New Delhi, Nov. 10 -- The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Sunday proposed the creation of India Development and Strategic Fund (IDSF), a sovereign-backed, professionally-managed financial institution aimed at financing the country's long-term growth and securing its strategic future. CII envisions IDSF as a twin-arm national fund that would mobilize long-term capital to strengthen India's productive capacity at home while securing critical economic and strategic interests abroad. CII said in a release that the IDSF could manage a corpus of $1.3-$2.6 lakh crore by 2047, placing it on par in scale and credibility with the world's leading sovereign wealth funds. To be sure, the proposal comes on the heels of mounting challenges India faces both at home and abroad, from sustaining high-quality jobs and energy transition domestically, to navigating intensifying global competition, supply chain realignments, tariff threats, and geopolitical uncertainties. IDSF's developmental investment arm would focus on long-gestation domestic priorities such as infrastructure, clean energy, logistics, education, healthcare, and urban development. It would also provide patient equity and blended finance to commercially viable projects, acting as an anchor investor to attract pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional investors from India and abroad, it added. Blended finance is a funding approach that combines concessional capital from public or philanthropic sources with commercial capital from private investors and development finance institutions to make projects financially viable and attractive. The IDSF would serve as an anchor investor, drawing in pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional investors from India and overseas, the CII statement said....