L&T Finance’s pivot and PolicyBazaar IPO to set the stage for LIC’s listing

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Editor's note: This is Street Smart, The Morning Context’s weekly newsletter on everything that impacts corporate India. Every Thursday, Street Smart will bring you an original, reported or analytical take on issues that have the potential to shake up the business ecosystem. Advait here. We need jobs. We need strong cash flow-driven businesses. And we need a strong financial sector that can fund new factories, roads, hospitals, affordable housing and other infrastructure to generate those jobs. But there is a problem, thrown up by L&T Finance’s recent Q2 numbers. It piques your curiosity. There’s more. Furquan takes a look at PolicyBazaar’s upcoming stock listing and says there’s a reason why the government is anxious about the insurance aggregator’s public debut. Let’s dive in.  Who will finance infrastructure projects?  L&T Finance’s second quarter numbers, which were announced on 20 October, intrigued me. No, not the drop in net profit. But the company’s near-complete shift in its business model, moving away from project finance to retail and rural lending.   In the quarter ended September 2021, it disbursed Rs 4,987 crore in rural loans (up …