Dvara Markets

The Indian Private Debt market is currently plagued with systemic issues that inhibit the massive growth opportunity that a well-functioning debt market can potentially unleash. The current system has few players, poor risk-sharing opportunities limiting newer entrants, and a high reliance on bank lending, among many other factors that ultimately result in unreliable and expensive access to debt capital for most.

While steps have been taken to address the constraints that can unshackle the market’s growth, the efforts haven’t been holistic in their design and execution to solve both foundational and characteristic issues of an efficient debt market. At Dvara, we believe a tremendous opportunity in this space could be solved for and can have far-reaching consequences towards enabling India’s growth story.

We aim to build an efficient integrated intermediary solution that solves the system’s shortcomings on the one hand and, on the other, brings issuers, investors and traders together by creating deep trusted partnerships, providing credible risk-sharing opportunities, addressing information asymmetry among participants and advocating for policy change. With key building blocks like sales, research and trading, the solution at its heart will have technology as the underlying thread, paving the way for the creation of cutting-edge models of finance that can lead to the creation of a well-functioning and efficient debt market that a country of India’s size both needs and deserves. The two initial products of interest are – agri warehouse receipts & corporate bonds issued by social impact companies.

Small Cities

The Small Cities initiative seeks to answer critical questions confronting small cities as they prepare for urbanisation and their need to finance long-term public infrastructure investments.

The initiative looks to explore:

  • What are the long-term infrastructure investments that a small city will need to make today in order to be prepared for increasing urbanisation, and how can these investments be sustainably financed?
  • How can citizens be made an integral part of the financing processes so that they see themselves as partners, with rights in and responsibilities for the city’s future growth? What are the incentives that can be built into financing mechanisms that create increased accountability from the local government and greater responsibility from citizens?

As part of a pilot effort under this theme, we had earlier worked with the City of Srirangapatna, near Mysore. Know more about our past work here.