{"id":44641,"date":"2026-08-04T06:15:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T00:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/free-is-the-most-expensive-word-in-public-policy-nageswaran\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T06:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T00:45:58","slug":"free-is-the-most-expensive-word-in-public-policy-nageswaran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/free-is-the-most-expensive-word-in-public-policy-nageswaran\/","title":{"rendered":"Free is the most expensive word in public policy: Nageswaran"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CHENNAI: Flagging that \u201cfree is the most expensive word in public policy\u201d, chief economic adviser (CEA) Anantha Nageswaran said infrastructure built on the promise of free or below-cost services cannot attract patient capital. \u201cWhat makes infrastructure worthy of patient capital? There are three conditions: quality infrastructure, contract certainty, and policy certainty. And the fourth, which we find harder to say aloud: durable returns rest on two things\u2014a price that covers the economic cost of a service, and a public willing to pay a fair charge for it. There is no third way around it,\u201d he said.Infrastructure built on the promise of free or below-cost service cannot support patient capital. It is a contradiction written into the balance sheet. Someone always ends up paying; either the user pays a fair charge, the taxpayer pays a hidden one, or the asset itself pays through slow decay due to a lack of maintenance. Free is the most expensive word in public policy,\u201d he said at the Tamil Nadu Infrastructure Summit, organised by CII.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n