IL&FS: India's ten year itch of setting up infrastructure companies

In their zeal to push the pace of infrastructure development, govts. would start afresh with a new institution leaving the old problems to fester

Does India have a ten-year itch for setting up an infrastructure company? IL&FS was set up in 1987. A decade later in 1997, IDFC came into existence. IIFCL was established in 2006 and the latest NIIF was born in 2016. 

As IL&FS has been on self-destruct mode since August this year, it is worth pondering over the reasons for successive governments of India setting up a national level company to take on the role of financing infrastructure development; that too with such clockwork regularity. It is equally interesting that each finance minister took pride in setting up each of them but