Navigating Major Programmes

How do industry leaders shift their thinking to incorporate the long-term right from the start? Over her 20-year career, Radhika Anand has identified a persistent and concerning pattern in the infrastructure landscape: a lack of planning past the preliminary completion of projects. In her far-ranging work as an economist covering Asia-Pacific and India through to her most recent role as VP of Commercial Advisory and Strategy at Infrastructure Ontario — and now as Founder and Senior Advisor at The Foundation Stone — Radhika has explored finance, investment law, and infrastructure delivery from all sides of the field. She saw early on the potential of infrastructure to create dignity and access in developing countries. This led her to dive deep into how infrastructure decisions are actually made—the risk allocation, political and financial evaluation, and public/private interactions that shape whether an asset delivers long-term value.

In her conversation with Evgenia, Radhika exposes and examines the oft-held view that public value and private profit are opposing forces. Drawing on her time evaluating companies in India and beyond, she argues that responsible commercial discipline is more common than many people think and can help create assets that are more durable, equitable, and useful over time. Rather than treating environmental, social, and community benefits as add-ons, Radhika makes the case for designing them into the asset from the beginning and continuing to monitor these essential considerations throughout the often decades-long life of every project.

The industry experts discuss the truth about tradeoffs, the trap of over-customization, and effective operating models. Talking through transit payment systems, data centres, Indigenous participation, and AI adoption, Radhika returns to a central point: major projects need multidisciplinary leaders who can balance both short-term delivery pressure and long-term consequences. This episode challenges infrastructure leaders to ask better questions earlier, think across systems, and design assets for the full life of their value—not only for the moment of procurement.

“When we are building assets in silos, it locks people out and destroys capital.”