The Indian economy was driven by infrastructure spending in the last five years and the government's proposed infra pipeline is expected to bring some serious projects in action, said TT Srinivasaraghavan, managing director, Sundaram Finance.

“Infrastructure was the angel that drove the economy during the previous five years. 2014 to 2019 was so much infrastructure driven and we had all sort of hope for that to get an extra push this time around but unfortunately in the last nine months, we haven’t seen the kind of action on the infrastructure front that we might have expected," he said.

"I would hope that this latest announcement goes into action sooner than later,” Srinivasaraghavan added.

Disbursement hit by auto slowdown

Srinivasaraghavan said disbursement growth is not in top three items of priority because of falling demand in the commercial vehicle segment. The passenger car sales are down 18 percent, medium and heavy commercial vehicles are down 52 percent, overall CVs are down 22 percent. "My best guess is that Q3FY21 is when we might start to see greenshoots,” he said.

"If we were growing in double digits, you should be worried. I don’t think this is the time to be chasing growth at all. It is a lot more about making sure that your portfolio quality stays robust, you keep your margins as healthy as you can and fasten your seat belt and hang on because these are turbulent times,” he said.

“Growing disbursements for me is not a key priority today,” he noted.

In terms of market share, he further mentioned, “Even though we don’t see a growth in disbursements, our market share has improved because part of it is maybe some of the others are a little starved for liquidity and therefore companies like ourselves have seen the benefit of that. So we have seen improvement in market share in some of the segments in which we operate including M&HCV - increased market share is nice but if CV sales are down 50 percent, that doesn’t help.”