bank has come to help India in many ways but its overall role has been criticized from various quarters. World Bank offered cheaper source of finance than IMF and other institutional agencies.
According to Bank’s study India was among the good countries where project financed by World Bank have good result. From 1993 to 1994 India got 4% of non aid resources. It had its focus on poverty alleviation in late nineties for India which is a departure from its previous policy which was just growth oriented. Credit policy of The World Bank believed that growth of income and output would automatically create a situation for development”. The World Bank target for India for 2010 is as follows
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(i) Reducing poverty below the 15% level.
(ii) Having promotion of nourishment of children
(iii) Putting in place a reliable distance surveillance system,
(iv) Increasing contraceptive prevalence to more than 60% of eligible couples and reducing population growth to 1.2% (from 1.9% at present)
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Though there were no specific roles of bank with regard to poverty alleviation and social programmes excepting on helping the big irrigation and power projects. The NTPC was biggest recipient of banks funds but that too in the pre reform era.
The project on private sector participation in Transmission and distribution in power sector in Orissa faced a great problem of collecting the requisite charges. In Karnataka and Bank traced lack of investor’s interest in distribution and privatization of electricity.
The Operation Evaluation Development of World Bank commented that “bank lending to urban sector also faced with the considerable failure because it ignored the public finance and institutional development aspects of urban lending.
The failure compelled the banks to withdraw from the projects of urban development in 1990. But in construction and expansion of NTPC the bank has considerable contribution. So in the power sector banks result are strongest among all other sectors.